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.     

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.     

Head Banging: Engineering Neutrality + the Parametric Ceiling

Through the work of Unit 15 at the Architectural Association in London, Francesca Hughes and Noam Andrews have been exploring the limits of parametric systems. Here Francesca Hughes questions whether parametricism has now hit a ‘developmental ceiling’. What are the full cultural implications of the promised instantaneity of completed components in architectural production? Where does the ‘strange engineered neutrality’ of ‘optimisation’ take us? Is there a real danger that an ambivalence to context is returning us to the tabula rasa of Modernism?. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lightness and Fluidity: Remarks Concerning the Aesthetics of Elegance

Over the last century, elegance as a term has been conspicuously absent from discussions centred on both architecture and the philosophy of aesthetics. Elegance's time has, however, now come. David Goldblatt describes how the maturation of digital discourse has led to the onset of a new, multifaceted, sensual rationality that is evident in recent designs and constructed works. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

(Science) Fiction,Ecophysical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines: Animism,Vitalism and Machinism as a Way to Rearticulate the Need to Confront the Unknown in a Contradictory Manner

François Roche of R&Sie(n) ruminates on the contradictory nature of the present: a time that is ‘vibrating’ while ultimately ‘lacking momentum’. Reclaiming ‘the scenarios and substances that condition architecture’, he rejects the large-scale flights of fancy of international signature architects and argues for the reactivation of ‘a throbbing, complex and unfinished “localism”’. In so doing, he advocates a machinism that enables fictionalisation and speculation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Outside the Terrestrial Sphere Greg Lynn FORM: N.O.A.H. (New Outer Atmospheric Habitat) and New City

Renowned architect and educator Greg Lynn describes two projects - N.O.A.H, a science-fiction film, and New City, a design exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York - that directly ‘engage the theme of Space Architecture as the new frontier for design research in terms of the spatial character and navigation of environments with alternative gravities’.     

Relentless Patterns: The Immersive Interior

What happens when patterns become all pervasive? When pattern contagiously corrupts and saturates adjacent objects, artefacts and surfaces; blurring internal and external environment and dissolving any single point of perspective or static conception of space. Mark Taylor ruminates on the possibilities of relentless patterning in interior space in both a historic and a contemporary context. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.