Collective Intelligence in Design

In their introduction to this issue, Christopher Hight and Chris Perry define the idea of collective intelligence in its relationship to design practice and to broader technological and social formations. First they suggest a reformulation of practices around networked communication infrastructures as conduits for the new orchestrations of power that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt detailed in their books Empire and Multitude. They then describe how such practices are often involved in the development of responsive sensing environments as new sites for manifesting the social organisations and communities made possible via telecommunications and the Internet. Lastly, they address how traditional boundaries of design disciplines and knowledge, from architecture to programming, are opening into complex co-minglings of their respective isolated ‘intelligences’ into collectives capable of engaging these new sites, new briefs and new sorts of projects. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Common Artefacts

With offices in Beijing, Mumbai and London, Serie Architects is an international practice that spans Asia. Here, co-founder and principal Christopher CM Lee looks beyond the superficial ‘exotic’ stereotypical image of ‘orientalism’ that was traditionally imposed on Asia by the West. With particular reference to Serie Architects' Tote, Mumbai, and Yan Zhenqing Museum in Linyi, China, he shifts the question of identity to what is common within the context of architectural production: what might imbue architecture with social and cultural validity? How might it be possible to attempt to create ‘common artefacts’ through the most typical elements – the ‘dominant types’.     

Becoming Architectural: Affirmative Critique,Creative Incompletion

When Greg Lynn embraced digital animation software in the 1990s, he not only redefined architectural production, but also the designer's relationship to the generative process. In this extract from an unpublished essay written in 2000, the philosopher Brian Massumi describes Lynn's ‘in-folding’ open-ended approach, which renders the design process ‘less an external conduit for the artist's creativity’ than the artist ‘a conduit for creativity of the design process’.     

Responsive Systems|Appliance Architectures

Branden Hookway and Chris Perry introduce the Responsive Systems Group (RSG), a newly formed design research collective at Cornell University's School of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, the work here addresses questions of collective intelligence at a number of scales. In terms of practice, collaborative, group-based work is emphasised, with both the students as well as the instructors working in teams of three (Perry and Hookway are co-directors of the Responsive Systems Group along with Ezra Ardolino). The second scale addresses the technologies and methodologies of design itself, exploring problems of ‘responsivity’ in the context of artificial intelligence and the emerging fields of robotic and sensory interaction design. Finally, and by extension, the issue of scale itself becomes a site of inquiry as the RSG's work focuses less on ‘architecture’ and more on ‘design’, implicitly if not explicitly loosening general notions of disciplinarity as a means of revealing new sites for mixture and innovation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Figures in the Sand

Coastal regions have become a magnet for recent development and globalisation, most conspicuously with the artificial islands off Dubai. This is a trend that has been offset by natural disasters, such as the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Christopher Hight and Michael Robinson describe how the Last Resort design studio at Rice School of Architecture has made its research focus Galveston Island, a nexus of natural, cultural and economic forces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

No More Stopping

The dissolution of the conventional breaking points in the construction and completion phases of a building's delivery has blurred ‘the distinction between the production of design intent and the transmission of information’. Here Richard Garber , Director of the School of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), advocates that architects should use this as an opportunity to widen their remit, gaining agency and with it responsibility and the financial rewards to practice. Here he draws from the examples of UNStudio, GLUCK+ and his own New-York based practice, GRO Architects.     

News from the field: Visual planning and urbanism in the mid‐twentieth century conference,Newcastle, UK, 11–13 September 2007

Gjirokastra, a century-old small city in southern Albania (now a UNESCO World Heritage site), provides an outstanding example of a Classical and Late Ottoman urban centre. At the same time, it is a special example of urban and architectural design based on self-defence by individual family units. Through an excursion of Gjirokastra's residential neighbourhoods, this article discusses how defence concerns guided its urban morphology and building typology until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The idea of war, feuds, and fear has pervaded the residents' self-identity for centuries. The military character of their houses owes much to the local ‘warrior’ mentality that prevailed in times of war and peace.     

After BitTorrent: Darknets to Native Data

What are the implications of the inherent reflexivity of the Internet for the design professions? Anthony Burke argues that radically innovative and distributed forms of information exchange such as BitTorrent suggest a general shift away from the traditional conception of the architect as master builder to one more in line with the collaborative remixing and patching tactics of the hacker. BitTorrent is a communications protocol that allows massive information exchange across infinite users with minimum resources. Through its sheer force of collectively pooled imagination, it provides a potent example of the sorts of platforms of information exchange that foster the new forms of communal organisation that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri term the ‘Multitude’, and which productively challenge conventional models of cultural invention and production. In this context, Burke raises questions about the implications of this broader shift for the design professions' business organisation, as well as their more general methodologies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

