江门市蓬江河沿岸人居环境改造工程

本文从人居环境的概念入手，分析人居环境建设的发展历程及发展趋势，研究人居环境建设与城市规划的关系，并着重从城市、社区和居住层面，探讨如何以人居环境理念指导城市规划，促进城市人居环境的可持续发展。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Eat Me… Drink Me…

Sean Lally of WEATHERS lets out a rallying cry to all architects. He calls on them to make environmental conditions the subject of design rather than regarding them as a standardised part of a building's services. Here he highlights the potential of material systems, which are usually applied to conditioning the interiors of buildings, in the generation of new forms and activities; whether it is in the honing of the performance aspect of a building's function, as in the Water Cube at Beijing (2008), or in the seasonal planning that underpins the concept behind WEATHERS' Wanderings project (2008-9). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Indigenous Home Ownership and Community Title Land: A Preliminary Household Survey

Home ownership is currently not an option for Indigenous people living outside of urban centres. This article presents the results of a household survey conducted in four community settlements in Queensland revealing diverse understandings, aspirations and concerns for Indigenous home ownership. Discussion concludes that the development of a home ownership scheme will require rigorous policy analysis and innovative economic and cultural solutions.     

Natural Methods of Interaction Or Natural Interaction in the Everyday Digital World

Computers, mobiles and automatised machines are so omnipresent that the means by which we interact with digital devices is now generally regarded as a given. Italian practice iO Agency, though, questions our use of mechanised interfaces and the language that they require us to learn. Valentina Croci explains how iO Agency has developed more natural ways for people to interact with digital environments through physical or tactile ‘triggers’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Indigenous Home Ownership and Community Title Land: A Preliminary Household Survey

Home ownership is currently not an option for Indigenous people living outside of urban centres. This article presents the results of a household survey conducted in four community settlements in Queensland revealing diverse understandings, aspirations and concerns for Indigenous home ownership. Discussion concludes that the development of a home ownership scheme will require rigorous policy analysis and innovative economic and cultural solutions.     

Urban Wash

Sean Lally of WEATHERS urges designers to realise the performative capabilities of the ambient effects of the urban wash – the artificial light given off by cities at night. Taking up this principle of a wash within his designs for the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, he demonstrates how a ‘climatic wash’ could create an artificial microclimate that extends the seasonal activities of the museum's programmes.     

Seoul's Interior Landscapes

The shop floor of the department store has increasingly become a cluttered no-man's-land, no more than a space between competing branded concessions. Howard Watson describes how at Lotte, a department store in Seoul, South Korea, Universal Design Studio has applied its subtle decorative design style – first launched internationally in the Stella McCartney stores – to unifying effect. 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 Sustainable Disco

Valentina Croci describes how Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde's Sustainable Dance Floor (SDF) provides the centrepiece for an eco-club in Rotterdam that builds low energy consumption into the attraction. The square dance floor uses ‘mechatronic’ sensors to convert kinetic movement into electricity when people dance. Movement is not only part of the thrill, but is literally electrifying. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hello Stranger: Phenomenology and Topography of the Megacity

Caroline Bos of UNStudio counters the city theme of this issue of Architectural Design with the spectre of the megacity. The very recent emergence and scale of the Asian megacity, she argues, requires a very different architectural treatment to the European or North American metropolis. It is one that should be understood through an experiential approach that brings to the fore spatial and visual relations between people, and people and things, asking, for instance, how so many strangers can be so visibly at home in public urban space.     

Local Code: Real Estates

With the employment of a geographical information system (GIS), the city can be revealed and analysed with an alacrity that was never previously imagined possible: vacant sites and spaces between buildings can immediately be located. Nicholas de Monchaux describes his project Local Code: Real Estates, based in San Francisco, which has highlighted the potential and scale of residual spaces situated around highways and industry as a new collective resource for community design. 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 ‘People’s City’

The mid-20th-century communist ideal was for cities that were ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Wang Jun , an editor at Outlook Weekly magazine and author of a best-selling book on the planning of Beijing, describes how the ambition to accommodate public life in urban space is a relatively modern phenomenon that goes against the grain of a long tradition of landownership in China. Given this background, can the original notion of the ‘People's City’ ultimately survive the current wave of property privatisation? Copyright © 2008 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?     

Bricked House: How Code and Law Can Lock You Out

Could we be unwittingly divesting too much control in technology? In so doing, could we be sleepwalking into a future in which our personal assets are no longer ours, but all too easily relinquished by the bank or mortgage company? Molly Wright Steenson , an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks so. She evokes an arresting vision of a close future in which our smartphones and the operating systems integrated within our cars and homes become our friend-enemy, immediately locking us out when they are no longer programmed to respond directly to our touch.     

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.