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.     

The plan as a colonization project: the medina of Tlemcen under French rule, 1842–1920

In the nineteenth century, Algerian cities were the first medinas in the Arab world to be colonized by a European power. Tlemcen, a medieval medina involved in this historical event, was marked by a relentless struggle on the part of the French administration to transform it into a city conforming to modern standards. The antagonism between two urban systems – the ‘Islamic city’ and the modern city – takes a problematic form when confronted with urban interventions that had colonizing aims. This paper will argue that the plan of the colonial city introduced a new order, subjecting the medieval medina within a set/subset relationship. Through urban subordination, the French military–civil administration used the plan layout as an instrument to control and dominate the medina of Tlemcen. In order to verify this hypothesis, a thorough study of documents dating from the early years of the French occupation was undertaken; thus, this paper is constructed as an urban study, based on a historico-morphological approach.     

Urban Wash

Sean Lally of WEATHERS urges designers to realise the performative capabilities of the ambient effects of the urban wash – the artificial light given off by cities at night. Taking up this principle of a wash within his designs for the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, he demonstrates how a ‘climatic wash’ could create an artificial microclimate that extends the seasonal activities of the museum's programmes.     

Landscape Utopianism: Information,Ecology and Generative Pastoralism

Architect and educator Gregory Marinic describes how the 21st century is witnessing the rise of a new utopianism through landscape/architectural interventions that pursue the possibilities of ‘ersatz utopias within our quotidian world’. He illustrates this with his own collaborative works and competition entries for d3, an art-architecture stewardship programme based in New York of which he is director.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bricked House: How Code and Law Can Lock You Out

Could we be unwittingly divesting too much control in technology? In so doing, could we be sleepwalking into a future in which our personal assets are no longer ours, but all too easily relinquished by the bank or mortgage company? Molly Wright Steenson , an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks so. She evokes an arresting vision of a close future in which our smartphones and the operating systems integrated within our cars and homes become our friend-enemy, immediately locking us out when they are no longer programmed to respond directly to our touch.     

Investing in the Ground: Reflections on Scarcity,Remediation and Obdurate Form

Douglas Spencer develops David Harvey's notion of the ‘spatial fix’ in which material processes in the built environment and the ground itself are repeatedly used up for the purposes of capital investment. This can be to the detriment of the quality of the land itself, which is often abandoned after a period of time as polluted and unusable brownfield sites; while available resources are bled dry. It is a situation that has been worsened over the last few decades with the emphasis on entrepreneurial and intensive modes of urbanisation. Spencer indicates how this situation can be negated by landscape urbanism through critical interventions, such as those represented here in the work of the Architectural Association Landscape Urbanism (AALU) Masters programme in London and Groundlab, the practice associated with it.     

Biodiversity Targets as the Basis for Green Design

Mike Wells , the Director of Biodiversity by Design, and Ken Yeang outline the need for biodiversity targets in architecture to provide a more far-reaching basis for green design. Rather than just literally ‘greening’ a building by covering it with foliage, they seek to encourage designers to engage with wider ecological processes and in more specific detail. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intimacy: Eragatory's Experiments in Materiality,Deep Texture and Mood

Because of their textural and sensory qualities – even or uneven, smooth or rough, cold or warm, reflective or matt – particular materials tend to evoke particular moods. But this does not mean that their nature and structure cannot be played with in order to create surprising atmospheres. London-based design practice Eragatory's ‘Intimacy’ series of interiors does just that, producing visual anomalies that distort the viewer's material understanding of space. Isaie Bloch , the firm's founder, describes how.     

Algorithmic Tectonics: How Cold War Era Research Shaped Our Imagination of Design

Between 1959 and 1967, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted the pioneering Computer-Aided Design Project, funded by the US Air Force. Engineers, researchers and students were brought together to re-imagine ‘design in the language of the machine’, and one of the most renowned students on this programme was Ivan Sutherland, the inventor and programmer of Sketchpad - the first interactive graphics system. Here, Daniel Cardoso Llach , an architect and researcher based at MIT, traces the influence of this Cold War project on the culture of building design and production today.     

One Space,Many Worlds

‘Cities hold two-thirds of their residents in slums, and the rest in stiflingly limiting, inflexible structures.’ Thus the impoverished parochial Mumbai is one and the same metropolis as the cosmopolitan globalised ‘Bombay’. Ramesh Biswas examines how the speculative housing developments of the aspirational middle classes are creating townships that intensify sprawl and further decentralise cities, squandering the potential for upgrading public space and creating an architecture for the common good. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

The Public and the V2

The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness and bonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypal view of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and its community were ultimately destroyed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mapping Scales of Urban Identity

Ricky Burdett , Professor of Urban Studies at LSE where he is Director of the Urban Age programme, is engaged in studying cities at different scales and regional contexts. Here he looks at what gives a city like London its unique sense of scale, and how it might be possible to design in the sort of vibrancy and spatial complexity that evolve in informal neighbourhoods over time. Through examples of local initiatives in Cape Town and Mumbai, he gives concrete evidence of what constitutes this approach.     

槟城湾三角——为槟城湾概念国际竞赛的巨构空中公园方案,槟城,马来西亚

槟城是马来西亚北部一座具有独特历史文化特色的中等规模城市.被称为东方之珠的槟城老城乔治敦于2008年被列入世界文化遗产名录.这是一座"必须到访"(Must visit)的城市.竞赛的副标题"乔治敦和巴特沃什滨水区再想象"表明,如何连接乔治敦和巴特沃什之间的槟城湾,成为突出的设计挑战.朱文一工作室提交的设计方案"槟城湾三角"探索了2050年槟城湾的一种可能:一座连接乔治敦和巴特沃什、坐落在槟城湾上空的空中公园(图1—图11).     

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Archi-Union Architects,City of Breeze,Shenzhen Bay,Shenzhen, China

What happens when ancient cultural practices are combined with the most current design technologies? Archi-Union Architects used the opportunity of their entry to the 2014 Shenzhen Bay ‘Super City’ International Competition to develop a bespoke generational method that integrated feng shui with advanced environmental simulation techniques. Philip F Yuan, the founder and director of Archi-Union Architects, who is Associate Professor in Architecture at Tongji University, Shanghai, here describes the City of Breeze project and the design methodology behind it.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

Brigitta Zics: Working on Interactive Potential

Valentina Croci kicks off a new series on interactive technologies with an investigation of the integrated, interdisciplinary research of the new media artist Brigitta Zics. Zics' projects throw light on how conventional architecture might learn from the interactive, placing a greater understanding on the sensory and the user's perceptual experience of a particular space. Copyright © 2007 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.