User-Focused Public Space(M)UTOPIA in Denmark

The Danish practice MUTOPIA brings to public space a strong sense of delight and playfulness, while demonstrating an overriding concern with the end user. As Serban Cornea of MUTOPIA explains, a temporary plaza for the extensive development of Orestad Nord in Copenhagen aims ‘to speed up the process of creating the area's own identity’, while the practice's housing for Lyngby-Taarb'k, Hovedstaden, audaciously puts the ‘garden’ back into the ‘garden suburb’ by relocating the transport infrastructure to the rooftops. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cyber House Rules: James Law Cybertecture International

After training at the Bartlett in London and an influential period working in Itsuko Hasegawa's studio in Tokyo, James Law returned to launch his own practice, James Law Cybertecture International, in Hong Kong. Working globally and across media and disciplinary lines, Law has captured the imagination of his home country - he was recently awarded the Microsoft/Esquire ‘Cool Guy Digital Lifestyle Award 2006’ by the general public as the personality most symbolic of the new digital lifestyle of Hong Kong. Anna Koor puts Law's brand of ‘cybertecture’ under the spotlight and describes the mechanism of his uniquely responsive practice. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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’.     

El Sur Global: Future Resilient City

Shifting the focus from futuristic visions, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner with Alexis Kalagas of interdisciplinary design practice Urban-Think Tank urge us to ‘forget about utopia’, for in the most part the urban environment of 2050 is already built. Architects’ sights need to be set on the sometimes grim and unfolding reality of favelas and the world's informal cities.     

Lasting Impressions: Pop-Up Culture by HWKN

In an age of competing online media, visibility and presence is everything for a brand. Matthias Hollwich , co-founder of the New York-based practice HWKN, describes how pop-ups can provide a vital ‘touch- point’ for companies' brand campaigns. When placed in a prominent urban venue, they create a highly experiential, physical focus. With the right degree of ‘Tweetability’, this is heightened further as they become a potent social media tool for communicating a ‘brand's “cool” factor’.     

Meeting the New Boss: After the Death of Theory

Christopher Hight seeks to find out what might be left over after the death of theory. Have theoretical questions become merely replaced by reproducible techniques and business plans? How should architects think and practise if they no longer - in the wake of Koolhaas - solely think architecturally? Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of ‘early-phase mining’ in reframing net-positive development

The term ‘net-positive development’ has gained significant recognition by both academics and professionals, especially in architecture. A net-positive development increases or creates economic, social and ecological capital(s) and makes a positive contribution to ecosystem services. Designing how excess resources may be used beyond a site's boundary is a very appealing notion, but difficult to put into practice without the tools and methods to support net-positive development. The effectiveness and potential impact on community design of ‘net-positive development’ is questioned when its evaluation is limited to a quantitative analysis only. A broader definition of net positive is offered that equally places social dimensions alongside ecological health through ‘mining’ for synergies and leverage points in the early stages of a design project. An emphasis is placed on the undervalued first step in the design process of ‘mining: evaluating the dormant, inherent potential’. This can be done through a process of questioning the conventional parameters of a context's predefined limits. A framework is also provided that can prove beneficial at this phase. It is posited that strong mining can provide full-spectrum change where true positive benefits, on multiple scales and for multiple stakeholder interests, are achieved.     

The Nomenclature of Style: Brutalism,Minimalism, Art History and Visual Style in Architecture Journals

Naming styles or movements is a basic mechanism of architectural journals. The announcement of phenomena such as ‘critical regionalism’ or ‘deconstructivism’ involves referring architectural developments to a context in socio-politics or philosophy, and thus provides at least an initial resistance to their understanding as formal styles, which they quickly become. A different strategy is the naming of an architectural moment in the traditional form of an art historical style. Peter Reyner Banham and the Architecture Review's promotion of ‘Brutalism’ as an anti-aesthetic, look its conceptual form from explicit movements, with members and agenda, such as Futurism. Architectural Design's promotion of ‘Minimalism’ in the l990s exemplifies a different kind of style. In both cases, apparently divergent uses of ‘style’ are complicated by the process of naming, and by the tendency of the journal's graphic design to become the style—to become self-identifying.     

Cultivating the Field in the Global Hinterland: Community Building for Mass Housing in the Amazon Region

The large-scale residential settlements that have sprung up over the last decade to house migrants flocking to join Brazil's burgeoning rural industries are in urgent need of retrofitting with infrastructure and community facilities if they are to become sustainable. To this end, international urban design practice the BAÚ Collaborative has initiated the ‘Eden’ project – a participatory design process that involves state authorities, local NGOs, residents and social workers. Rainer Hehl , a cofounder of BAÚ, outlines the problem, the project, and its test-site: the mining town of Parauapebas.     

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.