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.     

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.     

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 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.     

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.     

Does Collaboration Work?

Bringing together a number of design celebrities, among them Greg Lynn, UN Studio, Foreign Office Architects (FOA) and Kevin Kennon Architect, United Architects (UA) was established to create a collaborative proposal for the 2003 competition for a new World Trade Center. Invoking the name as well as the intentions of what started as a similar collaborative formation by established actors and film-makers in the 1940s (United Artists) to challenge mainstream corporate power, UA attempted to offer more visionary alternatives to the expectations of typical mainstream architectural solutions. Kevin Kennon here presents an insider's perspective on the UA collaboration and employs his unique history, including his former partnership at Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to raise important questions about collective design in terms of authorship, identity and practice. Central to his observations are the differences between the efficiency models of corporate teams and truly collaborative endeavours. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Austeria: City of Minimum Consumption

If a new stringency with economic and material resources is to become a new way of life, how should austerity be recast as a positive force rather than a negative imposition? Daliana Suryawinata and Winy Maas look at definitions of austerity and describes the Austeria project at The Why Factory at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) that looked at new models for combating excessive consumption, such as the ‘Zen road to affluence’.     

专业化发展--大型建筑设计院改革探讨

在大型建筑设计院体制改革中，专业化问题引起了众多的争论．本文从建筑设计市场和建筑技术发展的角度，探讨了专业化发展的内涵以及它对设计院和建筑师、工程师的影响，以寻求建筑设计院新的改革之路。     

The Hinging Tower

For their project for a tower in downtown Singapore, which they undertook for the Rising Masses Studio at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Ana María Flor Ortiz and Rodia Valladares Sànchez adopted a mathematical approach. They explicitly used mathematical notation as a mechanism of controlling form, in a manner that could also harness the possibilities of more random and unanticipated influences. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Designing at t + n

In the last four decades, Robert Aish has played a pivotal role in the development of new technologies in architecture. As a professional software designer and developer, he has directly informed building design and processes. As Director of Software Development at Autodesk, his role is to converge innovative concepts such as design computation with mainstream design and engineering software. Also an influential disseminator of knowledge, he is a co-founder of the SmartGeometry Group and has helped create a vital bridge between architectural design and computation. Here he describes some of the critical dilemmas facing both software developers and architectural users of computational design tools, comparing the pioneering work of Bruce Archer and Ivan Sutherland in the mid-1960s (at time t ) with how such tools are used today (at time t + n ). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Living Systems: Designing Growth in Baubotanik

Baubotanik – the construction method that uses living plants for load bearing in architectural structures – provides a surprising ability to anticipate the latent convergence of non-living and living systems in architecture. Through interdisciplinary research by architects, engineers and biologists it aims to synthesise architectural qualities, constructive requirements and biological properties in living structures. In this article, Ferdinand Ludwig, Hannes Schwertfeger and Oliver Storz of the Baubotanik research group at the Institute for Architectural Theory and Design (IGMA) at the University of Stuttgart explain how living and non-living building elements can be designed to develop into vegetal-technical compound structures. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Probability-based codified design: past accomplishments and future challenges

Structural design codes and standards provide a foundation of good engineering practice. The process of developing probability-based codes has brought the structural reliability research community and engineers in professional practice together and led to research toward a common goal that otherwise would not have been possible. This paper reviews developments in probability-based codified structural design during the past two decades, assesses advantages and shortcomings of the current generation of probability-based codes, and suggests several avenues for new research.     

不同龄期混凝土砖墙体收缩变形的试验研究

由于收缩大、含水率高,施工规范不允许使用未达到龄期的混凝土砖,然而由于种种原因,工程中尚有未达到标准龄期的混凝土砖大量使用的现实情况,需要工程技术人员认识这种材料的特性,并对已经上墙的材料提出修复措施.对不同龄期混凝土砖墙体的收缩变形规律进行试验研究.首先对单块砖进行了含水率、抗压强度等指标的测定;然后对不同龄期砌筑的...     

Material Behaviour: Embedding Physical Properties in Computational Design Processes

Material behaviour computes form. In the physical world, material form is always inseparably connected to internal constraints and external forces; in the virtual space of digital design, though, form and force are usually treated as separate entities – divided into processes of geometric form generation and subsequent engineering simulation. Using the example of the interdisciplinary ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion, constructed at the University of Stuttgart in 2010, Moritz Fleischmann, Jan Knippers, Julian Lienhard, Achim Menges and Simon Schleicher explain how feedback between computational design, advanced simulation and robotic fabrication expands the design space towards previously unexplored architectural possibilities. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive Strategies for an Ecological Architecture

Simos Yannas , Director of the Environment & Energy Studies Programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, calls for a rethink of architectural processes. Presently, architecture is conceived as an inanimate material system, but to become truly bioclimatic it needs to become adaptive in tune with the behaviour and the comfort of occupiers. Shifting from an emphasis on providing fixed interior conditions, it requires a dynamic approach to building performance and the resultant interactions between occupants, buildings and engineering appliances. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structured Becoming: Evolutionary Processes in Design Engineering

Computational design techniques are changing the role of analysis tools in collaborations between architects and engineers. Digital feedback loops of synthesis, analysis and evaluation establish a ‘process of becoming’ in which structural solutions evolve and adapt to specific requirements. Highly differentiated constructions are possible when digital techniques are fully integrated in design and production. Klaus Bollinger, Manfred Grohmann and Oliver Tessmann discuss these novel paradigms in relation to recent projects from engineering office Bollinger + Grohmann. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architects as Hairdressers

Neil Spiller reactionary? Spiller finds himself recoiling into a ‘grumpy old man’ as he observes the emergence of an alarming new trend in architecture schools that prioritises style over matter. Copyright © 2008 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.     

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.     

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.