Galapagos: On the Logic and Limitations of Generic Solvers

A graduate in architecture and urbanism from TU Delft, David Rutten works with software company Robert McNeel & Associates (RMN). The developer of Grasshopper®, he was recently awarded the ACADIA 2012 award for innovative research. The Galapagos plug-in, which Rutten has developed for Grasshopper®, implements two generic solvers (one using a genetic algorithm and one using a simulated annealing algorithm). A generic solver will find a solution to a problem that can be expressed in a mathematical way; however, as he explains here, while these solutions may not be exact, they will be very good.     

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.     

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.     

Lost in Parameter Space?

Rather than eradicating the need for mathematics in architectural practice, computation has intensified it. As Fabian Scheurer and Hanno Stehling of designtoproduction explain, the uneven flow of a complex design from computer-aided design (CAD) to computer-aided engineering (CAE) and through to computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) necessitates an understanding of abstract mathematical concepts that facilitate communication, precision and an accurate assessment of quality throughout the process. 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.     

Penang Tropical City,Penang, Malaysia OMA

A mixed-use programme for Penang in Malaysia with the potential to accommodate a resident population of 27,000 required OMA to operate at a planning level, while providing architectural definition. João Bravo da Costa describes how this led to a strategy that focused on types rather than objects, and specifically a typological distribution of programme across the site.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

The Institutional and Political Background to Chinese Urbanisation

Chinese cities have a very distinct history defined by their relationship to government and the land. Under imperial rule they served as administrative centres for rural agricultural areas that took precedence, economically and politically. Professor Sun Shiwen of Tongji University, Shanghai, describes how today’s urbanisation process is still informed by the city’s uniquely Chinese characteristics. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Ex Silico Ad Vivo: Computational Simulation and Urban Design at Foster + Partners

What makes a successful city? Can this be replicated simply by following tried-and-tested urban typologies? Francis Aish, Adam Davis and Martha Tsigkari of Foster + Partners' Applied Research + Development (ARD) group argue that technology allows other approaches to urban design. They explain that computational simulation is increasingly valuable in predicting how the dynamic and complex systems of a city might play out in an urban context, forging an exciting new alliance between computation and intuition.     

Treatment 1: Notes from an Informal Discussion on Interinstitutional Design Research and Image Production

Since 2003, Benjamin Bratton and Hernan Diaz-Alonso have conducted a series of parallel theory seminars and design studios at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture). These collaborations have addressed questions of collectivity at varying scales: personal (between two individuals, each with separate professional practices), institutional (between two disciplinary positions, one analytical and the other creative) and cultural (between what is inside and outside the architectural imaginary). The work featured in the article represents another primary mandate of their interinstitutional project: the transdisciplinary implications of design as a general form of practice as opposed to the historical definitions of ‘architecture’ or the architect. Copyright © 2006 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.     

Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP Architects

By focusing on a ‘scientific approach’ that emphasises the importance of cause and effect, Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP has developed a design for the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona that is less about spectacle and more about the people it accommodates. Croatian critic and architect Krunoslav Ivanisin admires the structure for the ‘inherent logic of its parts’, but also for its prioritisation of communal life. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Metabolism and Morphology

Architecture is on the cusp of systemic change, driven by the dynamics of climate and economy, of new technologies and new means of production. There is a growing interest in the dynamics of fluidity, in networks and in the new topologies of surfaces and soft boundaries. This is part of a general cultural response to the contemporary reconfiguration of the concept of ‘nature’ within the discourse of architecture; a change from metaphor to model, from ‘nature’ as a source of formal inspiration to ‘nature’ as a mine of interrelated dynamic processes that are available for analysis and digital simulation. Michael Weinstock presents an account of the dynamics of natural metabolisms, and suggests an agenda for the development of metabolic morphologies of buildings and cities. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Street Life and the ‘People’s City’

Could large-scale urban development and an erosion of rights to public space prove the death knoll for China’s vibrant street life? Shi Jian , Planning Director of ISreading Culture in Beijing, looks at the tradition of Chinese street culture and how it is currently shifting and reinventing itself for new urban contexts. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.