Auroville: An Architectural Laboratory

Architect Anupama Kundoo describes how ‘the dream of building a new city’ from scratch for an international spiritual community in southern India has created a magnet for architects around the world. As the city now approaches its 50th anniversary, she asks whether Auroville can keep its architectural culture of innovation and experimentation alight. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Time Matters: Transition and Transformation in Architecture

Though the contemporary world in the West has only just started to value architecture that is temporary and highly flexible rather than permanent and timeless, the East has a long building tradition respecting the transitory and ephemeral. Mark Taylor , Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia, looks at ways in which recent architecture in China, Japan and New Zealand has been embracing the limits and passing of time.     

Radical Italian Architecture Yesterday and Today

In Italy there is a revival of the spirit of 1960s Radicalism. Fresh from university, young architects ‘pick up a rock band name, enrol in an architectural competition or just invent their own research and project installations’. William Menking, who co-curated the 2003 exhibition at London's Design Museum on Superstudio - the supergroup of Italian radicali - and Olympia Kazi bring the new generation of young protagonists under scrutiny. Copyright © 2007 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.     

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.     

Cities and Grids: In Search of New Paradigms

The wider global influences of expanded populations, new technologies and economies in both Europe and the Far East are having a direct impact on the pattern and planning of urban form. Joan Busquets , the principal of B Arquitectura I Urbanisme (BAU) in Barcelona, and Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), describes how the urban grid is continuing to evolve with these changes, becoming ‘a matrix for innovation within urban development, allowing the creation of sustainable and compact cities’, enabling the forming of ‘new networks and innovative city systems’.     

The Future is Unwritten: Global Culture,Identity and Economy

Is architecture no more than a mere handmaid to global capitalism and the international property market? Murray Fraser , Professor of Architecture and Global Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, asserts that the true picture is both much more complex and less homogeneous than it might appear. While acknowledging that economic conditions are significant drivers in architecture, he argues that it is still possible for designers to respond creatively with suppleness and foresight in their exploration of paths for a better future.     

The Future of Information Modelling and the End of Theory: Less is Limited,More is Different

The computational design strategist Cynthia Ottchen , who was previously Head of Research and Innovation at OMA, offers insights into the future of building information modelling (BIM). Now in the Petabyte Age of the data deluge, she argues that in our adoption of BIM we have to surpass mere data collection and technical optimisation and open up new ways of thinking with the creative use of ‘soft data’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mathew & Ghosh Architects

The work of Mathew & Ghosh Architects (Nisha Mathew-Ghosh and Soumitro Ghosh) boldly extends an abstract Modernist language and at the same time draws from the vitality of places. While the firm's early works were small in scale, mostly residential in nature and based on a reappraisal of the early Corbusian idiom, recent projects include large-scale urban and landscape interventions with diverse conceptual and metaphorical imperatives. They have moved from a more reticent stance to the urban exuberance of their more recent projects (for example, their own office building), something akin to a ‘savage architecture’ as posited by Kazuo Shinohara in the context of the unsynchronised nature of the modern city. The architects' object of contemplation is the urban ‘box’, whether a private residence, office or part of a church. The box is first fractured and reconstructed as a bricolage of tectonic fragments, memories and events, all tenuously related as if unity in a contemporary culture is for ever denied. Like the Japanese notion of ‘ma’, the moment between fragments - a slit or an emptiness between two hovering planes - is telling. Mathew & Ghosh participate in the continuity of a historical narrative yet mark out the fissures and disjunctions; sometimes negotiations with the continuity emerge from unintended interstices. While these configurations of the contemporary urban ‘box’ are both contextual and abstract, they are also phenomenologically rich. There is a sustained dialect to the architecture of Mathew & Ghosh that includes consummate materiality and fine crafting, light as a medium, and always, as Nisha Mathew-Ghosh states, ‘good spatial possibilities’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Virtual Corpses,Figural Sections and Resonant Fields

The ‘figural section’ is one of the most potent but under used forms of architectural communication. It enables slices, extrusions, fragments and surfaces of buildings to become the media of the non-expressive and deadpan. Here Sean Griffiths of FAT looks at Venturi Scott Brown's influence in the development of the figural section and how it has evolved into a key trope in his practice's own work. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Living: Surface Tensions

‘Our work begins with the premise of a dynamic world. Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response?’ New York-based team The Living, led by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, have developed a practice of deep, open-source interfaces of participation. Jordan Geiger describes how for The Living their home city and its environs is a site of evolving forms of public space whether on land, air or water. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changing Building Sites: Industrialisation and Automation of the Building Process

The introduction of robotics in construction is part of a much longer history of industrialisation and automation on the building site. Thomas Bock of the Technical University of Munich and Silke Langenberg of the University of Applied Sciences, Munich, highlight how the Industrial Revolution and the development of a transport infrastructure in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe first triggered the shift in the building trade from a largely localised industry into a national and mechanised one, leading to the highly advanced automated construction techniques that continue to be developed in Japan and other Asian countries to this day.     

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.     

The True Counterfeits of Banksy: Radical Walls of Complicity and Subversion

Tattoo or consummate object of consumption? Banksy's artwork has an uneasy status. It simultaneously has the power to subvert, questioning the conventions of the art world while potentially colluding with it. Eva Branscome explores the paradox of Banksy in the light of Post-Modernism. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

That Old Thing Called Flexibility: An Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown hold an unrivalled position within architecture. Now written several decades ago, their classic books Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction remain unsurpassed for their ability to shock and overturn current architectural thought. Francesco Proto talks to Venturi and Scott Brown on their present thinking about iconography, transparency, spectacularisation, architectural pornography and the contemporary architectural avant-garde. Copyright © 2009 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.     

Outside the Terrestrial Sphere Greg Lynn FORM: N.O.A.H. (New Outer Atmospheric Habitat) and New City

Renowned architect and educator Greg Lynn describes two projects - N.O.A.H, a science-fiction film, and New City, a design exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York - that directly ‘engage the theme of Space Architecture as the new frontier for design research in terms of the spatial character and navigation of environments with alternative gravities’.     

Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism

Since the early decades of the 19th century, Turkey has undergone successive programmes of modernisation that have closely identified reform with Westernisation and its implied European ‘success and superiority’ over Turkish culture. Here Edhem Eldem reveals both the external and internal dynamic of Turkish Orientalism, which has proved such a complex multilayered process with an enduring influence on how Turkish society and elites view themselves today. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.