The Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has increasingly become ‘the new frontier for exploitation’ and why there is currently ‘a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the fields of the life sciences’ in which life itself becomes a raw material.     

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.     

Street Life and the ‘People’s City’

Could large-scale urban development and an erosion of rights to public space prove the death knoll for China’s vibrant street life? Shi Jian , Planning Director of ISreading Culture in Beijing, looks at the tradition of Chinese street culture and how it is currently shifting and reinventing itself for new urban contexts. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Chinese City: A Self-Contained Utopia

Could the utopian ideal of building a tabula rasa city from scratch be slipping away? Neville Mars , Director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF), Beijing, highlights how in the last decade development has become focused on the periphery of existing metropolises. Fuelled by the aspirant middle classes' inexorable appetite for settling in modern cities, urbanisation is manifesting itself in ‘self-contained utopias’: walled-off, slick cities that are dormitory, satellite towns rather than independent urban settlements. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deus Ex Machina: From Semiology to the Elegance of Aesthetics

Architecture's ability to realise large-scale effects permits its emphasis to shift aesthetics on a project-by-project basis. Elegance unleashes a specific visual intelligence that can be achieved by refinement and precision of surface. Here, Mark Foster Gage investigates how elegance can be designed into a project. This requires a ‘visual and formal expertise’ combined with a careful curation of mutation and awareness of ‘extreme differentiation’. Elegance often only reveals itself partially, acquired, in the design stage, through ‘isolated views and expertly calibrated moments’ and perceived fleetingly in built work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Animating Architecture: Coupling High-Definition Sensing with High-Definition Actuation

Ruairi Glynn , lecturer on interactive architecture at the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, University College London (UCL), puts the pressing question: ‘What does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?’ Despite the pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing – the Internet of Things (IoT) – and students' ability to speculate, build and test responsive lifesize installations, could practice itself be in danger of getting left behind?     

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.     

Galapagos: On the Logic and Limitations of Generic Solvers

A graduate in architecture and urbanism from TU Delft, David Rutten works with software company Robert McNeel & Associates (RMN). The developer of Grasshopper®, he was recently awarded the ACADIA 2012 award for innovative research. The Galapagos plug-in, which Rutten has developed for Grasshopper®, implements two generic solvers (one using a genetic algorithm and one using a simulated annealing algorithm). A generic solver will find a solution to a problem that can be expressed in a mathematical way; however, as he explains here, while these solutions may not be exact, they will be very good.     

Eat Me… Drink Me…

Sean Lally of WEATHERS lets out a rallying cry to all architects. He calls on them to make environmental conditions the subject of design rather than regarding them as a standardised part of a building's services. Here he highlights the potential of material systems, which are usually applied to conditioning the interiors of buildings, in the generation of new forms and activities; whether it is in the honing of the performance aspect of a building's function, as in the Water Cube at Beijing (2008), or in the seasonal planning that underpins the concept behind WEATHERS' Wanderings project (2008-9). Copyright © 2010 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.     

Why We Need Architecture of Tolerance

Professor and Chair in Integrated Design at the University of Calgary Faculty of Environmental Design, Branko Kolarevic has established an international reputation as an author and commentator on digital design and manufacturing in architecture. Here he questions the importance of high-definition tolerance in construction itself. As an industry that operates at far greater sizes and scales than other manufacturing bases, has the ‘messy world of building’ not always had to allow for a reasonable tolerance of errors? Should high-definition processes, which negate or negotiate zero tolerance, really be for architects and construction professionals the Holy Grail that they first appear?     

After China: The World? Three Perspectives on a Critical Question

Are China’s cities now poised for global influence? This challenging question initiates a tripartite response from three authors: Kyong Park , Laurence Liauw and Doreen Heng Liu . In order to fully speculate on the potential of Chinese urbanism and architecture beyond its own borders: Park looks at whether China is a fully replicable capitalist model; Liauw outlines recent indicators of urban Sinofication around the world, whether it is the exporting of high-end designer furniture to the West or the injection of Chinese capital into Africa; and Heng Liu examines the dissemination of the Pearl River Delta both as an idea - first proliferated by Rem Koolhaas in the mid-1990s - and in its physical manifestations. Copyright © 2008 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.     

Strength in Numbers

David Salomon examines the history of the original World Trade Center (WTC) competition of 1962 and the more recent 2003 competition, finding interesting parallels in terms of how commercial and bureaucratic, as well as progressive, forces of innovation intersect over larger debates about control, power and questions of collaborative identity and practice within the city as a political machine, and which figure 9/11 in implicitly provocative ways. The 1962 competition featured another progressive architectural collaboration: Walter Gropius's The Architect's Collaborative (TAC). Not unlike the 2003 competition in which United Architects (UA) and other collaborative practices lost to the more stable, individual celebrity identity, TAC lost to Minoru Yamasaki. Salomon also argues that the organisational and structural qualities of UA's WTC proposal sought to embed collective operations of multiplicity rather than mere duplication of the previous WTC Twin Towers within the form of the design itself. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Morphogenetic Urbanism

Peter Trummer pursues a morphogenetic model of urban design in which matter and form are placed in a dynamic rather than a fixed relationship. He demonstrates its application with a neighbourhood model that he has developed for the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, with the Second-Year Research Programme at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Local Code: Real Estates

With the employment of a geographical information system (GIS), the city can be revealed and analysed with an alacrity that was never previously imagined possible: vacant sites and spaces between buildings can immediately be located. Nicholas de Monchaux describes his project Local Code: Real Estates, based in San Francisco, which has highlighted the potential and scale of residual spaces situated around highways and industry as a new collective resource for community design. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Cross the River by Touching the Stones: Chinese Architecture and Political Economy in the Reform Era: 1978-2008

China's Open Door Policy and economic development set in motion in 1978 can be regarded as the triumph of pragmatism over theory - specifically Chairman Mao's brand of Marxist theory. Tao Zhu traces the progress of reform over the last 30 years, and its impact on Chinese architectural culture. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Persistence of the Pastoral

Architect, animator and educator Nic Clear challenges the contemporary notion of the pastoral to go beyond the simplistic binary opposites of the untainted rural idyll and the industrialised city. He explores how the narratives of the pastoral have provided a mainstay for science fiction and how this can be used to re-imagine nature itself with the aid of advanced biotechnologies to create new architectures for the 21st century.