Arguing for Elegance

Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects describes how elegance in architecture thrives on and articulates complexity. For elegance to be fully expressed in any work, it must be mastered and refined throughout the building and construction process. This entails the refinement of spatial and structural organisation and the integration of all building systems that are systemic, inflecting and adapt to each other, providing an overall intelligence of assembly. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Urban Complex: Scalar Probabilities and Urban Computation

Guest-editor Anthony Burke redefines complexity in relation to the city as ‘a dynamic and luminal organisational condition “growing at the edge of chaos”’ and in so doing shifts our understanding of urban trauma as an event intrinsic to the contribution of the metropolis rather than external to it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Behavioural Complexity: Constructing Frameworks for Human-Machine Ecologies

Founded by Patrik Schumacher and Brett Steele in 1997, the Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) Master's programme,based at the AA in London, provides an important research base for Parametricism. The current Director of AADRL, Theodore Spyropoulos , continues to push the boundaries of advanced computing and machine intelligence. Here he describes the work that he has undertaken at the AA and through his practice Minimaforms into adaptive ecologies that employ responsive machine learning to enable spatial transformations.     

Fearscapes: Caracas Postcards from a Violent City

Venezuelan architect, artist and educator Eduardo Kairuz reveals how beneath the stereotypical view of Caracas as the ‘Murder Capital of the World’ lies a history of savage imposition, dating back to its founding in the 16th century and its colonial past and manifested today in the stark social segregation between parts of the city. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Materialising Complexity

The specialist practice designtoproduction consults on the digital production of complex architectural designs. Here, co-founder Fabian Scheurer charts the relatively recent journey that architecture has taken from the regular to the irregular. He provides a comprehensive account of how this shift to curvilinear and complex forms has impacted on design and production methods, and the strengths and pitfalls of parametric design and CNC fabrication. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun , Editor-in-Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. Copyright © 2008 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.     

On Modelling Complexity and Urban Form

As generators of new cities or extensions of existing ones, algorithmic urban models provide a means of designing urban forms of a new complexity. They have the capacity to produce extremely intricate architectural forms, but also to be responsive to scenarios and constraints. M Christine Boyer , the William R Kenan Jr Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, reflects on how ‘architects acting as an interface between data sets and computer algorithms’ might shape distinctive urban environments that lead to the mass customisation of cities.     

Medium-Scale Anatolian Cities: Conceptual and Physical Routes of Urban Transformation

Banu Tomruk investigates the post-1980s transformation of the built environment of medium-scale Anatolian cities. She examines the subject through a conceptual and physical framework that places as much emphasis on populist rhetoric – ‘identity crisis’, ‘historicisation’, ‘the making of a tourist city’ – as on the built structures themselves and their realisation as standardised apartment blocks and gated communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Engineering Urban Complexity: Bespoke Integrated Design

Rapid urbanisation across the globe and far-reaching technological changes are transforming urban design. Building Information modelling (BIM) is combining 3D modelling techniques and the employment of rich datasets, which is eliding the gap between the disciplines of architecture and engineering. This is enabling the introduction of a new level of complexity in the modelling of cities and the simulation and testing of urban and environmental conditions. Rob May , an Associate Director at BuroHappold Engineering and the leader of the structures team in Beijing, reflects on the potential of complex bespoke processes for creative problem-solving in the urban context.     

Urban [IM]plants Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonheiden,Belgium

Bonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its exceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remained protected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environment has been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creating public spaces that use the town's ‘original landscape as the base material’. Copyright © 2008 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.     

Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Designing for a Lifetime in New York and Other US Cities

In the next 30 years, the number of senior citizens in the US will increase to become larger than any other single age group. How are cities starting to prepare for this huge expansion in the numbers of over-65s? Jerry Maltz and Christine Hunter of the Design for Aging Committee of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIANY), aided by Eric Cohen and Susan Wright , describe how New York and other US cities are laying the necessary groundwork through the World Health Organization's Age-Friendly Cities programme, while also setting up innovative centres for senior citizens, making much-needed modifications to the physical environment and developing new approaches to affordable housing.     

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.     

Urban Flux

In the 21st century, why does the type of poverty and human exploitation most readily associated with Dickensian London or the ‘dark Satanic Mills’ of Victorian England still persist today? Matthew Gandy , Professor of Geography at University College London, and Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, lifts the lid on the unevenness of global development, revealing why contemporary urban space continues to be characterised by landscapes of neglect interspersed with areas of intense investment and consumption. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hacking Science: The ALivE Group's Material Design Methods for Interdisciplinary Environments

Advances in the understanding and processing of materials have historically been one of the foremost drivers of architectural innovation. Today, groundbreaking material developments mainly occur on the nano-scale, and thus lie outside most designers' working knowledge and expertise. Martin Bechthold , Professor of Architectural Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and Allen Sayegh , Associate Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology at the GSD, introduce the work of the Adaptive Living Environments (ALivE) group at Harvard University, which seeks to reconcile fundamental material science with architectural design through new modes of interdisciplinary collaboration drawing from contemporary cultures of computation and hacking.     

Designing for an Earlier Age

While the need for suitable housing to accommodate burgeoning numbers of elderly citizens is undeniably great worldwide, Jayne Merkel puts the case that the necessity for affordable housing among young adults is arguably even greater, at least in the US and the UK, and particularly in New York, London and Los Angeles. The relationship between the demands of these two very different age groups is direct, since young people tend not to have children until they can find suitable housing. Forestalled childbearing means fewer members of later generations to financially support growing numbers of aged over time.¹ And young people without suitable housing tend to move back in with ageing parents or drain their financial resources.     

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.     

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.