Terminal Distribution

Could the late 20th-century rejection of Modernist planning, and along with it the notion of a ‘universal subject’, mean that urban designers and architects might have lost sight of who they are designing cities for? Albert Pope sets out on a search to define the contemporary ‘who’ and finds some answers in Michel Foucault's notion of the historically grounded subject. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social needs of the elderly and active aging in public open spaces in urban renewal

Urban renewal districts have a relatively high concentration of elderly people. Open spaces are important for the elderly for enhancing social interaction and active aging. However, planning and design of open spaces tend to stress on the physical and safety needs of the elderly, while social needs are not frequently addressed. This study intends to identify whether the social needs of the elderly regarding the use of public open spaces in urban renewal districts are addressed in the standard planning and design guidelines which newly planned development and districts are often based upon. Eight focus groups were conducted in elderly community centers in two urban renewal districts in Hong Kong. The results indicate that elderly people consider ‘social and physical activities’, ‘community life facilities and services’ and ‘social network’, as well as a ‘clean and pleasant environment’ to be their most important needs. Thus, planners and designers should take into consideration these criteria for enhancing the social well-being of the elderly and active aging in public open spaces in urban renewal. Furthermore, it stresses that urban renewal districts are part of the elderly's past living experiences and established social networks, which is not the case in new developments and areas. As such, the users' actual needs should be elicited rather than perceived by planners and designers.     

Literal and notional force fields in architecture

The Philips Pavilion, design by Le Corbusier's office for the 1958 World's Fair, brought the architectural plan, the optical effects of movement and the ideology of progress into a more intense discursive relationship than virtually any project since his Purist houses of the 1920s. While the Pavilion has long been recognised as a seminal work, scholars have tended to overlook the aesthetic intentions of its chief designer, the composer Iannis Xenakis, often simplistically characterising the building as an architectural ‘translation’ of music. This paper closely examines several of Xenakis's wireframe axonometric sketches along with new diagrammatic renderings to analyse the formal disconnect between the Pavilion's plan and the experience of walking around and through it. The professional friction between its two designers yielded a new variation on the promenade architecturale; its principal tension is not between multiple formal readings but rather between the smooth exterior, whose complex form offers a continuous variation of contours, and the ‘narrative’ experience of the interior, with its multimedia account of human history.     

Arup Associates

A specialist architectural division of the wider Arup group, Arup Associates has a unique composition and ethos. In its studios, teams of architects, structural engineers, environmental engineers, urban designers and product designers work alongside each other on the design of buildings from a project's inception. It is an interdisciplinary approach that the practice pioneered in the 1960s, and which has been reinvigorated in the last few years by a new emphasis on ‘unified design’ – a radical wholeness in thinking and execution. Here, Jay Merrick talks to Arup Associates' principal Declan O'Carroll and considers his vision of an architecture capable of addressing complexity and sustaining humanity in the face of modernity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From Authorship to Ownership: A Historical Perspective

Since the notion of copyright first arose in the Renaissance era, the perception and reality of architects' roles has dramatically altered. Guest-Editor Antoine Picon traces the evolution from lone creative genius to today's ‘star architects’, employing hundreds of designers. Is the concept of authorship still relevant in this new context? Or has the emphasis shifted to ownership, whether of building designs or of the software or templates used to produce them?     

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 architectural legacies of Kisho Kurokawa in China

Kisho Kurokawa (1934–2007) was a world-famous Japanese architect who made his impact on urban architecture in Japan and many other countries. His philosophy of symbiosis influenced several generations of designers and social architects in Japan and the world. In his heyday during the mid 1980s, Kurokawa started a twenty-year journey of architectural design and urban planning in China. His designs in China are closely involved with the contemporary architectural history and practice of the country: for example, in importing foreign architectural design, researching the formal design language and the emerging of private development. The authors traced the footprints of Kurokawa in China and investigated the relevant building and urban design cases. This paper reviews Kurokawa's outstanding works in China, tries to reveal the master's trajectory of adapting ‘symbiosis’ and ‘grey’ concepts in different conditions, and fills a gap in the understanding of modern Chinese and Japanese architecture.     

