Material Elegance

In the everyday, elegance is a wholly subjective attribute. Whether we deem someone to be ‘elegant’ is entirely dependent on our own personal perception of their outward appearance. Here, Manuel DeLanda provides for architecture an objective interpretation of the elegant or smart solution in which ‘there is a measurable economy of means to achieve a certain outcome’. Through a brief historical survey, he traces an empirical tradition of material elegance. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mur Island,Graz, Austria

The New York artist Vito Acconci has chosen to work through architecture, seeing the potential of it as a medium to engage ‘the public with the world around them’. He explains why he believes the location of his highly successful cultural centre for Mur Island, Graz, in Austria missed the opportunity to rejuvenate areas of the city beyond the historic core. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Louise T Blouin Institute,West London

The borderlands of Notting Hill and Shepherd's Bush – at the very fringes of the Westway – have become the site of London's largest new privately owned artspace. A nonprofit foundation funded by Louise T Blouin MacBain, the Canadian CEO of a global media business and an arts philanthropist, the institute has been designed both as a home for the Blouin Foundation and as an effective showcase for the work of newly emerging and established artists. Jeremy Melvin describes how architects Borgos Dance have used the ‘intriguing’ exterior of an old coachbuilder's workshop to their advantage, in hewing out a ‘compelling’ new interior. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Renewable Types and the Urban Plan

The notion of designing according to building type for some might imply constraint, or even a reversion to convention. In Diploma Unit 6 at the AA in London, Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby have proved typology can be used to liberating effect, producing series that harness ‘the cumulative intelligence’ of type, while ‘surpassing both its idea and its deep structure’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Good Natured Stuff

Neil Spiller ruminates on nature and what ‘the odd naughty leaf’ has contributed to art and architecture over the years - culminating in evolutionary design and parametrical modelling today. He flags up the work of two of the most ‘talented young bucks’ in the field - Dennis Dollens and Cloud 9. But how realistic is it for us to really expect biomimicry to influence how and what we build? Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finding Time

What has our sense of the acceleration of time got to bear on our experience of cities? How might it be consciously countered by architects ‘finding time’ through ‘thoughtful design and measured observation’. ‘A self-declared ‘cultural polymath’, Tim Makower is the founder of Makower Architects. A partner at Allies and Morrison for many years, he has significant experience in leading large-scale projects, ranging from the King's Cross Masterplan in London to the Old Doha Regeneration Framework, which he draws on here and in his book Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale (Wiley, 2014).     

Distructuring Utopias

In order to meet the challenges of fast-paced urban transformations, Laurent-Paul Robert and Dr Vesna Petresin Robert of Rubedo call for a rethinking of the perennial Utopian model of urban design. They espouse a design strategy that is both able ‘to reflect the dynamics of urban growth and decay’, while meeting the needs of a ‘post-capitalist economy’ - a condition in which change is the only constant. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Becoming Architectural: Affirmative Critique,Creative Incompletion

When Greg Lynn embraced digital animation software in the 1990s, he not only redefined architectural production, but also the designer's relationship to the generative process. In this extract from an unpublished essay written in 2000, the philosopher Brian Massumi describes Lynn's ‘in-folding’ open-ended approach, which renders the design process ‘less an external conduit for the artist's creativity’ than the artist ‘a conduit for creativity of the design process’.     

Italian Architecture from the Inside

Fulvio Irace focuses on the internal tendencies of Italian contemporary architecture. In his identification of national characteristics, he recognises the part that a consolidated approach to Modernism has played. Looking backwards as well as forwards, Modernism in Italy, in all its manifestations, has been simultaneously concerned with ‘the exaltation of the new’ and ‘the obsession with memory’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exuberance,I Don't Know; Excess,I Like

Hernan Diaz Alonso redefines ‘excess’ and ‘exuberance’ on his own terms. Fully au fait and comfortable with the excessive, he describes how in relation to his own work he views excess as more of a tendency or a logic, which sums up his approach; whereas he perceives the exuberant as removed from the design process and more like an ‘adjective’, an ‘emerging quality’ observed by others. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Poetics of the Island of Vessels

Since 2000, Neil Spiller has been engaged on a ‘long project’: a series of hundreds of drawings that through a potent mix of cyborgian fantasy and Surrealism, imbued with poetry and biotechnology, evoke a psycho-geographical island inhabited by an irascible alter ego, ‘The Professor’. Spiller seeks out in this work ‘an unusual and startling architecture’ that reveals a ‘loving, enigmatic and ragged beauty’.     

