Radical Italian Architecture Yesterday and Today

In Italy there is a revival of the spirit of 1960s Radicalism. Fresh from university, young architects ‘pick up a rock band name, enrol in an architectural competition or just invent their own research and project installations’. William Menking, who co-curated the 2003 exhibition at London's Design Museum on Superstudio - the supergroup of Italian radicali - and Olympia Kazi bring the new generation of young protagonists under scrutiny. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross the River by Touching the Stones: Chinese Architecture and Political Economy in the Reform Era: 1978-2008

China's Open Door Policy and economic development set in motion in 1978 can be regarded as the triumph of pragmatism over theory - specifically Chairman Mao's brand of Marxist theory. Tao Zhu traces the progress of reform over the last 30 years, and its impact on Chinese architectural culture. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has increasingly become ‘the new frontier for exploitation’ and why there is currently ‘a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the fields of the life sciences’ in which life itself becomes a raw material.     

The Persistence of the Pastoral

Architect, animator and educator Nic Clear challenges the contemporary notion of the pastoral to go beyond the simplistic binary opposites of the untainted rural idyll and the industrialised city. He explores how the narratives of the pastoral have provided a mainstay for science fiction and how this can be used to re-imagine nature itself with the aid of advanced biotechnologies to create new architectures for the 21st century.     

Virtual Corpses,Figural Sections and Resonant Fields

The ‘figural section’ is one of the most potent but under used forms of architectural communication. It enables slices, extrusions, fragments and surfaces of buildings to become the media of the non-expressive and deadpan. Here Sean Griffiths of FAT looks at Venturi Scott Brown's influence in the development of the figural section and how it has evolved into a key trope in his practice's own work. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post-Apocalypse Now

In cinema, the post-apocalypse has become a recurring theme offering endless opportunities to envisage and keep on reimagining the end of the world as we know it. Here Mark Fisher explores the post-apocalyptic in Children of Men (2006), The Road (2006) and Terminator Salvation (2009), and asks whether these seminal films point towards a tendency to imagine the end of existence over the end of capitalism. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detailing the Walled Garden for Lebbeus

Neil Spiller , the Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London, has an unrivalled international reputation for the virtuosity of his visionary graphic work. Here, in a highly personal and poetic eulogy to Lebbeus Woods, Spiller pays tribute to his master through the lens of his own work, where detail becomes an important element in an imagined, augmented world in which the concrete or the specific lends credence to the fictional.     

What Happened to Ecology? John McHale and the Bucky Fuller Revival

Since the early 20th century, the environmental impulse in architecture has waxed and waned. Anthony Vidler considers this cyclical phenomenon, particularly in relation to the Independent Group in Britain during the 1950s, which culminated in John McHale's discovery of Richard Buckminster Fuller in 1955 and the full-blown Bucky Fuller revival of the 1960s. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Living: Surface Tensions

‘Our work begins with the premise of a dynamic world. Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response?’ New York-based team The Living, led by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, have developed a practice of deep, open-source interfaces of participation. Jordan Geiger describes how for The Living their home city and its environs is a site of evolving forms of public space whether on land, air or water. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

iPhone City

Is the iPhone and a whole new generation of mobiles and PDAs eclipsing the physical city? Whereas once the metropolis alone brought together people, markets, goods, transport and information, the iPhone and similar handheld devices are changing spatial interaction. From Los Angeles, Benjamin H Bratton ruminates on the full impact of this technological shift. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Questions of Taste

Charles Holland of FAT picks up the Post-Modern baton from Venturi Scott Brown and Charles Jencks and raises the neglected topic of taste. Though the way architecture is experienced by people is bound up with taste, it remains an area of discomfort for architects – tied up with awkward discussions of privilege and class. Holland shows how in FAT's Islington Square housing project the DIY taste of the residents was not only embraced, but fully accommodated. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Future of Information Modelling and the End of Theory: Less is Limited,More is Different

The computational design strategist Cynthia Ottchen , who was previously Head of Research and Innovation at OMA, offers insights into the future of building information modelling (BIM). Now in the Petabyte Age of the data deluge, she argues that in our adoption of BIM we have to surpass mere data collection and technical optimisation and open up new ways of thinking with the creative use of ‘soft data’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shape and the City

At a time when architecture's historical relationship to the city -founded on various formal and, more recently, informal homologies – has been rendered inoperative, how might a renewed architecture constructively inform the megalopolis? RE Somol flings all the formal and informal protocols offered to the city by architecture out of the pram and calls for a politics of shape, a potential trajectory tested with two projects by Zago Architecture.     

Trauma Within the Walls: Notes Towards a Philosophy of the City

Renowned philosopher and critical theorist Andrew Benjamin provides a framework for thinking about trauma and the city. He returns to Sigmund Freud's definition of trauma as repressed memory and to Aeschylus' formulation of the unmasterable as portrayed in mythical Athens in the Oresteia trilogy. This view of unaccustomed or unpredictable forces, such as civic strife, as ever present and integral to democracy, enables the maintenance of the urban project avoiding repression. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dirty Futures: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mother Nature

Not only do bacterial cells in the human body outnumber human cells, but human habitation leaves microbial traces in the air and on surfaces. With these facts in mind, architect and academic Geoff Ward re-examines recent perceptions of ‘the dirty’ and recasts the natural in architecture in relation to it.     

Public Lifestyle in the Low-Density City

Much maligned, shopping centres have come to represent many of the negative aspects of low-density areas. They are all too often associated with high car dependency and a paucity of cultural and public amenities. Alex Wall questions this preconception. Could the well-conceived and designed shopping centre actually prove to be urban sprawl's redemption?. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Meeting the New Boss: After the Death of Theory

Christopher Hight seeks to find out what might be left over after the death of theory. Have theoretical questions become merely replaced by reproducible techniques and business plans? How should architects think and practise if they no longer - in the wake of Koolhaas - solely think architecturally? Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.