After the Event: Speculative Projects in the Aftermath

Working on speculative architectural projects in the aftermath of traumatic events requires both fearlessness and sensitivity on the part of the designer. Samantha Spurr describes how architecture studios organised by the University of Technology, Sydney, held in Shenzhen, Berlin and Beirut, have brought students into direct contact with these issues and fragile sites. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Let's Rock over Barock

Since the 17th century, Austria has been a stronghold of the Baroque. Here Wolf D Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au recognises the deep pull of this cultural tradition in contemporary Austrian architecture, as it continues to endow its designers with an aptitude for spatial sequence and a tendency to prefer to design complex spaces over simplified boxes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Two-Speed Landscape: The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary

Tom Noonan describes how, for this award-winning project, he took up the pen and developed a hybrid drawing technique that exploited the benefits of both the analogue and the digital - characterised by the tactility of the hand and the precision of the computer. He explains that a preoccupation with representation was further ‘reflected and supported by the programme, narrative and language of the architecture’.     

The Urban Complex: Scalar Probabilities and Urban Computation

Guest-editor Anthony Burke redefines complexity in relation to the city as ‘a dynamic and luminal organisational condition “growing at the edge of chaos”’ and in so doing shifts our understanding of urban trauma as an event intrinsic to the contribution of the metropolis rather than external to it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interiorities

Ali Rahim emphasises the importance for design of overlaying a mastery of digital techniques with a nuanced and developed aesthetic sensibility. Here he illustrates his fascination with the formal with his exploration of ‘interiorities’, or internal logics of tectonic structures, in his design research at the University of Pennsylvania. The strive to create variation and atmosphere in buildings effectively places a stress on different part-to-whole relationships, organisations, material qualities and colours and their various rates of transformation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp (FJMT)

The output of FJMT varies greatly in scale and location. The practice has completed community schemes in Sydney's suburbs as well as accommodation for prestigious institutions in the city centre. It has adapted existing structures on heritage sites as well as producing high-tech newbuilds. As Fleur Watson and Martyn Hook explain, what FJMT's projects have in common is an unwavering commitment to the enhancement of the public realm. The firm embraces the full responsibility of building in the sensitive urban and topographic context of this harbour city with its ridges and coastal inlets. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comings and Goings

As a throwback to the idealism of the 1970s, with its contemporary layering of ‘obscure language, extreme ideas and incomprehensible rhetoric’, is EcoRedux helpful to architects? Brian Carter , Professor and Dean at the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo, thinks so. A licensed architect in the UK, who most recently worked in practice with Arup Associates in London before taking up an academic position in North America, Carter regards environmental issues as a single but important aspect of design. He urges architects and architectural educators to make the direct engagement with the difficulties of designing and constructing buildings their priority. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Geotechnical properties of steel slag aggregates: Shear strength and stiffness

Steel slag is an industrial by-product formed in the furnace during the steelmaking process. Electric arc furnace slag (EAFS) and ladle furnace slag (LFS) are the primary by-products of steelmaking from steel scraps. This research evaluates the physical, geotechnical and engineering properties of LFS, EAFS and a blend comprising 50% LFS and 50% EAFS (LFS50 + EAFS50) through laboratory testing. The specialized laboratory tests undertaken in this study include California bearing ratio (CBR) and unconfined compressive strength (UCS) tests, direct shear tests (DSTs), consolidated drained (CD) triaxial tests and repeated load triaxial (RLT) tests. The shear strength responses of the steel slag were found to vary with the dilatancy-induced peak strength of the LFS and the LFS50 + EAFS50 mixture and the dilatancy-associated strain-hardening behavior of the EAFS. Based on the high shear strength parameters and the adequate stiffness that were attained, the steel slag was found to have the potential for usage as a geo-material. LFS and LFS50 + EAFS50 were well-graded and had high CBR values, which would deem them suitable for roadwork applications. EAFS, however, was found to be poorly graded and to have relatively lower CBR values, which would deem it suitable for less stringent applications such as engineering fill and pipe bedding. The viability of using these by-products as geo-materials in civil infrastructures can transform these current waste by-products, particularly LFS, from being stockpiled at steel company plants to being used as alternative green material.     

