Polymorphic Matters: Architecture,Change and Imagination

Polymorphism was an important tactic used by Woods to render objects and spaces in the process of transformation and transmutation. Ashley Simone , Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in New York City, explores the terrain where materiality meets change, where fantasy supplants reality. Her prime example is the suite of drawings for the ‘AEON’ project.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The New Materiality

In the last few decades an entirely new conception of the material world has emerged. Here, philosopher Manuel DeLanda , whose work has become synonymous with this ‘new materialism’, introduces this novel understanding of materiality. Like any other conceptual framework, it has precedents in the history of philosophy - the work of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is a good example - but only recently has it become coherently articulated with science and technology. Gone is the Aristotelian view that matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside (transcendent essences), as well as the Newtonian view in which an obedient materiality simply follows general laws and owes all its powers to those transcendent laws. In place of this, we can now conceptualise an active matter endowed with its own tendencies and capacities, engaged in its own divergent, open-ended evolution, animated from within by immanent patterns of being and becoming.     

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.     

Urbanism Without Density

The predominance of sprawling, low-density urban environments throughout the world begs the question: What constitutes a city? Such environments also require us to rethink public space, traditionally at the core of city centres. Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel outline the challenges and opportunities that cities of dispersal raise. Copyright © 2008 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.     

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.     

Parc Des Expositions (PEX), Toulouse: A Condenser for Diversity

Responding to a competition brief for accelerating urban development around the Parc des Expositions (PEX) exhibition centre of Toulouse, Clément Blanchet describes how the Of?ce for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) proposed an urban strategy in place of a conventional masterplan: the emphasis being on exploring and facilitating the growth of the existing urban patchwork, rather than on forced urbanism.     

Between Pragmatism and Theory

For the last three decades, Italian architecture has been characterised by an extreme polarisation. At one end of the spectrum have been the neo-conservators, who are subsumed by Italy's history, and at the other end the avant-garde for whom innovation is the Holy Grail and the present is a clean slate. Francesco Proto outlines the current potential for steering a middle course that will afford a greater eclecticism, enabling a natural balance between pragmatism and theory. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

The Social Call

Every time you text or call from your mobile phone, you may be unknowingly providing essential data that is being captured for public or commercial research. Valentina Croci describes how The Senseable City Lab at MIT and the Estonian group Positium LBS with the Department of Geography at the University of Tartu have been developing projects that enable us to sense the city, dynamically mapping social movement. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Putting the ‘I’ back into Architecture

Neil Spiller gets personal in a bid to put the ‘I’ back into architecture. He celebrates the spatial experimentation of the work of Charlotte Erckrath. Creating a space of desire, she produces a subjective ‘synthesis of architect, body, space and view’. Copyright © 2008 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?     

It's All Inside My Head

The physical manifestations of built architecture are often discussed in terms of a single architect's inspiration, overemphasising and romanticising the intellectual contribution of the signature architect. Here Neil Spiller describes the extraordinary departure that Marcos Novak is undertaking at the University of California's Santa Barbara campus, where Novak's own scanned brain becomes a literal, reflexive generating force in the formation of a spatial environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Happy Meals’: Finding Happiness with Hans Becker and the Humanitas Care Model

Hans Becker , originally a professor at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam, is a seemingly unlikely guru for elderly care. In 1992 he was appointed Chair of the Rotterdam-based housing association Humanitas with the task of overturning the outmoded and failing commercial model of its nursing homes. He set about replacing them with ‘apartments for life’ that promoted independent living. In order to understand more about the successful Humanitas model, David Birkbeck , Chief Executive of Design for Homes in the UK, interviewed Becker and found out how the move to a new housing type was enabled by a philosophical shift that placed an emphasis on the engendering of happiness among its residents – with food and the creation of convivial on-site restaurant facilities proving a critical tool.     

iPhone City

Is the iPhone and a whole new generation of mobiles and PDAs eclipsing the physical city? Whereas once the metropolis alone brought together people, markets, goods, transport and information, the iPhone and similar handheld devices are changing spatial interaction. From Los Angeles, Benjamin H Bratton ruminates on the full impact of this technological shift. Copyright © 2009 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.