Lost in Parameter Space?

Rather than eradicating the need for mathematics in architectural practice, computation has intensified it. As Fabian Scheurer and Hanno Stehling of designtoproduction explain, the uneven flow of a complex design from computer-aided design (CAD) to computer-aided engineering (CAE) and through to computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) necessitates an understanding of abstract mathematical concepts that facilitate communication, precision and an accurate assessment of quality throughout the process. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ex Silico Ad Vivo: Computational Simulation and Urban Design at Foster + Partners

What makes a successful city? Can this be replicated simply by following tried-and-tested urban typologies? Francis Aish, Adam Davis and Martha Tsigkari of Foster + Partners' Applied Research + Development (ARD) group argue that technology allows other approaches to urban design. They explain that computational simulation is increasingly valuable in predicting how the dynamic and complex systems of a city might play out in an urban context, forging an exciting new alliance between computation and intuition.     

Performing Elegance

At the level of global culture, the impact of elegant buildings is magnified where there is a seamless integration of complex parts and fabrication expressed through a mastery of techniques and transformative set of features. Hani Rashid of Asymptote explains how, in working at an international scale, the practice is now seeking to propagate innovative design through a ‘developed understanding of the multiple levels of local responses that affect both local and global conditions’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computatonal Intelligence: The Grid as a Post-Human Network

Research and design collaborative EZCT Architecture & Design Research has adopted grid computing to produce a series of furniture systems and other small-scale prototypes using genetic algorithms in combination with automated fabrication technologies. Here, cofounder Philippe Morel relates this design practice to the broader technical and social implications of various grid-computing projects, such as the online organisation Folding@Home, which utilises grid computing and distributed communities for the production and exchange of postindustrial knowledge. He argues that these ‘knowledge farms’ which create an ‘ambient factory’, are perhaps the ultimate form of social-economic production, transforming not only the evolution of design but of the communities that produce and eventually consume its products. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

日本建筑师坂茂和他的纸建筑

日本建筑师坂茂是人道主义实践实验建筑师的代表人物之一,以对纸建筑的研究而闻名于世界。本文对坂茂的教育背景、纸建筑实验和实践方式、纸建筑的形式美感和纸建筑的建造技术进行了简要介绍,希望可以引起读者更多的思考。     

Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture

Interactive design has come about as a result of the intermingling of disciplines. As a consequence, the language it uses has become blurred - borrowed or stolen with little restraint from elsewhere. Though particular terms have become ubiquitous, the original concepts that lie behind them have been lost. This means that all too frequently they are no longer knowingly used. Usman Haque sorts the wheat from the chaff and brings clarity to bear on the vocabulary and thinking behind interactivity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Intelligent Wood Assemblies: Incorporating Found Geometry and Natural Material Complexity

The onset of digital technology has seen the embracing on nonstandard design techniques that use standardised materials, typified by the use of milled plywood. Jonathan Enns describes a project that he has developed at Princeton seeking to harness the irregular and materially complex nature of the innate geometry in timber in such as way as to directly characterise the final design. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Seoul's Interior Landscapes

The shop floor of the department store has increasingly become a cluttered no-man's-land, no more than a space between competing branded concessions. Howard Watson describes how at Lotte, a department store in Seoul, South Korea, Universal Design Studio has applied its subtle decorative design style – first launched internationally in the Stella McCartney stores – to unifying effect. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

Localising the Global

The received view of China and much of Southeast Asia is that it is uncritically importing Western architecture and urban design. In reality, though, urbanisation is far more complex than this. Is there more to an English-style town in China or a Chinatown district in a US city than straight pastiche? Kyong Park looks at the level of local translation involved with appropriation in a Chinese and South Korean context.     

Weaving Architecture: Structuring the Spanish Pavilion,Expo 2010, Shanghai

A complex basket-like structure woven from lightweight steel and wicker, the Spanish Pavilion for the Expo 2010, in Shanghai, is the site of a unique collaboration between architects EMBT (Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue) and MC2 Structural Engineers. Here Julio Martínez Calzón and Carlos Castañón Jiménez of MC2 describe how intense dialogue became key to the realisation of the pavilion, as form-finding and the development of the underlying structural system were equally integral to the design process. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Woven Surface and Form

The Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, founded by Cecil Balmond and Charles Walker, has become synonymous with a highly mathematical, topological approach to architecture. It has, however, collaborated on some of the most exciting experimental fabric structures of recent years, including Anish Kapoor's Marsyas at Tate Modern and Rem Koolhaas's Cosmic Egg at the Serpentine Gallery. Here, the unit's Tristan Simmonds, Martin Self and Daniel Bosia describe how the AGU has progressed research into textile techniques that encompass tailored biomorphic forms alongside knot diagrams. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Animating Architecture: Coupling High-Definition Sensing with High-Definition Actuation

Ruairi Glynn , lecturer on interactive architecture at the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, University College London (UCL), puts the pressing question: ‘What does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?’ Despite the pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing – the Internet of Things (IoT) – and students' ability to speculate, build and test responsive lifesize installations, could practice itself be in danger of getting left behind?     

坂茂思想及其作品浅析

日本建筑师坂茂（Shigeru Ban）是现今国际最受瞩目的中生代建筑师之一,其最广为人知的特色,是对自然建材尤其是纸管材料的运用。他的设计理念,体现了对建筑用材和建筑环保的探索,更深含对人类社会的关怀与责任。本文将着重对坂茂的创作思想和设计手法作初步探讨。     

由“过渡”而始从坂茂的纸管校舍到过渡性建筑的探讨

由著名建筑师坂茂先生设计中日志愿者们共同搭建完成的国内第一座纸管建筑在成都华林小学正式投入使用。文章对这座纸管过渡校舍的建造实施设计影响和建筑教育意义等方面进行了进一步的思考同时也展开了对灾害危机后过渡性建筑话题的讨论。