A History of Territories,Movements and Borders: Politics of Inhabitation

If the city is as much about culture as nature, then a cultural understanding of the shaping of the urban is as essential as a scientific one. Here, architect and critic Marina Lathouri , who directs the graduate programme in History and Critical Thinking at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, describes how the concept of planning in the 19th century became intrinsically linked to notions of territory, borders and spatial organisation. She questions whether this might now be tested, and new design technologies used, to expose underlying emerging patterns of disruptive flows beckoning the possibility of the logic of a new social disposition.     

Simultaneous Territories: Unveiling the Geographies of Latin American Cities

The harmonious, utopian image that housing in Latin America exuded across the world in the postwar years is very much at odds with the current view of the region, in which unbridled shantytowns dominate. Patricio del Real sets out to understand how such a rupture might have been possible: What was the process of exclusion at play in these Modernist projects? How does Modernism represent simultaneous territories in which emerging challenges to the social and political status quo were merely muffled by the architectural seduction of the 1950s?. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Latin America Meander: In Search of a New Civic Imagination

Teddy Cruz reviews the shifting political landscape of the last two decades in Latin America. Breaking from US dependency, the continent has charted an alternative course as municipalities have reconnected public policy, social justice and civic imagination. In order to address inequality, new models of urban development have been produced on sites of scarcity, and city mayors and administrations have been prepared to learn from each other through best practice. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Governing Change: The Metropolitan Revolution in Latin America

In 21st-century Latin America, cities are taking the lead. With the greatest populations and economic output concentrated in large-scale metropolises, there is a real sense that the largest cities are outgrowing their national contexts. In many cases, power has been devolved at a municipal level. This has enabled mayors to implement infrastructural and transport projects. As Ricky Burdett and Adam Kaasa highlight in their discussion of two particular initiatives in São Paulo and Mexico City, it has also opened the way for innovative new community projects. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban Responses to Climate Change in Latin America: Reasons,Challenges and Opportunities

Cities in Latin America have a crucial role to play in climate change. Urban areas are the main emitters of greenhouse gases, while being vulnerable to severe weather conditions such as floods, heat waves and tropical storms that environmental shifts are expected to trigger. Patricia Romero-Lankao outlines the background to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, while highlighting how development in Latin America presents unique opportunities for mitigating potential damage to the environment. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Old Dispersions and Scenes for the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity

The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optioneering: A New Basis for Engagement Between Architects and Their Collaborators

Conventionally, architects are somewhat tardy when inviting engineers to join their projects. By only introducing consulting engineers to participate in the later stages of the design process, engineers are commonly assigned a fixing role. This provides little opportunity for creative engineering solutions at the generative stage. Optioneering, a new business management model, however, offers the possibility of a new collaborative method for interaction between designers and their partners. Dominik Holzer and Steven Downing describe how a research project between the Spatial Information Research Laboratory (SIAL) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the engineering firm Arup investigated the capability of this new form of collaboration. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can Architectural Design Be Research?

So far the Unit Factor series has focused on design research within the context of the Architectural Association in London. Here the series editor, Michael Weinstock, discusses the possibilities of architects undertaking research in practice. He draws on the experience of Chris Bosse, who is responsible for the competition-winning design for the Watercube, Beijing's National Swimming Centre. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Two-Speed Landscape: The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary

Tom Noonan describes how, for this award-winning project, he took up the pen and developed a hybrid drawing technique that exploited the benefits of both the analogue and the digital - characterised by the tactility of the hand and the precision of the computer. He explains that a preoccupation with representation was further ‘reflected and supported by the programme, narrative and language of the architecture’.     

On Design Engineering

London-based Adams Kara Taylor (AKT) is one of the most innovative design-led structural and civil engineering practices in the UK. Seeking out creative collaborations with leading architectural firms and schools of architecture and design internationally, it has, as Hanif Kara , Co-Founder and Director at AKT, explains, developed a holistic approach in which architecture and engineering converge. Here Kara defines the emerging methods of ‘design engineering’, emphasising the importance of early input at the conceptualisation stage and research over even the contribution of digital technologies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bogotá and Medellín: Architecture and Politics

In the last 15 years, Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia's two largest cities, have undergone urban renaissances. These are a direct result of a political will to tackle the social, economic and physical segregation caused by the large-scale urban migrations of the 1970s and 1980s, which resulted in informal developments that were often isolated from central urban areas with no infrastructure. Lorenzo Castro and Alejandro Echeverri describe the shared experiences and distinct approaches of each city. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PREVI-Lima’s Time: Positioning Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda in Peru’s Modern Project

Launched in 1968, the PREVI-Lima housing competition brought informal urbanisation to the attention of architects worldwide. The competition brief required the design of low-rise, high-density expandable homes, grouped in neighbourhoods. Here Sharif S Kahatt puts PREVI’s experimental project within the social, political and theoretical context of the time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture

Interactive design has come about as a result of the intermingling of disciplines. As a consequence, the language it uses has become blurred - borrowed or stolen with little restraint from elsewhere. Though particular terms have become ubiquitous, the original concepts that lie behind them have been lost. This means that all too frequently they are no longer knowingly used. Usman Haque sorts the wheat from the chaff and brings clarity to bear on the vocabulary and thinking behind interactivity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From Experimental Epistemology to Experimental Architecture

A life-long beacon for Lebbeus Woods was his understanding of the ideas of second-order cybernetics and attempts to assimilate them into his architectural projects. An introduction to this discourse was provided in Urbana-Champaign in the early 1960s by his most important intellectual mentor, cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster. Poised at the intersection of architecture and cybernetics, Ben Sweeting charts some of the lines of their interactions and friendship.     

Local Climates of the City

A specialist in urban effects on climate, particularly the heat island effect, Iain D Stewart is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Here he describes how the emergence of ‘borderless’, ‘patchwork’ and ‘polynucleated’ cities has led climatologists to develop a new classification system of urban landscapes. The system divides cities into local climate zones (LCZs) according to their surface structure, cover, fabric and metabolism.     

On the Threshold of Rationalism

No longer a leading architectural trend, Rationalism has fallen out of fashion. At best ‘marginalised’, even its tenets appear questionable. Guest-editors Andrew Peckham, Charles Rattray and Torsten Schmiedeknecht describe what motivated them to uncover and reassess the Rationalist sensibility among current European practices. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Works In/On//Around///Behind Progress

Artist Hilary Powell describes how her work in film, food and the pop-up book offers playful critiques of regeneration and place making. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architectural Geometry as Design Knowledge

The onset of digital design has enabled a new level of experimentation with free-form shapes in contemporary architecture, which has made geometry a fertile area of research over the last decade or so. Helmut Pottmann describes how geometry not only has the potential to inform a more exciting generative approach for architects, but can also make design much more construction aware for the whole design team, enabling a wholly digital workflow from design to fabrication. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.