Biodiversity Targets as the Basis for Green Design

Mike Wells , the Director of Biodiversity by Design, and Ken Yeang outline the need for biodiversity targets in architecture to provide a more far-reaching basis for green design. Rather than just literally ‘greening’ a building by covering it with foliage, they seek to encourage designers to engage with wider ecological processes and in more specific detail. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

String Block Vs Superblock Patterns of Dispersal in China

The superblock in China has become the dominant unit of urban planning, allowing for rapid urban growth while also meeting the needs of state and property developer alike. Kjersti Monson explains the conditions that have given rise to the superblock, while challenging it by proposing an alternative ‘stringblock’ approach, rooted more in collective culture and addressing the demands of the market-driven economy. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Hinging Tower

For their project for a tower in downtown Singapore, which they undertook for the Rising Masses Studio at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Ana María Flor Ortiz and Rodia Valladares Sànchez adopted a mathematical approach. They explicitly used mathematical notation as a mechanism of controlling form, in a manner that could also harness the possibilities of more random and unanticipated influences. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Penang Tropical City,Penang, Malaysia OMA

A mixed-use programme for Penang in Malaysia with the potential to accommodate a resident population of 27,000 required OMA to operate at a planning level, while providing architectural definition. João Bravo da Costa describes how this led to a strategy that focused on types rather than objects, and specifically a typological distribution of programme across the site.     

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.     

How Protocells Can Make ‘Stuff’ Much More Interesting

Rachel Armstrong explains why living systems with their own metabolisms provide more exciting and far-reaching solutions than conventional building materials. She also explicitly explains why the pursuit of protocell technology, which enables us to artificially design living systems, is so much more promising than established methods, such as incorporating high-maintenance biological features – green walls or roofs – into existing urban context or applying biomimicry to traditional materials. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun , Editor-in-Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP Architects

By focusing on a ‘scientific approach’ that emphasises the importance of cause and effect, Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP has developed a design for the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona that is less about spectacle and more about the people it accommodates. Croatian critic and architect Krunoslav Ivanisin admires the structure for the ‘inherent logic of its parts’, but also for its prioritisation of communal life. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign

Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang call for architects to play a more proactive role in building performance modelling. They look at how this is all made possible with the emergence of accessible, cost-effective web-based systems for practices and the way that this can further be enhanced by integrated performance-based design approaches. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

One Space,Many Worlds

‘Cities hold two-thirds of their residents in slums, and the rest in stiflingly limiting, inflexible structures.’ Thus the impoverished parochial Mumbai is one and the same metropolis as the cosmopolitan globalised ‘Bombay’. Ramesh Biswas examines how the speculative housing developments of the aspirational middle classes are creating townships that intensify sprawl and further decentralise cities, squandering the potential for upgrading public space and creating an architecture for the common good. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Crisis! What Crisis? Retooling for Mass Markets in the 21st Century

From his base in Southeast Asia, Tom Verebes , Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), asks what the hardcore realities are for robotics in architecture in this new ‘Asian Century’. At a time when China strives to accommodate 10 million new urban citizens each year by rolling out high-rise residential blocks with standardised serial production techniques, what hope is there that the homogeneous Chinese city will apply robotic tools of mass customisation for the construction of distinctive, rather than generic structures?     

Urbanisation in Contemporary China Observed: Dramatic Changes and Disruptions

Shenzhen is one of the fastest-growing cities in China, having leapt from fishing village to a global city in a matter of a couple of decades. Here Huang Weiwen , the Deputy Director of the Urban and Architecture Department at Shenzhen Municipal Planning Bureau, provides the background to China's unrivalled urbanisation, which is unmatched in terms of both its speed and intensity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Low Albedo: The Mathilde Project

It is hard to imagine anything more darkly moody than a slow-rotating, ultra-black asteroid lurking in deep outer space. Los Angeles-based practice Hirsuta's recent Mathilde project is directly inspired by such an object, turning it inside out in an inversion of space and form. Jason Payne , principal of this practice, which combines a focus on materiality and sensual stimulation with an exploration of emerging construction technologies, describes it.     

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.     

Bricked House: How Code and Law Can Lock You Out

Could we be unwittingly divesting too much control in technology? In so doing, could we be sleepwalking into a future in which our personal assets are no longer ours, but all too easily relinquished by the bank or mortgage company? Molly Wright Steenson , an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks so. She evokes an arresting vision of a close future in which our smartphones and the operating systems integrated within our cars and homes become our friend-enemy, immediately locking us out when they are no longer programmed to respond directly to our touch.     

No Frills and Bare Life: Cheapness and Democracy

Alejandro Zaera-Polo looks at the implication of ‘cheapness’ pursued by some of today's most successful companies, which deliver no-frills services and products to the biggest number of customers possible. This is a strategy perhaps best exemplified by EasyJet and IKEA. Setting aside the impact on global warming, what implications does this approach have for democratisation and urbanisation? And what can architecture, in particular, learn from it at time when it is turning its back on its aspirations for the iconic and the grand visions of the first decade of this century.     

The Collision of Scarcity and Expendability in Architectural Culture of the 1960s and 1970s

Architecture as a practice assimilates contradictions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approaches to materials and sustainability. New finishes, details and products are continually specified and often fetishised, while architects are at pains to show their minimal impact on the environment. Steve Parnell highlights an era in the pages of Architectural Design in the late 1960s and early 1970s that congregated these incongruities by simultaneously advocating low-energy solutions and expendability, most notably the inflatable.     

Local Climates of the City

A specialist in urban effects on climate, particularly the heat island effect, Iain D Stewart is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Here he describes how the emergence of ‘borderless’, ‘patchwork’ and ‘polynucleated’ cities has led climatologists to develop a new classification system of urban landscapes. The system divides cities into local climate zones (LCZs) according to their surface structure, cover, fabric and metabolism.