Returning Genius to the Place

Advocates of sustainable design since the early 1990s, HOK are intent on disseminating new research, resources and tools across their global design teams. Mary Ann Lazarus , Sustainable Design Director at HOK, and Chip Crawford , Planning Group Director at HOK, describe a particularly innovative project that the two groups have collaborated on with the essential input of the Biomimicry Guild (see p 44). Addressing critical environmental issues at the habitat scale and performance standards, they have developed ecological design tools that have been employed on masterplans for Lavasa, India, and Langfang, China. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Nile street: mixed-tenure housing

Bruce Stewart describes how Munkenbeck and Marshall, a practice whose work is more often associated with high-end design, have, at a site in Hackney near the City of London, produced a complex scheme for Peabody that is considered in its treatment of mixed tenure. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

McLaren Technology Centre

The product of a highly customised production process, the racing car is the very antithesis of the modular and the mass produced. Jeremy Melvin reveals how Foster and Partners has designed a headquarters for the McLaren Group - a premier producer and promoter of Formula One cars - that, despite its location on the site of an old farm in Woking, Surrey, is resplendent as a ‘late industrial vision of the object perfectly refined to fulfil its allotted task’.     

Urban Simulacra: London

As the digital revolution deepens and pervades every aspect of daily life, virtual realities begin to penetrate one another in a multiplicity of ways. The amount of sensing data being compiled on the city grows, enabling the construction of virtual realities that can, in turn, be transformed for diverse purposes. Here, Michael Batty and Andrew Hudson-Smith from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, outline how they went about the construction of a virtual city in central London. A conventional 3-D-GIS/CAD model was used as the basis on which to build a digital realm in which designers are cast as avatars and populations as agents, so as to define new ways in which to understand and plan the city. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Towards self-organisational and multiple-performance capacity in architecture

Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design expands and develops the themes of the previous, highly successful Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies issue of 4 (Vol 74, No 3, 2004), which was also guest-edited by Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock of the Emergence and Design Group. While the first volume elucidated the concepts of emergence and self-organisation in relation to the discipline of architecture, this issue augments its theoretical and methodological foundation within a biological paradigm for architectural design, while also discussing promising, related, instrumental techniques for design, manufacturing and construction. Michael Hensel introduces the issue and explains how it addresses a much broader range of scales, from the molecular to that of macro-structure and, beyond, to ecological relations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reviews

THE IMPROVEMENT OF LONDON'S GREEN BELT — A SECOND REPORT (SC 860R) Green Belt Working Group, Standing Conference on London and South East Regional Planning

THE SCHOOL OUTDOOR RESOURCE AREA School Council Project Environment 1970-73 (Longmans 1974: Price £2.95) University of Newcastle Upon Tyne Director — R W Coleton, Deputy Director — R F Morgan

URBAN WASTELAND A report on land lying dormant in cities, towns and villages in Britain by Timothy Cantell 1977 56pp. CIVIC TRUST.     

Chris Lee/Kapil Gupta

With both its architects working from separate cities, Chris Lee/Kapil Gupta is the face of the increasing number of transnational practices now encompassing India, and evidence of the long-term international associations that architectural education now enables. Chris Lee Architects is an international practice based in London which is informed through research conducted at the Architectural Association, where Lee has taught since 2002. Gupta is design principal at Contemporary Urban India and the Director of Research and Publications at the Urban Design Research Institute, Mumbai. Being fascinated by the evolution and mutation of building types in today's cities, Lee and Gupta explore the issues that lie at the intersection between architecture and urbanism with a particular focus on developing new relevant types for these environments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The development of a spatial resource inventory system for countryside planning purposes in the Clwydian hills of North Wales

THE IMPROVEMENT OF LONDON'S GREEN BELT — A SECOND REPORT (SC 860R) Green Belt Working Group, Standing Conference on London and South East Regional Planning

THE SCHOOL OUTDOOR RESOURCE AREA School Council Project Environment 1970–73 (Longmans 1974: Price £2.95) University of Newcastle Upon Tyne Director — R W Coleton, Deputy Director — R F Morgan

URBAN WASTELAND A report on land lying dormant in cities, towns and villages in Britain by Timothy Cantell 1977 56pp. CIVIC TRUST.     

Designing at t + n

In the last four decades, Robert Aish has played a pivotal role in the development of new technologies in architecture. As a professional software designer and developer, he has directly informed building design and processes. As Director of Software Development at Autodesk, his role is to converge innovative concepts such as design computation with mainstream design and engineering software. Also an influential disseminator of knowledge, he is a co-founder of the SmartGeometry Group and has helped create a vital bridge between architectural design and computation. Here he describes some of the critical dilemmas facing both software developers and architectural users of computational design tools, comparing the pioneering work of Bruce Archer and Ivan Sutherland in the mid-1960s (at time t ) with how such tools are used today (at time t + n ). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tracking,Tagging and Scanning the City

The proliferation of social media and software, such as building information modelling (BIM), has led to an unprecedented accumulation of data in the last few years, which can be tracked, tagged and scanned.With it, buildings and cities have been transformed into portals for information. Andrew Hudson-Smith , Director at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (UCL), describes how the ability to use emerging urban analytic tool kits provides the possibility of a real-time view of the city and a crystal-ball-like glimpse into urban networks of the future.     