City as Wilderness: The Wilderness Metaphor from Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl to Contemporary Urban Designers

In this text we take a closer look at the development of the wilderness metaphor of the Zwischenstadt, that is, fragmented urban landscapes in Germany. We trace the metaphor's meanings back to its origins in the conservative cultural criticism of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl of the mid-nineteenth century and analyse the different meanings of ‘wilderness’ in today's urban and landscape planners’ positions. Our aim is to demonstrate that the meanings of the concept of wilderness, as well as those of city and cultural landscape, differ depending on the context in which they appear. We point out that different values can be attached to each individual meaning. These evaluations depend on cultural and political patterns and on one's own world view. We apply the insights thus gained to identify three different types of design strategy for the Zwischenstadt used by urban and landscape designers.     

Spaces of Freedom

The predicaments of the current global climate bring a new poignancy and focus to architecture. Emiliano Gandolfi , the curator of the much lauded ‘Experimental Architecture’ exhibition in the Padiglione Italia at the 2008 Venice Biennale, outlines how an emerging group of designers are redefining architecture as they seek to provide solutions that identify people's needs and address the exigencies of global warning, the environmental crisis and migration. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The social context of CAAD in practice

The term ‘application domain’ crops up in many CAAD research papers and yet seldom is the domain described in any detail. In the absence of a detailed understanding of the application domain, CAAD research often substitutes a typical ‘designer’ or ‘architect’ as the end-user of developed systems. The end-user's beliefs, norms, values, history and other concrete characteristics are rarely fleshed out beyond a stereotypical, totalising view, which serves as an ‘ideal-type’ that offers a psychological economy, avoiding the need for us to think too deeply about individual CAAD users. But, as anyone who has taught architecture or worked in practice will be aware, despite many shared interests and attitudes among a given group of designers, there is considerable variation across individuals, not just in skills but in general disposition or ‘styles’ of comportment, which shape how individuals go about designing. Design research has mostly been blind to such variations. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to begin to fashion a set of questions that will enrich our knowledge and to suggest a framework that can be used to answer them.     

From the Cold War to the warmed globe: planning,design-policy entrepreneurism,and the crises of nuclear weapons and climate change

Faced with two existential threats – nuclear war and climate change – planners have responded by proposing sweeping reforms for city-regions, often deploying the newfound rationales to re-package earlier ideas about ‘the good city’. This paper analyses how mid-twentieth-century planning discourses regarding Cold War urban dispersal in the USA might help us understand contemporary conversations about urban climate change adaptation. We apply Kingdon's Multiple Streams Analysis and his concept of policy entrepreneurs to show how planners frame problems and shape policy agendas. We propose a subtype of ‘design-policy entrepreneurs’ who use the spatial and visual tools of planning and design to advocate for preferred policies. By analysing the rhetoric and visual representations made by planners and designers from 1945 to 1965, we examine how they repurposed long-standing ideas about urban deconcentration into ‘dispersal for defence’ proposals. Such proposals for dispersing urban settlements into separated and ‘self-contained’ units received a dysfunctional partial acceptance: housing and transportation legislation embraced the dispersal part but resisted the complementary elements aimed at limiting damages from nuclear attack by concentrating development into distinct nodes. We conclude by asking how the perils of such partial policy-making success might play out on the terrain of climate change adaptation.     

St. George's School Wallasey,the visual environment

This paper discusses the visual environment at St. George's School, Wallasey. A number of aspects of the visual environment related to the use of glazing are used to organise observations and measurements together with comments made previously by other authors. It is concluded what what has previously been described as a ‘solar wall’ should be assessed as a ‘solar window’ and that this is an important message for passive solar designers. The visual aspects of glazing cannot be ignored and designers of passive solar buildings should be at least as concerned with the interior visual consequences of glazing as with the interior thermal effects.     

Book Reviews

This paper is part of a larger series, attempting to align Louis Kahn's ‘form and design’ theory with Platonism.¹ One obstacle to this alignment is the commonly held view that Kalm drew on historic precedents when conceiving his fundamental planning strategies, or die ‘form’ of his buildings, since Plato would have architects copy the Forms, or Ideas, directly. The opinions of the ‘source-hunters’ are reviewed, but found to contradict much of what Kahn said, as well as die opinions ofodier scholars and associates of Kahn's. The weight of the latter views casts doubt on those of die ‘source-hunters’, leaving open the possibility that Kahn drew on Forms directly, as Plato would have ‘craftsmen’ do.     

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.     

Reforming Planning Legislation: A New Zealand Perspective

Tourism, as a form of development rather than as a contribution to human welfare and a broadening of the leisure experience, is capable of becoming one of the principal polarising forces in the community. Its provocative image has been captured in the titles and subtitles of numerous publications: ‘the golden hordes’, ‘new kind of sugar’ and ‘vacationscape’ are just samples. Rosemary Wearing's attempt to determine local attitudes towards tourism development in a Victorian case study (Wearing 1981) and George Young's examination of tourism ‘saturation levels’ and host communities (Young 1973) seem not to have had the impact they should.     