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art,Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture,Japan

‘Tactical translucency’ is a distinct characteristic of the work of SANAA's Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa . In the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, it was applied as a strategy in which to blur the boundaries between the city and the interior space of the art museum, creating a type that fuses areas for public activities and the more contemplative gallery spaces.     

Orchard Building,Bedales School

The new classroom and administration building by Walters and Cohen for Bedales School also acts as a new entrance for the campus. Jeremy Melvin describes how as such the architecture is ‘symbolically as well as functionally significant’ in a manner that is in keeping with the school's ethos. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Grand Work of Fiction: The Detail as Narrative

A practising architect and Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Edward Ford is the leading expert on the architectural detail and the author of three seminal books on the subject. Here Ford explains that, though the decision ‘to abstract or to articulate’ architecture ‘may be largely subconscious’, it is never ‘arbitrary’. For ‘in the well-designed building, it is done in the service of the creation of a larger narrative, a unity of vision’.     

Replacing a Beloved Building with a Hybrid: Paresky Student Center,Williams College

Jamie Horwitz describes how Polshek Partnership's design for a new student centre at Williams College, a small liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has successfully integrated ‘environmentally sensitive practices into the choreography of life’. Catering not only to students' 24-hour needs, its dining facilities tap into a network of local food producers within its far-reaching sustainable programme. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Final Draft: Designing Architecture's Endgame

‘Completion is both essential for, and antithetical to, innovation.’ Here, Gretchen Wilkins and Guest-Editor Andrew Burrow attempt to resolve this generative paradox by going in search of ‘open-to-ending strategies in architectural practice’. They advocate the model of the ‘final draft’ in the design process as a means to bringing a project to a close while anticipating or encouraging future work.     

Hitler's ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’: a case only for Poland? A forgotten dimension of national-socialist spatial and town planning in the former Czechoslovakia

Adolf Hitler constructed his Nazi ideology as a universal worldview aimed at the German Reich's eastward expansion; the ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’ programme was officially launched in 1940. The forcible establishment of multiple administrative units in 1938/1939 created the conditions for an architecture that would serve the totalitarian regime. Thus began an enormous planning process and the targeted institutionalization of urban development and spatial planning and research. This programme included not only German government agencies and research institutions specifically established or reorganized for this purpose, but increasingly also involved communal politics and independent or government architects. The author pursues the thesis that this Germanization concept, formulated within the framework of the ‘Generalsiedlungspläne Ost’, allowed the relevant agencies to increase their influence or eliminate any opponents. From this basis, the study identifies the role that GBI (Generalbauinspektor) for Berlin Albert Speer, his architects, and local architects played in the planning process in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and analyses the architectural evidence of the Nazi rulers’ Germanization and colonization policies. The initial comparison of the urban planning models applied in ‘Großreich Deutschland’ with those in the annexed regions in today's Poland and Czech Republic offers relevant arguments related to this far-reaching sociological and architecture–historical topic.     

London Short Stories: Drawing Narratives

Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and a successful practitioner, CJ Lim has won international awards for his exquisite drawings, including the esteemed Royal Academy of Arts Grand Architecture Prize. Here CJ extols the virtue of narrative and signified meaning in buildings and describes his project London Short Stories that employs ‘real and imaginary sites as springboards for the imagination’. Often ‘immoral, licentious, anarchical and unscientific’, the short stories, which are three-dimensional creations constructed out of paper, are from ‘an aesthetic point of view, glorious, ravishing and a pleasure to behold’.     

Stalker/ON

How might we ‘reboot’ architecture and ‘regain the critical’? American architectural critic and professor Peter Lang finds in Stalker's interactive field study of a Romany community around Rome a trigger for a re-energised way of thinking that questions how we might effectively live communally and economically. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital Cottage Industries

Mike Aling 's ProunStretcher project engages with the recent global revival of cottage industries, fuelled by the application of digital technologies, as a means to address ‘the manifold social issues present across our rural landscape-as-urban-extension’.