Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 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.     

A/B Architecture: Publicly Augmented Design

Architects are sometimes criticised for prioritising aesthetics over functionality; but attempts to involve end users in building design all too often encounter apathy. Is a successful participatory design process possible? Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of MIT's Senseable City Lab have been researching ways to make it so. Their solutions include an adaptation of the A/B testing method used in software development, together with means from questionnaires to immersive virtual systems that can draw both conscious and unconscious public feedback while maintaining architects' central role.     

Architecture (and the other 99%): Open-Source Architecture and Design Commons

Under the current commercial practice model, can architecture ever really be cutting-edge or egalitarian in its aims? If only 2 per cent of the world's buildings are designed by architects for 1 per cent of the richest clients, is it possible to design for a wide cross section of the population let alone be truly subversive? Alastair Parvin of architecture studio 00 (zero zero) and co-founder of the Wiki-House puts the case forward for a whole new model of open-source practice.     

Designing for a Lifetime in New York and Other US Cities

In the next 30 years, the number of senior citizens in the US will increase to become larger than any other single age group. How are cities starting to prepare for this huge expansion in the numbers of over-65s? Jerry Maltz and Christine Hunter of the Design for Aging Committee of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIANY), aided by Eric Cohen and Susan Wright , describe how New York and other US cities are laying the necessary groundwork through the World Health Organization's Age-Friendly Cities programme, while also setting up innovative centres for senior citizens, making much-needed modifications to the physical environment and developing new approaches to affordable housing.     

The Dichotomies of Rationalism in 20th-Century Italian Architecture

The two key moments of Rationalism in Italy - the Gruppo 7 of the 1930s and the Tendenza of the 1960s - stand in counterpoint. The Tendenza espoused a very different ideology to its predecessor and thus remained ambivalent to the earlier legacy. Andrew Peckham reveals how this led to a history of discontinuity and, ultimately, recognition of Rationalism's limitations despite the involvement of influential figures such as Giuseppe Terragni, Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture of the Occasion

In an age of casual dressing and informal, fluid social meetings, Pia Ednie-Brown , Associate Professor the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, highlights the paradox of the highly formalist nature of many temporary structures. Often designed to be the event itself, pop-ups have become the ‘architecture of the occasion’. These are epitomised by the elaborate and eccentric one-off designs of cultural pavilions or follies. Could it be, Ednie-Brown asks, that this shift to a formalist architecture is giving us the unique opportunity to embrace the casual informality of today's social interactions, while still getting ‘glimmeringly sequined up for the event’?     

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.     

‘Never Mind All That Environmental Rubbish,Get On With Your Architecture’

Could the primacy of green architecture in recent years be eroding the discipline? Is it reducing architecture to a mere ‘environmental techno-science’? Penelope Dean argues for a revised environmental agenda that is driven by ideas and concepts rather than subservient technologies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

WORK Architecture Company's Diane von Furstenberg Studio,New York

In what was once the goriest part of Manhattan - the Meatpacking District on the far west side - WORKac has created a glittery collection of showrooms, studios and offices spread over four floors, sandwiched between a rooftop dwelling and a street-level flagship store within a pair of 19th-century warehouses. Jayne Merkel explains how sunlight from an angular jewel-like skylight fills the interior, which is intersected by a bejewelled, precast-concrete grand staircase, with refracted, reflected, constantly changing and relatively natural-looking light. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Concrete Constructs: The Limits of Rationalism in Swiss Architecture

Ákos Moravánszky explains why for him ‘the traces of Mediterranean Rationalism in the new Swiss-German architecture are like the imitation stitching on the moulded plastic dashboard of a new car’. It is an influence which, despite the undeniable impact of Aldo Rossi and the Ticino School at ETH Zurich in the 1970s, remains skin-deep, sharing little with the present in terms of ideology or the interpretation of the historic past. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Returning Genius to the Place

Advocates of sustainable design since the early 1990s, HOK are intent on disseminating new research, resources and tools across their global design teams. Mary Ann Lazarus , Sustainable Design Director at HOK, and Chip Crawford , Planning Group Director at HOK, describe a particularly innovative project that the two groups have collaborated on with the essential input of the Biomimicry Guild (see p 44). Addressing critical environmental issues at the habitat scale and performance standards, they have developed ecological design tools that have been employed on masterplans for Lavasa, India, and Langfang, China. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sustaining the Local: An Alternative Approach to Sustainable Design

By implication, the developmentof experimental architecture that is responsive to the local context can have sustainable benefits for the natural environment and adjacent community. Here, architect and writer Terri Peters , who has a PhD in sustainable building transformation, picks up the gauntlet and asks how the notion of localness might be able to advance sustainable design. Focusing on a qualitative rather than quantitative interpretation of sustainability, she describes projects by New York-based studio The Living, the Chinese architect Li Xiaodong and Toronto architects Superkül, highlighting the importance of ecology, social sustainability and context-specific design in the treatment of their work.     

The World's Biggest Sculptor: The Architecture of Massimiliano Fuksas

At the start of the new millennium, Massimiliano Fuksas was one of the most significant Italian architects working outside his home country. His reputation in Italy and abroad, however, was taken to a further level by his completion of the New Milan Trade Fair. Stefano Casciani, an ex-student of Fuksas, provides an insightful and intriguing account of his ‘old’ professor: a robust and seemingly contradictory figure who is capable of great voluminous expression and delicacy. Casciani also finds constancy in his unrelenting energy, freshness and wit. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CONTINUUM: A Self-Engineering Creature-Culture

An interdisciplinary design research collaborative led by Alisa Andrasek, CONTINUUM emerged from a series of design research seminars at Columbia University's graduate school of architecture. Working collaboratively with Robert Aish, Andresek's workshops explored the potential of the new Bentley Systems' GenerativeComponents design software, which at the time was in beta testing. CONTINUUM was formed to extend the possibilities of such collaborations and has expanded its network, occupying an interesting and unique territory of intersecting interests between academia, corporate practice and the companies that create design tools. Traditionally understood as antagonistic, commercial and progressive interests and intentions find common ground in their shared need for research into advanced design software that will enable the retooling of architectural practice. Here, Pia Ednie-Brown, with illustrations by Alisa Andrasek, examines the unique ways in which CONTINUUM enfolds diverse professional and academic practices. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban American Landscape

Landscape architecture has emerged from the deep sleep it entered during the Modernist period and remained in for most of the 20th century. Now, valued because of the environmental movement, stimulated by collaborations with architects and artists, and presented with opportunities to transform abandoned industrial sites, landscape architects are enthusiastically producing new kinds of parks on brownfields, along waterfronts, even on rooftops and in garbage dumps. Jayne Merkel here looks at ways the designed landscape is creating outdoor public space in a country where it has not always been valued. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Plug-In,Clip-On,Tune-Up: A Throwaway Architecture with Optional Extras

For Simon Herron drawing is an innate, even an addictive, compulsion. Here he lets us into his own personal world of drawing: ‘a private haptic language of invention’, which simultaneously has the power to shock and resonate with its time. He traces his graphic lineage back to the work of his father, Ron Herron of Archigram, and projects it forwards through the output of his students.