Renewable Types and the Urban Plan

The notion of designing according to building type for some might imply constraint, or even a reversion to convention. In Diploma Unit 6 at the AA in London, Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby have proved typology can be used to liberating effect, producing series that harness ‘the cumulative intelligence’ of type, while ‘surpassing both its idea and its deep structure’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’. Copyright © 2007 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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

‘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.     

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.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

Finding Time

What has our sense of the acceleration of time got to bear on our experience of cities? How might it be consciously countered by architects ‘finding time’ through ‘thoughtful design and measured observation’. ‘A self-declared ‘cultural polymath’, Tim Makower is the founder of Makower Architects. A partner at Allies and Morrison for many years, he has significant experience in leading large-scale projects, ranging from the King's Cross Masterplan in London to the Old Doha Regeneration Framework, which he draws on here and in his book Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale (Wiley, 2014).     

Deus Ex Machina: From Semiology to the Elegance of Aesthetics

Architecture's ability to realise large-scale effects permits its emphasis to shift aesthetics on a project-by-project basis. Elegance unleashes a specific visual intelligence that can be achieved by refinement and precision of surface. Here, Mark Foster Gage investigates how elegance can be designed into a project. This requires a ‘visual and formal expertise’ combined with a careful curation of mutation and awareness of ‘extreme differentiation’. Elegance often only reveals itself partially, acquired, in the design stage, through ‘isolated views and expertly calibrated moments’ and perceived fleetingly in built work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital Morphogenesis

Taking its inspiration from biology, digital morphogenesis operates through a logic of optimisation. Departing from the notion of architecture primarily as form-finding that privileges appearance, Neil Leach describes how morphogenesis places emphasis on ‘material performance’ and ‘processes over representation’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medium-Scale Anatolian Cities: Conceptual and Physical Routes of Urban Transformation

Banu Tomruk investigates the post-1980s transformation of the built environment of medium-scale Anatolian cities. She examines the subject through a conceptual and physical framework that places as much emphasis on populist rhetoric – ‘identity crisis’, ‘historicisation’, ‘the making of a tourist city’ – as on the built structures themselves and their realisation as standardised apartment blocks and gated communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has increasingly become ‘the new frontier for exploitation’ and why there is currently ‘a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the fields of the life sciences’ in which life itself becomes a raw material.     

Exuberance,I Don't Know; Excess,I Like

Hernan Diaz Alonso redefines ‘excess’ and ‘exuberance’ on his own terms. Fully au fait and comfortable with the excessive, he describes how in relation to his own work he views excess as more of a tendency or a logic, which sums up his approach; whereas he perceives the exuberant as removed from the design process and more like an ‘adjective’, an ‘emerging quality’ observed by others. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. 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.     

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.     

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.     

Extreme Integration

Tom Wiscombe advances an argument for an architecture of ‘extreme integration’, where the sanctity of the single surface responsible solely for affect is challenged by multilayered and multidimensional built surfaces. The new species of architecture is ‘robust enough to be both formally and technologically innovative’, replacing a mechanistic model with a biological jungle ecology of messiness and excess. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.