Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

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.     

Polymorphic Matters: Architecture,Change and Imagination

Polymorphism was an important tactic used by Woods to render objects and spaces in the process of transformation and transmutation. Ashley Simone , Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in New York City, explores the terrain where materiality meets change, where fantasy supplants reality. Her prime example is the suite of drawings for the ‘AEON’ project.     

The Public and the V2

The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness and bonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypal view of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and its community were ultimately destroyed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Architectural Chemistry

Protocell technology has a precedent in the innovative use of plastic in the 1960s, when chemistry first came up with an innovative new material that could be applied to architecture, interiors and product design. Omar Khan describes how at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the University at Buffalo in New York, he is developing a line of research that builds on the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s for soft materials and the capabilities of an elastic responsive architecture. Copyright © 2011 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.     

‘Happy Meals’: Finding Happiness with Hans Becker and the Humanitas Care Model

Hans Becker , originally a professor at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam, is a seemingly unlikely guru for elderly care. In 1992 he was appointed Chair of the Rotterdam-based housing association Humanitas with the task of overturning the outmoded and failing commercial model of its nursing homes. He set about replacing them with ‘apartments for life’ that promoted independent living. In order to understand more about the successful Humanitas model, David Birkbeck , Chief Executive of Design for Homes in the UK, interviewed Becker and found out how the move to a new housing type was enabled by a philosophical shift that placed an emphasis on the engendering of happiness among its residents – with food and the creation of convivial on-site restaurant facilities proving a critical tool.     

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.     

‘Never Mind All That Environmental Rubbish,Get On With Your Architecture’

Could the primacy of green architecture in recent years be eroding the discipline? Is it reducing architecture to a mere ‘environmental techno-science’? Penelope Dean argues for a revised environmental agenda that is driven by ideas and concepts rather than subservient technologies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun , Editor-in-Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Parc Des Expositions (PEX), Toulouse: A Condenser for Diversity

Responding to a competition brief for accelerating urban development around the Parc des Expositions (PEX) exhibition centre of Toulouse, Clément Blanchet describes how the Of?ce for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) proposed an urban strategy in place of a conventional masterplan: the emphasis being on exploring and facilitating the growth of the existing urban patchwork, rather than on forced urbanism.     

历史·理论·范式——“建筑学硕士”专业学位课程-“建筑历史与理论”教学大纲

根据2018年教育部对全国专业硕士学位必修课程的设置要求,在被认定的建筑学硕士学位专业必修课中,包含了"建筑历史与理论"课程。本文从因材施教的基本原则出发,针对适应建筑学硕士学位培养目标和学生未来主要职业生涯的特点和需求,在以往相类教学课程的基础上,以理论诸范式及其相互关系为主线,提出了"建筑历史与理论"课程教学大纲,对讲授内容和方法作了新的系统梳理和概括,列出了部分比较重要的教学参考书目,以为日后课程设置在全国各建筑院校的实施提供前期研究和讨论参考。     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Works In/On//Around///Behind Progress

Artist Hilary Powell describes how her work in film, food and the pop-up book offers playful critiques of regeneration and place making. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Illuminating Embodiment: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Relational Architectures

Art and architecture have a strong tradition of humanism in which man and the human body are the centre and measure of all things. Maria Fernández describes the work of artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer whose work transgresses and challenges these preconceptions through performance, seeking to expose the body and society's receptivity to instability, fluctuation and re-imagining. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exit Ltd

For London-based editor, author and curator Shumon Basar , The Temple of Janus Revisited by Exit Ltd is an effective critique of post-9/11 politics and culture. A virtual re-enactment of the Roman Temple of Janus in Washington DC, it evokes the imminent collapse of the American Empire. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban [IM]plants Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonheiden,Belgium

Bonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its exceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remained protected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environment has been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creating public spaces that use the town's ‘original landscape as the base material’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.