Ex Silico Ad Vivo: Computational Simulation and Urban Design at Foster + Partners

What makes a successful city? Can this be replicated simply by following tried-and-tested urban typologies? Francis Aish, Adam Davis and Martha Tsigkari of Foster + Partners' Applied Research + Development (ARD) group argue that technology allows other approaches to urban design. They explain that computational simulation is increasingly valuable in predicting how the dynamic and complex systems of a city might play out in an urban context, forging an exciting new alliance between computation and intuition.     

Structuring Materiality: Design Fabrication of Heterogeneous Materials

What happens when we invert the usual sequence of the design process - form-structure-material - so materiality becomes the generative driver? Taking nature as her model, Neri Oxman advocates a new material method, Variable Property Design (VPD), in which material assemblies are modelled, simulated and fabricated with varying properties in order to correspond with multiple and continuously shifting functional constraints. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

Optioneering: A New Basis for Engagement Between Architects and Their Collaborators

Conventionally, architects are somewhat tardy when inviting engineers to join their projects. By only introducing consulting engineers to participate in the later stages of the design process, engineers are commonly assigned a fixing role. This provides little opportunity for creative engineering solutions at the generative stage. Optioneering, a new business management model, however, offers the possibility of a new collaborative method for interaction between designers and their partners. Dominik Holzer and Steven Downing describe how a research project between the Spatial Information Research Laboratory (SIAL) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the engineering firm Arup investigated the capability of this new form of collaboration. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Standardising Heterogeneity: Public Housing and the Absent(ed) Architect

Does the decentralisation of housing provision by government necessarily lead to a less standardised and more diverse approach to design and planning? Can targeted financial programmes effectively trigger the forces of the free market to deliver more innovative and varied solutions to housing? Michael Bell , Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in New York, reviews the impact of the introduction of tax credits and other initiatives, brought in to encourage public/private partnerships and the involvement of speculative developers in the 1980s and 1990s, on the quality of public housing in the US. In doing so, he puts out a call to architects to acquaint and engage themselves with the complexities of the financial markets.     

Complex Systems Architecture

Neil Spiller reveals the complexity of architectural systems to us, or is it the complexity of the architectural mind? For Spiller, the potential of a single notation as a seed for a truly ecological architecture provides an essential catalyst, triggering a multifaceted musing that takes in diagrams, Paul Preissner's new competition entry for the Taiwan Centre of Disease Control and his future work with Dr Rachel Armstrong on complex biological systems. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Strength in Numbers

David Salomon examines the history of the original World Trade Center (WTC) competition of 1962 and the more recent 2003 competition, finding interesting parallels in terms of how commercial and bureaucratic, as well as progressive, forces of innovation intersect over larger debates about control, power and questions of collaborative identity and practice within the city as a political machine, and which figure 9/11 in implicitly provocative ways. The 1962 competition featured another progressive architectural collaboration: Walter Gropius's The Architect's Collaborative (TAC). Not unlike the 2003 competition in which United Architects (UA) and other collaborative practices lost to the more stable, individual celebrity identity, TAC lost to Minoru Yamasaki. Salomon also argues that the organisational and structural qualities of UA's WTC proposal sought to embed collective operations of multiplicity rather than mere duplication of the previous WTC Twin Towers within the form of the design itself. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bugs,Bats and Animal Estates: The Architectural Territories of ‘Wild Beasts’

For architecture, animals and insects have conventionally represented the threat of infestation - a parasitic and insanitary uninvited presence. Could the animal world, however, offer previously untapped opportunities for design innovation? At a time when the relationship between architecture and nature is coming under question, Ben Campkin takes the opportunity to bring attention to the wider social and geographical processes lying beneath the occupation of the man-made environment by insect and animal life. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performing Elegance

At the level of global culture, the impact of elegant buildings is magnified where there is a seamless integration of complex parts and fabrication expressed through a mastery of techniques and transformative set of features. Hani Rashid of Asymptote explains how, in working at an international scale, the practice is now seeking to propagate innovative design through a ‘developed understanding of the multiple levels of local responses that affect both local and global conditions’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Future is Unwritten: Global Culture,Identity and Economy

Is architecture no more than a mere handmaid to global capitalism and the international property market? Murray Fraser , Professor of Architecture and Global Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, asserts that the true picture is both much more complex and less homogeneous than it might appear. While acknowledging that economic conditions are significant drivers in architecture, he argues that it is still possible for designers to respond creatively with suppleness and foresight in their exploration of paths for a better future.     

The $300,000/Year Architect

Could building information modelling (BIM) shake up not only design and delivery processes, but also be set to redefine the construction hierarchy? Could it shift the architect's position from near the bottom of the current food chain to one nearer the top? Urs Gauchat , Professor and Dean of the School of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, outlines the architect's place in a complex future where there is an increasing demand for buildings but a demise in available materials and conventional energy sources. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Architectural Chemistry

Protocell technology has a precedent in the innovative use of plastic in the 1960s, when chemistry first came up with an innovative new material that could be applied to architecture, interiors and product design. Omar Khan describes how at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the University at Buffalo in New York, he is developing a line of research that builds on the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s for soft materials and the capabilities of an elastic responsive architecture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architects as Hairdressers

Neil Spiller reactionary? Spiller finds himself recoiling into a ‘grumpy old man’ as he observes the emergence of an alarming new trend in architecture schools that prioritises style over matter. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shape and the City

At a time when architecture's historical relationship to the city -founded on various formal and, more recently, informal homologies – has been rendered inoperative, how might a renewed architecture constructively inform the megalopolis? RE Somol flings all the formal and informal protocols offered to the city by architecture out of the pram and calls for a politics of shape, a potential trajectory tested with two projects by Zago Architecture.     

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 India Project

While pockets of India are now approaching the living standards of Switzerland, other regions are debilitated by a level of poverty that is akin to that of Zimbabwe. Sunil Khilnani asks what remains of the universalist project of India's political founders. Has architecture, in the rush for market and economic success, lost its self-understanding? Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Informalising Architecture: The Challenge of Informal Settlements

Transgression is often driven by the power to exercise choice and consciously cross the line. As Kim Dovey , Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne, explains, informal settlements, which have grown up globally out of immediate need for shelter and community, and are legally precarious, transgress established codes of ‘land tenure, urban planning, design and construction’. Their condition requires transgression, even if they are subversion through necessity rather than by design. So what is architecture's future role in informal settlements? And what can be learnt from this more ad hoc and incremental model of urban design?     

The City Beyond Analogy

Is the city really all that complex? Can urban social behaviour be explained in the evolutionary drama of cross-species competition? Is urban self-organisation in fact the urban norm? Is the emphasis on systems that the ‘system city’ tag conjures up unduly restrictive? Colin Fournier , Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), prods and probes the precepts behind the System City issue, while being simultaneously fascinated and enthralled by it.