The Metabolism of the City: The Mathematics of Networks and Urban Surfaces

How might we best track the accelerating demands of global urbanisation? Michael Weinstock, Director of Research and Development at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, proposes a mathematical approach to uncovering the dynamics of cities. He advocates a dual method that reveals any city's particular metabolism by simultaneously mapping its physical shape - its compactness and densities - and its flows of energy, information and materials. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Digital Cities

Code, it would seem, is everywhere. We are beginning to understand that much of our natural environment is based on rule-based behaviours, from the emergent swarm intelligence of flocks of birds and schools of fish, to the complex patterns of snowflakes, ferns, seashells and zebra skins. And nothing escapes. Not even the human body. The human genome is being mapped out and sequenced by scientists to provide a genetic blueprint of human life itself. In this context, it is hardly surprising that architects are now beginning to explore similar principles in the design studio. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parallel Indexing: Infrastructure and Space

As governments around the world open the public coffers in an attempt to pull their economies back from collapse, Holger Kehne and Jeff Turko describe how they have extended the work of the Architectural Association Diploma Unit 12 to incorporate the pertinent subject of infrastructure and architecture, employing ‘indexical systems’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Collision of Scarcity and Expendability in Architectural Culture of the 1960s and 1970s

Architecture as a practice assimilates contradictions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approaches to materials and sustainability. New finishes, details and products are continually specified and often fetishised, while architects are at pains to show their minimal impact on the environment. Steve Parnell highlights an era in the pages of Architectural Design in the late 1960s and early 1970s that congregated these incongruities by simultaneously advocating low-energy solutions and expendability, most notably the inflatable.     

The Deep Structure of the Picturesque

The late Paul Coates was one of the first students at the Architectural Association (AA) in London to submit an international computation-based diploma, in 1969. Responsible for introducing a series of computational techniques, Coates was also the founder of the MSc in Computing and Design at the University of East London, and in 2002 the Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture (CECA). In this unpublished article from 2008, which has been prepared and rewritten for publication by Christian Derix , Coates recounts his pursuit of ‘the particle physics of architecture’ - geometric rules that inform both unplanned and planned human occupation of space.     

The New Materiality

In the last few decades an entirely new conception of the material world has emerged. Here, philosopher Manuel DeLanda , whose work has become synonymous with this ‘new materialism’, introduces this novel understanding of materiality. Like any other conceptual framework, it has precedents in the history of philosophy - the work of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is a good example - but only recently has it become coherently articulated with science and technology. Gone is the Aristotelian view that matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside (transcendent essences), as well as the Newtonian view in which an obedient materiality simply follows general laws and owes all its powers to those transcendent laws. In place of this, we can now conceptualise an active matter endowed with its own tendencies and capacities, engaged in its own divergent, open-ended evolution, animated from within by immanent patterns of being and becoming.     

The India Project

While pockets of India are now approaching the living standards of Switzerland, other regions are debilitated by a level of poverty that is akin to that of Zimbabwe. Sunil Khilnani asks what remains of the universalist project of India's political founders. Has architecture, in the rush for market and economic success, lost its self-understanding? Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The EmTech Wave Canopy 2009

Michael Weinstock describes the constraints and creativity behind the Wave Canopy, the EmTech Masters programme construction project for 2009, which was located on the upper terrace of the Architectural Association's premises in Bedford Square. Copyright © 2010 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.     

Intelligent Cities and the Taxonomy of Cognitive Scales

Here, Guest-Editor Michael Weinstock with Mehran Gharleghi of the EmTech programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London shift the definition of the intelligent city away from one that is predicated on information and communication technologies towards a deeper and more profound characterisation. They explore the possibilities of cognitive complexity in urbanism emerging out of the interaction of sensory processing and behavioural responses to the world. Within the context of large infrastructural systems, what might, for instance, rapidly developing machine consciousness have in common with collective intelligence? What could the preliminary conceptual schema be for an intelligent city that is sufficiently self-aware to synchronise its systems with climatic and ecological phenomena at regional and local scales?     

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.     

The Evolutionary Dynamics of Sentience in Cities

Cities, and their component buildings and infrastructural systems, have developed rapidly in responsive and adaptive capacities. Ubiquitous computation and new informational technologies are increasingly embedded in the physical and social processes of the city. Here, Michael Weinstock identifies ‘sentience’, or the ability to be aware, as the primary driver of innovation in the urban environment; as the extended ‘nervous system’ of a city develops the potential to sense changes in the city's flows, and in its internal and external environments.     

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 Ebb and Flow of Digital Innovation: From Form Making to Form Finding - and Beyond

Architectural historian and theorist Mario Carpo examines the status quo of digital innovation. Whereas the espousal of animation software in the 1990s placed architects conspicuously at the forefront of new technologies as early adopters and adapters, in the new millennium they have less enthusiastically embraced the participatory opportunities of Web 2.0 and open-source modes of working. Could the desire for single authorship be holding designers back?     

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.     

Material,Form and Force

Conventionally, material in architecture has been treated as the ‘servant’ of form. An iterative design process, though, that continuously integrates material, form and force has the potential to unfold a new generative logic of form-finding. This offers ways of processing the flow of forces through a material object and balancing variations of form with the organisation and behaviour of material. Toni Kotnik and Michael Weinstock present a series of experimental construction projects, developed within the Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech) programme at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, that explore the intricate relationship between material, form and force. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.