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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

‘To Go Beyond or Not to Be’ Unsolicited Architecture: An Interview with Ole Bourman

The complex dynamics of today's architecture require a deep intellectual freedom. This is something that Dutch architectural critic Ole Bouman espouses through his provocative writings and lectures and his advocacy of ‘unsolicited architecture’. Luca Guido invited Bouman to reflect on what it means to be an architect today and how it might be possible to pursue critical practice beyond the conventional construction processes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shatotto: Architecture for Green Living (Rafiq Azam)

Rafiq Azam, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has produced interventionist architecture in Dhaka city's unchallenged urbanity where owner-developer profits tightly dictate the terms of engagement. His designs for apartment buildings are regarded as compelling revisions of given typologies. In his urban projects, Azam has dematerialised the obtrusive and anti-urban boundary wall that characterises the city with new layerings of gardens, plantings and other architectural fragments such as gardens in the air. His contribution to the ‘greening’ of apartments is original and clearly an achievement in the rigid mathematics of the market. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Metropol Parasol,Seville

In central Seville, a huge fungus-like form floats over the Plaza de la Encarnación. Jürgen Mayer H describes how his Metropol Parasol has revitalised a historic square, providing new amenities such as a museum, market space and viewing platform, while also imbuing it with a formal identity that triggers informal activities and events.     

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.     

The Ecological Facades of Patrick Blanc

The urban geographer Matthew Gandy explores the work of French botanist Patrick Blanc, who applies his scientific knowledge and preoccupations to urban design. After his invention of the mur végetal (green wall), a botanical and structural system for greening buildings, in 1988, Blanc's work has gone on to transcend the creation of merely living walls. Through his landscape schemes Blanc has recognised the city's rich potential for verdant metamorphosis, transforming fern- and moss-covered streets and buildings into unlikely ravines or rainforests. 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.     

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 Interview with Giorgio Grassi

In January 2007, Lucia Tozzi visited Giorgio Grassi's office in Milan. Their conversation touched on Grassi's recent work on Leon Battista Alberti, which is examined here in the context of Grassi's obliquely expressed views on contemporary architecture and the cult of personality. As perhaps the most intellectually rigorous and formally consistent Rationalist architect of his generation, Grassi's work and thinking retain a hermetic aspect, but one notable for its philosophical self-questioning and underlying political commitment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Authorship at Risk: The Role of the Architect

The exquisite drawings of Dan Slavinsky were the highlight of the 2010 Bartlett Summer Show at University College London (UCL). Here, in an article featuring his series ‘In Arcadia at the End of Time’, he questions how the introduction of protocell technology might shift the position of architects and ultimately require them to relinquish control of details, as features and materials become subject to evolution and decay. Copyright © 2011 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.     

Complex Systems Architecture

Neil Spiller reveals the complexity of architectural systems to us, or is it the complexity of the architectural mind? For Spiller, the potential of a single notation as a seed for a truly ecological architecture provides an essential catalyst, triggering a multifaceted musing that takes in diagrams, Paul Preissner's new competition entry for the Taiwan Centre of Disease Control and his future work with Dr Rachel Armstrong on complex biological systems. Copyright © 2009 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.     

Exuberance,I Don't Know; Excess,I Like

Hernan Diaz Alonso redefines ‘excess’ and ‘exuberance’ on his own terms. Fully au fait and comfortable with the excessive, he describes how in relation to his own work he views excess as more of a tendency or a logic, which sums up his approach; whereas he perceives the exuberant as removed from the design process and more like an ‘adjective’, an ‘emerging quality’ observed by others. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.