Spatialising differently through ability and techné

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on multisensorial and multimodal processes by considering spatial design differently through three case studies in Canada and Belgium that involved persons with visual impairments. Our research provokes alternative ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘being’ in the world and we assert that the normative ways that designers think, act, and design for/with people who have disabilities can be shifted when considering ableism and techné together. Our studies and methods differ from other design processes and methods, in that we situate design within an understanding of ableism and techné, where we encourage designers to reflect upon their ability biases in order to break assumptions about the abilities and disabilities of users and/or codesigners. Through exploring, observing and creating, nuanced examinations into ability and techné are revealed that support an intimate bond and an empathic response towards shaping the designers’ understanding of participants embodied and practical knowledge. Our case study research expands the ways of knowing and doing in codesign through ableism and techné with people who are visually impaired, to create inspiring and meaningful designs through multisensorial processes that are inclusive of ‘seeing’ in order to spatialise differently.     

Image makers of British modernism: Dell & Wainwright at The Architectural Review

‘It used to be unkindly said of the modern school of architects before the war that they designed their buildings not to please clients or even themselves, but to please Dell & Wainwright. Unfair though this was, it paid a deserved compliment to Dell &Wainwright, the official photographers of The Architectural Review. It meant that their representations of modern buildings—resplendent in a perpetual mellow sunshine, beautifully composed within a frame of leafy branches or above a foreground dappled with shadows—when reproduced on the glossy pages of the Review came near to the ideal their designers had in their imaginations. They were the brave new world itself?…’ This comment, published in the 13^th June, 1946, Issue of the Architects’ Journal on the occasion of Mark O. Dell’s retirement, highlights both the expressive power and the influential nature of Dell & Wainwright’s photography. Their images were part of the Review’s 1930s campaign to promote modern architecture in Britain and given much prominence in the periodical’s pages, which had been reshaped by the Editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings and his team thanks to the use of experimental typography and innovative layouts. Many of the trademark features of Dell & Wainwright’s work had been introduced in architectural imagery by the ‘New Photography’, which had originated in continental Europe in the previous decade and encompassed both the ‘New Vision’ of Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko, and the ‘New Objectivity’ of photographers such as Werner Mantz and Albert Renger-Patzsch. This paper examines the origins of Dell and Wainwright's partnership, their work for The Architectural Review and its critical reception, but also questions some of the most recurrent assumptions related to their photographic output, which was decidedly wider in range than is commonly believed.     

We Will Be Making Active Form

In response to the relative redundancy of architect-designed buildings and the proliferation of commercial structures that are rolled out to a highly formulaic spatial format across the world's cities, Keller Easterling advocates a new architecture of ‘active form’. These active forms potentially perform as ‘verbs’ rather than ‘nouns’ to the city's activities, providing ‘the means by which the field changes’ and the ‘repertoire for how it plays’.     

The landscape photographer as illustrator

Taking landscape photographs for books and reports can be a very rewarding job at a time when public appreciation of the countryside and its vulnerability is so high.

But the book production process can affect the photographer's contribution in unexpected ways. The quality of the printing is one factor, and the role of the designer in creating the ‘look’ of a publication seems crucial, problematically so, since designers often come in with wide powers after everyone else's work is completed. There is a need for closer collaboration betwen the interested parties in publishing projects.     

Conforming to the expectations of the profession: a Lacanian perspective on planning practice,norms and values

This article introduces and examines aspects of Lacan's critical social theory, it examines why a Lacanian psychoanalytical appoach can be regarded as pertinent to analysis of planning processes. The article introduces the notion of the Lacanian subject and explains some of the key Lacanian concepts including the ‘Real’, the ‘Other’, and the Lacanian signifier. These concepts are then related to the acquisitions of planning education and professional skill development—what ‘shapes’ the planner? The article suggests that planning practices and decision‐making are often constrained by the planner's desire to conform to self‐imposed perceptions of professional and societal expectations. These practices contribute to maintenance of the ideological edifices which constitute social reality in that they do not necessarily materialise a planner's own values and beliefs, but rather the beliefs and values which a planner ‘thinks’ that planners are supposed to have and to express in society. The article concludes with a consideration of the implications this has for planning ethics.