Transgression,Innovation, Politics

As partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, Patrik Schumacher has become renowned for his substantial role in taking an experimental practice to a global level. Here he argues for some qualification in the way that transgression might be employed in architecture: Where should transgression stand in relation to a cycle of innovation? Should progress take uneven revolutionary leaps or a smooth accumulative path? By looking outside itself and engaging in political debate, could the architecture of transgression, in fact, be doing no more than burdening the discipline?     

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.     

Hello Stranger: Phenomenology and Topography of the Megacity

Caroline Bos of UNStudio counters the city theme of this issue of Architectural Design with the spectre of the megacity. The very recent emergence and scale of the Asian megacity, she argues, requires a very different architectural treatment to the European or North American metropolis. It is one that should be understood through an experiential approach that brings to the fore spatial and visual relations between people, and people and things, asking, for instance, how so many strangers can be so visibly at home in public urban space.     

Architecture in China and the Meaning of Modern

What is generally understood by Modern architecture in China is set to be re-evaluated across the world with a major exhibition this summer at the RIBA in London and a significant new book by Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren. Here co-author and co-curator of Modernism in China, Edward Denison , outlines why we need to look back to China's Modernist roots in the early 20th century if we are to understand the intense modernisation of the present. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice

The most immediate impact of scarcity on architecture is the insufficient supply of building materials. As Jon Goodbun and Karin Jaschke explain, this requires an engagement with more than the direct influences on the exhaustion of natural resources. Looking beyond the conventional capitalist model of flows driven by ‘the market’, they look at how new ideas on materialism are demanding a radical revision of the relationship between matter and social, economic and political forces.     

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.     

Reading the Wind and Weather: The Meteorological Architecture of Studio Mumbai

Architectural writer and educator Kazi Ashraf likens the work of Studio Mumbai to that of a tree, in which landscape and architecture converge. As he explains, such a position is realised by a profound commitment to the act of building in which native materials are condensed into temporary structures. This requires due attention to the process of making, reflected in a workshop practice that incorporates craftsmen and artisans, and by necessity has to stand outside the conventional expectations for construction and economies of time.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shape and the City

At a time when architecture's historical relationship to the city -founded on various formal and, more recently, informal homologies – has been rendered inoperative, how might a renewed architecture constructively inform the megalopolis? RE Somol flings all the formal and informal protocols offered to the city by architecture out of the pram and calls for a politics of shape, a potential trajectory tested with two projects by Zago Architecture.     

The Persistence of the Pastoral

Architect, animator and educator Nic Clear challenges the contemporary notion of the pastoral to go beyond the simplistic binary opposites of the untainted rural idyll and the industrialised city. He explores how the narratives of the pastoral have provided a mainstay for science fiction and how this can be used to re-imagine nature itself with the aid of advanced biotechnologies to create new architectures for the 21st century.     

Radical Post-Modernism and Content: Charles Jencks and Rem Koolhaas Debate the Issue

The following debate took place on 28 December 2009 between Charles Jencks and Rem Koolhaas , and was transcribed and edited by Eva Branscome. Jencks and Koolhaas have exchanged ideas since the late 1960s. Jencks was the one to insist that Koolhaas come to the 1980 Venice Biennale, originally entitled ‘Post-Modernism’. (Paolo Portoghesi invited Jencks to collaborate with him on this first Biennale before it expanded into historicism.) In January 2002, Jencks was also a judge of the competition for the CCTV Building, the headquarters for China Central Television in Beijing, discussed below. Jencks and Koolhaas continue to thrive on their discussions and disagreements. Although they have very different commitments to the issue of ‘content’, their varying positions help to clarify what is meant here by ‘radical’. Copyright © 2011 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.     

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?     

Growing Semi-Living Structures: Concepts and Practices for the Use of Tissue Technologies for Non-Medical Purposes

For over a decade, artist/researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have led the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), hosted in SymbioticA - The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. It has provided a unique context for their explorations, enabling them to pioneer new ways of growing tissue for artistic purposes outside the ethical strictures of medical laboratories, while also subverting and questioning scientific tools and techniques. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Water and Asphalt The Projection of Isotropy in the Metropolitan Region of Venice

Through an exploration of the Veneto region close to Venice, in northeastern Italy, Paola Viganò provides an alternative definition of the dispersed territory. Rather than archetypal sprawl, which has developed out of untamed growth of metropolitan areas, this is an ancient landscape of evenly scattered development that has grown up alongside roads and waterways. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Future of Information Modelling and the End of Theory: Less is Limited,More is Different

The computational design strategist Cynthia Ottchen , who was previously Head of Research and Innovation at OMA, offers insights into the future of building information modelling (BIM). Now in the Petabyte Age of the data deluge, she argues that in our adoption of BIM we have to surpass mere data collection and technical optimisation and open up new ways of thinking with the creative use of ‘soft data’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transgression in and of the City

For Turkish artist and educator Can Altay ‘today's cities are full of limits’. This unevenness can be regarded as the manifestation of current investment patterns and political and cultural conflicts. Does, however, transgression offer opportunities to subvert this? Is it possible for a city's inhabitants, artists and architects to open up boundaries and through the power of presence to intervene in the status quo?