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 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.     

Investing in the Ground: Reflections on Scarcity,Remediation and Obdurate Form

Douglas Spencer develops David Harvey's notion of the ‘spatial fix’ in which material processes in the built environment and the ground itself are repeatedly used up for the purposes of capital investment. This can be to the detriment of the quality of the land itself, which is often abandoned after a period of time as polluted and unusable brownfield sites; while available resources are bled dry. It is a situation that has been worsened over the last few decades with the emphasis on entrepreneurial and intensive modes of urbanisation. Spencer indicates how this situation can be negated by landscape urbanism through critical interventions, such as those represented here in the work of the Architectural Association Landscape Urbanism (AALU) Masters programme in London and Groundlab, the practice associated with it.     

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.     

Newness,Tradition and Identity: Existential Content and Meaning in Architecture

At a time when novelty and aesthetic invention have become the established norm for contemporary architecture, the esteemed Finnish author and architect Juhani Pallasmaa speaks out in defence of tradition. He explains how nuance, expressive subtlety and an ambition for an experiential and existential quality in a work require a sense of historical continuum: ‘An embodiment of the essence of tradition’ as a precursor for ‘meaningful creativity’.     

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.     

Check-In: Foursquare and the Rich Annotated Topology of Citizen-Generated Hyperlocal Data

Over the last few years, a new resource has emerged for studying the evolution of specific cities. That resource is urban annotation: the attachment of comments to places so that they can later be accessed by others in that same location via smartphone. The city guide app Foursquare is the prime example of this. Barcelona-based curator and cultural researcher José Luis de Vicente examines the app from its origins to the types of data it generates, considering its implications and its surprisingly accurate predictive potentials.     

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’.     

Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice

The most immediate impact of scarcity on architecture is the insufficient supply of building materials. As Jon Goodbun and Karin Jaschke explain, this requires an engagement with more than the direct influences on the exhaustion of natural resources. Looking beyond the conventional capitalist model of flows driven by ‘the market’, they look at how new ideas on materialism are demanding a radical revision of the relationship between matter and social, economic and political forces.     

Growth Typologies,Localities and Defamiliarisation: Experiments with Artificial Urbanism in Sichuan,Guangzhou and Beijing

For the last 8 years, the Media × Design Lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has been engaged on research into ‘Artificial Urbanism’. Jeffrey Huang , Director of the lab, describes how generative computer codes and algorithms are employed in pursuit of an accelerated design process; with the aim of not only meeting the demands of rapid urbanisation, but also being responsive to the ecological and contextual conditions of a particular locality.     

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.     

Convoluted Flesh: A Synthetic Approach to Analogue and Digital Architecture

Marcos Cruz and Marjan Colletti advocate their own distinct design approach that is intuitive and blissful in its opulence, evoking the sublime.Here they discuss the potential of opening up ‘new spatial, or material possibilities’ that are liberated from the self-imposed restrictions of their more technologically driven contemporaries. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Scarcity and Abundance: Urban Agriculture in Cuba and the US

In urban agriculture, there is a direct connection between scarcity and abundance: with the threat of food shortages so often acting as an effective trigger for food-growing enterprises. Produce can also be grown with few or limited resources. André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn of Bohn&Viljoen Architects juxtapose the experience of the organopónicos, or market gardens, in Cuba, which have proliferated since the US trade blockade of the 1990s and ensuing fuel shortages, and more recent experiments in food production in North American cities that are learning from their example.     

Open Fields: The New Rural Design Revolution

Alastair Parvin , an architectural and strategic designer at 00:/, calls for a focus on ‘the opposite side of the urbanisation story: the impact that urbanisation has on rural areas’. He advocates a rural design revolution that re-engages with farming and the countryside as a site of intense production, rather than as a preserve for nostalgia and leisure activities.     

Too Good to Be True: The Survival of English Everyday PoMo

‘Intelligent, eclectic, witty, profoundly humanistic, and keen to debunk an inflexible, elitist and dangerously authoritarian Modernism’: Kester Rattenbury evokes the spirit of early British Post-Modernism. She reminds us of how in the early 1980s it spearheaded a spirited community architecture that played a strategic role in protest against wholesale, motorway-led redevelopments and the survival of Convent Garden. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Tree Canopy as Blueprint

As the opportunities for new territories become more limited, the only way is up. Mitchell Schwarzer explores the dizzying heights of the ‘last biotic frontier’ of arboreal architecture with its high platforms, walkways and canopy craft. Challenging in construction and engineering terms, the tree canopy also requires engaging with a different atmospheric and climatic range to those conditions encountered at ground level. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.