Landscape Utopianism: Information,Ecology and Generative Pastoralism

Architect and educator Gregory Marinic describes how the 21st century is witnessing the rise of a new utopianism through landscape/architectural interventions that pursue the possibilities of ‘ersatz utopias within our quotidian world’. He illustrates this with his own collaborative works and competition entries for d3, an art-architecture stewardship programme based in New York of which he is director.     

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 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.     

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.     

Architecture Autonomous (Gerard da Cunha)

Gerard da Cunha maintains his practice from the old Portuguese colony of Goa, which he considers has a novel history in that it was the site of the ‘first sustained encounter between the East and the West’. This encounter has engendered a unique culture and architecture that is evident in da Cunha's lively and rather Gaudíesque work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Extreme Integration

Tom Wiscombe advances an argument for an architecture of ‘extreme integration’, where the sanctity of the single surface responsible solely for affect is challenged by multilayered and multidimensional built surfaces. The new species of architecture is ‘robust enough to be both formally and technologically innovative’, replacing a mechanistic model with a biological jungle ecology of messiness and excess. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Flora_Flex: In Search of Synthetic Immortality

Evan Douglis performs alchemy, bringing to life from theinaminate ‘the natural’ with his genetically inspired Flora_flex prefab modular building system. He demonstrates the beauty, intricacy and opulence inherent in pursuing flowering plant morphology as a model for surface variation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finding Time

What has our sense of the acceleration of time got to bear on our experience of cities? How might it be consciously countered by architects ‘finding time’ through ‘thoughtful design and measured observation’. ‘A self-declared ‘cultural polymath’, Tim Makower is the founder of Makower Architects. A partner at Allies and Morrison for many years, he has significant experience in leading large-scale projects, ranging from the King's Cross Masterplan in London to the Old Doha Regeneration Framework, which he draws on here and in his book Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale (Wiley, 2014).     

Plug-In,Clip-On,Tune-Up: A Throwaway Architecture with Optional Extras

For Simon Herron drawing is an innate, even an addictive, compulsion. Here he lets us into his own personal world of drawing: ‘a private haptic language of invention’, which simultaneously has the power to shock and resonate with its time. He traces his graphic lineage back to the work of his father, Ron Herron of Archigram, and projects it forwards through the output of his students.     

Jamie Fobert Architects: Inside Out

The architect of several artists' homes, Jamie Fobert is now landing himself a string of acclaimed arts and commercial commissions. From his warehouse in Old Street in London, he explained to Howard Watson how the sensitive integrity of his architecture has developed out of ‘an inside-out approach’, which puts particular store in ‘framing light and views’ and the sculpting of space aided by physical model-making, rather than the synthetic top-down views that are imposed by widely used CAD programs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mathew & Ghosh Architects

The work of Mathew & Ghosh Architects (Nisha Mathew-Ghosh and Soumitro Ghosh) boldly extends an abstract Modernist language and at the same time draws from the vitality of places. While the firm's early works were small in scale, mostly residential in nature and based on a reappraisal of the early Corbusian idiom, recent projects include large-scale urban and landscape interventions with diverse conceptual and metaphorical imperatives. They have moved from a more reticent stance to the urban exuberance of their more recent projects (for example, their own office building), something akin to a ‘savage architecture’ as posited by Kazuo Shinohara in the context of the unsynchronised nature of the modern city. The architects' object of contemplation is the urban ‘box’, whether a private residence, office or part of a church. The box is first fractured and reconstructed as a bricolage of tectonic fragments, memories and events, all tenuously related as if unity in a contemporary culture is for ever denied. Like the Japanese notion of ‘ma’, the moment between fragments - a slit or an emptiness between two hovering planes - is telling. Mathew & Ghosh participate in the continuity of a historical narrative yet mark out the fissures and disjunctions; sometimes negotiations with the continuity emerge from unintended interstices. While these configurations of the contemporary urban ‘box’ are both contextual and abstract, they are also phenomenologically rich. There is a sustained dialect to the architecture of Mathew & Ghosh that includes consummate materiality and fine crafting, light as a medium, and always, as Nisha Mathew-Ghosh states, ‘good spatial possibilities’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On Green Design (Part 3) The Basic Premises for Green Design

In the final part of his short series that outlines the main principles of ecodesign, Ken Yeang turns his attention to the alternatives that are on offer to designers who want to ensure comfortable internal conditions in their buildings. He covers the full gamut of choices and hybrids from buildings that are constructed in ‘passive mode’, without the need for any electromechanical systems, to those that are conceived in ‘productive mode’ producing their own energy. Copyright © 2008 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.     

Chandavarkar and Thacker

The first architectural firm in Bangalore, founded in 1947 by Narayan Chandavarkar, Chandavarkar and Thacker is currently under the directorship of Prem Chandavarkar and Sai Shankar Bharatan. Continuing the collaborative nature of the practice during its many reorganisations over the years, Prem Chandavarkar has also given the firm a new intellectual edge by confronting Bangalore's new urbanity, and as such is a role model for many younger-generation architects. The practice's current work represents thoughtful and reflective responses as architecture finds itself at a critical juncture in this city of a euphoric present.With the practice's 60-year history, Chandavarkar is particularly aware of the humility and ‘backgroundness’ that once characterised the culture of the city in contrast to the present voluble environment. He has written (including in his essay in this issue) about the nature of practice and production, and has argued why a critical and self-reflexive practice needs to be the order of the day. Chandavarkar and Thacker speak of an ‘aesthetics of absorption’ and a ‘negotiated practice’, both of which should inform a much needed criticality of the exuberant conditions today. ‘A building does not convey meaning as much as it slowly absorbs it,’ declares the practice, and so the test of a building is not the initial impression of its spectacular presentation, but the accrued experiences and memories of its everyday inhabitation. In their understanding of culture as an active and ongoing phenomenon, and hence one not yet susceptible to definition, the architects bring an open-endedness to their own practice. The result is an avoidance of a predetermined language of expression, and thus the variety of spatial, volumetric, site and technofunctional responses, in their array of works. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Diving into the Depth-Scape: Exuberance and Personalities

Exuberance is about more than appearance. Yael Reisner argues that it engenders an emotional response. It provides a whole ‘depth-scape’ of expression by offering extensive qualities that go beyond the merely practical or the required. Exuberance proffers a full emotional range from the horrific to the sublime, which requires complexity but also the presence of creative personalities who lend personal interpretation to the design process. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The New Delfina

Peter Cook eulogises the exuberant: he urges us to recognise its potential for release, as a true opportunity to let go creatively – and, in fact, to let it all ‘rush out in a torrent’. In tandem, he redraws the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica from his hotel window, as an exuberant pile or liveable conglomeration of grotto-like spaces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Site/Non-Site: Extending the Parameters in Contemporary Landscape

As the world teeters on the verge of environmental collapse, landscape architecture has taken on a new significance offering a longed-for sanctuary for our increasingly urbanised lives. Here, in his introduction to the issue, guest-editor Michael Spens explains how by taking its impetus from land art, landscape architecture, as an expanded field, transcends the conventional confines of site. This renders it possible to read architecture ‘as landscape, or as non-landscape, as building becomes non-site’ and the ‘site indeed materialises as the work per se’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.