Digital Cities

Code, it would seem, is everywhere. We are beginning to understand that much of our natural environment is based on rule-based behaviours, from the emergent swarm intelligence of flocks of birds and schools of fish, to the complex patterns of snowflakes, ferns, seashells and zebra skins. And nothing escapes. Not even the human body. The human genome is being mapped out and sequenced by scientists to provide a genetic blueprint of human life itself. In this context, it is hardly surprising that architects are now beginning to explore similar principles in the design studio. 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.     

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.     

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.     

Experiments in Associative Urbanism

‘There has never been a more crucial time to challenge, reassess and propose alternatives to conventional urban masterplanning and its associated conventions, types and standards.’ Tom Verebes describes how the Design Research Laboratory (DRL) at the Architectural Association in London has employed a parametric approach to urbanism that investigates how associative design systems can control local dynamic information flows through interactive systems, spaces and interfaces. Copyright © 2009 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.     

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.     

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.     

Parametric Patterns

For Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, articulation is the central core competency of architecture; and designed patterns provide one of the most potent devices for architectural articulation. Schumacher ushers in a new era of parametric architecture in which pattern becomes an innovative and powerful register of articulation, providing amplification of surface difference and correlation, ultimately resulting in dynamic, high-performance ornamentation.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Algorithmic Tectonics: How Cold War Era Research Shaped Our Imagination of Design

Between 1959 and 1967, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted the pioneering Computer-Aided Design Project, funded by the US Air Force. Engineers, researchers and students were brought together to re-imagine ‘design in the language of the machine’, and one of the most renowned students on this programme was Ivan Sutherland, the inventor and programmer of Sketchpad - the first interactive graphics system. Here, Daniel Cardoso Llach , an architect and researcher based at MIT, traces the influence of this Cold War project on the culture of building design and production today.     

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。     

Invisible Agency

Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider call for a redefinition of the architect away from the professional who is ostensibly involved in adding ‘more stuff to the world’. Looking beyond the business of matter or managing the impact of that matter on the environment, they explore ways that designers can use their intelligence and creativity to shift existing habits of consumption and patterns of behaviour. They highlight the work for four practices who are already operating in this field: 2012Architecten, 00/:, Arif Hasan and Morar de Outras Maneiras (MOM).     

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.     

Works In/On//Around///Behind Progress

Artist Hilary Powell describes how her work in film, food and the pop-up book offers playful critiques of regeneration and place making. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Let's Rock over Barock

Since the 17th century, Austria has been a stronghold of the Baroque. Here Wolf D Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au recognises the deep pull of this cultural tradition in contemporary Austrian architecture, as it continues to endow its designers with an aptitude for spatial sequence and a tendency to prefer to design complex spaces over simplified boxes. Copyright © 2010 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.