Behavioural Complexity: Constructing Frameworks for Human-Machine Ecologies

Founded by Patrik Schumacher and Brett Steele in 1997, the Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) Master's programme,based at the AA in London, provides an important research base for Parametricism. The current Director of AADRL, Theodore Spyropoulos , continues to push the boundaries of advanced computing and machine intelligence. Here he describes the work that he has undertaken at the AA and through his practice Minimaforms into adaptive ecologies that employ responsive machine learning to enable spatial transformations.     

Symmetry As Geometry: Kuwait International Airport

Computer-aided design (CAD) software has often been associated with the limitations of Euclidean geometry. Kristoffer Josefsson , a mathematician and specialist geometer employed in the Specialist Modelling Group (SMG) at Foster + Partners, explains how the symmetry-encoded representation undertaken for Kuwait International Airport enabled the group to extend CAD tools for non-Euclidean use.     

Integrated Computational Design: National Bank of Kuwait Headquarters

Foster + Partners' design for the National Bank of Kuwait Headquarters is for an environmentally responsive building and a complex geometry. Dusanka Popovska , a design system analyst in the Specialist Modelling Group (SMG) at Fosters, explains how the group was introduced at an early stage in the bank's design process to develop a parametric model that was capable of integrating various performance parameters while continuing to investigate geometrical solutions.     

The Metabolism of the City: The Mathematics of Networks and Urban Surfaces

How might we best track the accelerating demands of global urbanisation? Michael Weinstock, Director of Research and Development at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, proposes a mathematical approach to uncovering the dynamics of cities. He advocates a dual method that reveals any city's particular metabolism by simultaneously mapping its physical shape - its compactness and densities - and its flows of energy, information and materials. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Designing Inequality?

How much is the design profession to blame for the stark inequality of Brazilian cities and other global metropolises? Ricky Burdett , Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and Director of its Cities and the Urban Age Programme, questions the ability of designers to often fully ‘grasp the social and environmental implications of the spatial decisions they take’.     

Quality assurance

Brian Hall, Assistant Director at the Building Research Establishment and Head of the BRE Construction and Application Group together with Ken Fletcher, Head of the Quality Assurance research section and Technical Secretary for CIB W88, describe a range of suggestions for improving the management of construction for design and site processes. Twenty-two factors thought to be important in obtaining quality are identified, each are separately examined and related to the principles of quality systems.     

Quality assurance

Brian Hall, Assistant Director at the Building Research Establishment and Head of the BRE Construction and Application Group together with Ken Fletcher, Head of the Quality Assurance research section and Technical Secretary for CIB W88, describe a range of suggestions for improving the management of construction for design and site processes. Twenty‐two factors thought to be important in obtaining quality are identified, each are separately examined and related to the principles of quality systems.     

Catalytic Urbanism: The Role of Customised Design Solutions in Delivering Transformational Urban Change

Elad Eisenstein is a Director at Arup, leading the firm's urban design and masterplanning practice from London. Here he describes how through a highly customised approach, ‘catalytic urbanism’, Arup is working internationally in cities undergoing rapid change in a manner that is tailored to both global and local forces – accounting for climate change, macroeconomics and mobility. This bespoke method is illustrated in three diverse contexts: in North London, Pretoria in South Africa and Wanzhuang in China.     

Urban Flux

In the 21st century, why does the type of poverty and human exploitation most readily associated with Dickensian London or the ‘dark Satanic Mills’ of Victorian England still persist today? Matthew Gandy , Professor of Geography at University College London, and Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, lifts the lid on the unevenness of global development, revealing why contemporary urban space continues to be characterised by landscapes of neglect interspersed with areas of intense investment and consumption. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fabrication Agency: Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall

Advances in computation challenge established design approaches in architecture through a much deeper integration of form generation and materialisation. Tobias Schwinn , Research Associate at the Institute for Computational Design (ICD), University of Stuttgart, and Guest-Editor Achim Menges , Director of the ICD, introduce how the potentials and constraints of robotic fabrication can now be explored as generative drivers in agent-based design. This enables architectural innovation in unison with fabricability, structural capacity and spatial performance, as demonstrated by the Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall in Schwäbisch Gmu"nd, Germany, the world's first building with a robotically fabricated segmented timber shell as its primary structure.