On Design Engineering

London-based Adams Kara Taylor (AKT) is one of the most innovative design-led structural and civil engineering practices in the UK. Seeking out creative collaborations with leading architectural firms and schools of architecture and design internationally, it has, as Hanif Kara , Co-Founder and Director at AKT, explains, developed a holistic approach in which architecture and engineering converge. Here Kara defines the emerging methods of ‘design engineering’, emphasising the importance of early input at the conceptualisation stage and research over even the contribution of digital technologies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evolving Patterns: Correlated Systems of Interaction

Over the last four decades, the onset of computation has enabled architects and designers to employ generative patterns in their exploration of emergent social, material and spatial systems. Theodore Spyropoulos provides an overview of the field and discusses how it has been developed by the Design Research Lab (DRL) at the Architectural Association into an ‘Adaptive Ecologies’ agenda. In the context of parametric urbanism, the DRL has explored models of living through behavioural patterns found in nature, examining the role of the singular and the collective. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Trauma Within the Walls: Notes Towards a Philosophy of the City

Renowned philosopher and critical theorist Andrew Benjamin provides a framework for thinking about trauma and the city. He returns to Sigmund Freud's definition of trauma as repressed memory and to Aeschylus' formulation of the unmasterable as portrayed in mythical Athens in the Oresteia trilogy. This view of unaccustomed or unpredictable forces, such as civic strife, as ever present and integral to democracy, enables the maintenance of the urban project avoiding repression. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parallel Indexing: Infrastructure and Space

As governments around the world open the public coffers in an attempt to pull their economies back from collapse, Holger Kehne and Jeff Turko describe how they have extended the work of the Architectural Association Diploma Unit 12 to incorporate the pertinent subject of infrastructure and architecture, employing ‘indexical systems’. 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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

A Two-Speed Landscape: The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary

Tom Noonan describes how, for this award-winning project, he took up the pen and developed a hybrid drawing technique that exploited the benefits of both the analogue and the digital - characterised by the tactility of the hand and the precision of the computer. He explains that a preoccupation with representation was further ‘reflected and supported by the programme, narrative and language of the architecture’.     

Parametric Matter

The assimilation of digital techniques in production and manufacturing has enabled innovative explorations into nonstandard material organisation. Yusuke Obuchi, Theodore Spyropoulos and Tom Verebes of the Design Research Lab (DRL) at the Architectural Association (AA) describe how an interest in a textiles approach has developed out of a preoccupation with the interrelationship between material and computational design methods. They describe three projects that aspire to embed forms of material intelligence into architectural space. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Regeneration for All Generations: The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Kathryn Firth , Chief of Design at the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), and Manisha Patel , a director at PRP Architects, describe how the London 2012 bid's promise to promote wellbeing and social inclusion in the Stratford area of East London is now being borne out in urban design and housing that meet ‘the evolving needs and desires of people throughout their lifetimes’. A key scheme is PRP Architects' design for multi-generation houses at Chobham Manor, on the eastern side of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.     

同济大学建筑设计研究院近期佳作介绍

本文在同济大学建筑设计研究院45周年院庆之际,回顾了设计院的发展历程和创作主张并介绍了近期的多项佳作。     

Almost All Right: Vienna's Social Housing Provision

The aim of social housing is to manage scarcity by providing affordable accommodation for everyone. Responding to shifts in demand, it also has to adapt to ever-changing economic, political and social conditions. Here, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Michael Klein and Georg Kolmayr look at Vienna's social housing provision, which for over a century has been ‘dealing with scarcity and its ghosts in order to avoid its negative effects’.     

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.     

作为研究的设计教学及其对中国建筑教育发展的意义

设计教师的日常工作——设计教学——是不是可以被看作为一种学术研究的特殊方式?这个问题的解答取决于设计教学是不是具有发展设计观念和方法的潜能。我国建筑设计教学的发展在“布扎”之后正面临着一个教什么和怎么教的学术真空,其解决之道就在于从学术研究的角度来重新界定设计教学,把设计教学当作为设计研究的重要工具。     

Patterns in Performance-Orientated Design: An Approach towards Pattern Recognition,Generation and Instrumentalisation

The question of pattern in architecture generally divides architects into two distinct groups: those with an aesthetic interest in man-made ornament; and those who take a deeper interest in the processes that underlie the formation of pattern in the natural world. An investigation of the performative, though, enables an exploration of pattern that arises out of the interaction of man-made interventions with the natural environment. Michael Hensel , Professor for research by Design at AHO, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and Achim Menges of the Emtech (Emergent Technologies and Design programme) at the Architectural Association in London, explore this arena based on their research and educational work at the AA and other international institutions, which focuses on aspects of performance in the built environment. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The EmTech Wave Canopy 2009

Michael Weinstock describes the constraints and creativity behind the Wave Canopy, the EmTech Masters programme construction project for 2009, which was located on the upper terrace of the Architectural Association's premises in Bedford Square. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parallel Biological Futures

Neil Spiller looks beyond the digital and envisions a surreal future of ‘biological parallelism’ that pushes the boundary of architecture deep into the natural sciences, potentially creating ‘huge rafts of new architectural flora and fauna’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive Strategies for an Ecological Architecture

Simos Yannas , Director of the Environment & Energy Studies Programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, calls for a rethink of architectural processes. Presently, architecture is conceived as an inanimate material system, but to become truly bioclimatic it needs to become adaptive in tune with the behaviour and the comfort of occupiers. Shifting from an emphasis on providing fixed interior conditions, it requires a dynamic approach to building performance and the resultant interactions between occupants, buildings and engineering appliances. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.