Estimation of elastic wave velocity through unsaturated soil slope as function of water content and shear deformation

The objective of this study was to estimate the elastic wave velocity of an unsaturated soil slope, and to verify its applicability. The elastic wave velocity in a silty sand was measured. The individual influence of the volumetric water content and the tilt angle on the normalized wave velocity through unsaturated soil were investigated through a series of varied slope model tests. The relationship function of the normalized wave velocity-volumetric water content-tilt angle was established. To verify the proposed estimation function, a series of fixed slope model tests was carried out. The relationship functions were used to estimate the behaviors of the wave velocity in rainfall-induced slope failure model tests. The applicability of the proposed relationship functions for the wave velocity behaviors was also presented. It was found that the estimation function is highly consistent with the measurements for the wave velocity behaviors through unsaturated soil slope in the presented test conditions. In addition, the effects of the rainfall duration/initial water content, density, slope angle and surface layer thickness on the decrease rate of the normalized wave velocity with the volumetric water content and the tilt angle within the test conditions in this study were seen to be small.     

Trauma Within the Walls: Notes Towards a Philosophy of the City

Renowned philosopher and critical theorist Andrew Benjamin provides a framework for thinking about trauma and the city. He returns to Sigmund Freud's definition of trauma as repressed memory and to Aeschylus' formulation of the unmasterable as portrayed in mythical Athens in the Oresteia trilogy. This view of unaccustomed or unpredictable forces, such as civic strife, as ever present and integral to democracy, enables the maintenance of the urban project avoiding repression. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Austeria: City of Minimum Consumption

If a new stringency with economic and material resources is to become a new way of life, how should austerity be recast as a positive force rather than a negative imposition? Daliana Suryawinata and Winy Maas look at definitions of austerity and describes the Austeria project at The Why Factory at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) that looked at new models for combating excessive consumption, such as the ‘Zen road to affluence’.     

Parametric Patterns

For Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, articulation is the central core competency of architecture; and designed patterns provide one of the most potent devices for architectural articulation. Schumacher ushers in a new era of parametric architecture in which pattern becomes an innovative and powerful register of articulation, providing amplification of surface difference and correlation, ultimately resulting in dynamic, high-performance ornamentation.     

Evolving Patterns: Correlated Systems of Interaction

Over the last four decades, the onset of computation has enabled architects and designers to employ generative patterns in their exploration of emergent social, material and spatial systems. Theodore Spyropoulos provides an overview of the field and discusses how it has been developed by the Design Research Lab (DRL) at the Architectural Association into an ‘Adaptive Ecologies’ agenda. In the context of parametric urbanism, the DRL has explored models of living through behavioural patterns found in nature, examining the role of the singular and the collective. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Material Capacity: Embedded Responsiveness

Most attempts towards climate-responsive architecture rely heavily on elaborate technical equipment superimposed on otherwise inert material constructs. In contrast, natural systems embed all the responsive capacity in the structure of the material itself. In this article, Achim Menges and Steffen Reichert present the development of biomimetic responsive material systems that require neither the supply of external energy nor any kind of mechanical or electronic control. They introduce their research on physically programming the humidity-reactive behaviour of these systems, and explain the possibilities this opens up for a strikingly simple yet truly ecologically embedded architecture in constant feedback and interaction with its surrounding environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital Cities

Code, it would seem, is everywhere. We are beginning to understand that much of our natural environment is based on rule-based behaviours, from the emergent swarm intelligence of flocks of birds and schools of fish, to the complex patterns of snowflakes, ferns, seashells and zebra skins. And nothing escapes. Not even the human body. The human genome is being mapped out and sequenced by scientists to provide a genetic blueprint of human life itself. In this context, it is hardly surprising that architects are now beginning to explore similar principles in the design studio. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patterns in Performance-Orientated Design: An Approach towards Pattern Recognition,Generation and Instrumentalisation

The question of pattern in architecture generally divides architects into two distinct groups: those with an aesthetic interest in man-made ornament; and those who take a deeper interest in the processes that underlie the formation of pattern in the natural world. An investigation of the performative, though, enables an exploration of pattern that arises out of the interaction of man-made interventions with the natural environment. Michael Hensel , Professor for research by Design at AHO, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and Achim Menges of the Emtech (Emergent Technologies and Design programme) at the Architectural Association in London, explore this arena based on their research and educational work at the AA and other international institutions, which focuses on aspects of performance in the built environment. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Breathing Tropical High-Rise

In the last decade or so, the question of scale has been epitomised by the intense urbanisation of Southeast Asia with its burgeoning high-rises. Wong Mun Summ, Richard Hassell and Alina Yeo of WOHA describe four projects that ameliorate high-density living through design strategies that simultaneously harness innovative technological solutions and traditional knowledge to introduce comfort and green space into the living environment.     

Encoding Material

Gramazio & Kohler's work in the faculty of Architecture and Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich is renowned for its pioneering work with industrial robots. Here, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler and Silvan Oesterle describe how the integration of fabrication-relevant decisions into encoded designs enables the control of complex interactions between material elements and facilitates the direct generation of machine data, as epitomised by their West Fest Pavilion project. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.