Radical Italian Architecture Yesterday and Today

In Italy there is a revival of the spirit of 1960s Radicalism. Fresh from university, young architects ‘pick up a rock band name, enrol in an architectural competition or just invent their own research and project installations’. William Menking, who co-curated the 2003 exhibition at London's Design Museum on Superstudio - the supergroup of Italian radicali - and Olympia Kazi bring the new generation of young protagonists under scrutiny. Copyright © 2007 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.     

Protocells: The Universal Solvent

Protocell architecture inverts the current economic and procurement processes of construction with their emphasis on cost, speed and quantifiable outcomes. Wet, semi-living and symbiotic with ecological systems and materials, protocell systems promise a pargadigm that is the very antithesis of existing practice and will require the employment of very different skills sets and approaches. To ease the intellectual transition from hard engineering to chemical solutions, Neil Spiller investigates the enduring notion of alchemy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture

Interactive design has come about as a result of the intermingling of disciplines. As a consequence, the language it uses has become blurred - borrowed or stolen with little restraint from elsewhere. Though particular terms have become ubiquitous, the original concepts that lie behind them have been lost. This means that all too frequently they are no longer knowingly used. Usman Haque sorts the wheat from the chaff and brings clarity to bear on the vocabulary and thinking behind interactivity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Textiles in Architecture

‘The cutting edge in architecture is not sharp, but sensuous and soft.’ As textiles begin to emerge as megamaterials, Bradley Quinn explains how architects are pioneering new possibilities for soft structures. Fabric-formed environments are fashioning tensile buildings and inflatable pavilions, while the tailoring techniques of braiding, weaving and pleating are building supple skyscrapers and bioclimatic enclosures. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture and Dispersal

To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with Stan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocative questions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the public sphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects and urban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have been quick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change? Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computational Spring Systems: Open Design Processes for Complex Structural Systems

Sean Ahlquist and Moritz Fleischmann are both former graduates of the Emergent Technologies and Design Programme at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, who have now established their own innovative research and design practice, morse. Here they describe their work with computational spring algorithms that has enabled iterative investigations of tension active systems and structures. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Surrealistic Exuberance – Dark Matters

For Neil Spiller, there is a current vacuum in much of contemporary parametric design. It is devoid of embodied cultural experience and character. Much can be learnt by rediscovering the dark matter of Baroque and Surrealistic art and architecture, which through repressed eroticism optimised on the simultaneous presence of the secular and the profane - the heaving physicality of the everyday world and the repressed strictures of the Catholic church. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Diving into the Depth-Scape: Exuberance and Personalities

Exuberance is about more than appearance. Yael Reisner argues that it engenders an emotional response. It provides a whole ‘depth-scape’ of expression by offering extensive qualities that go beyond the merely practical or the required. Exuberance proffers a full emotional range from the horrific to the sublime, which requires complexity but also the presence of creative personalities who lend personal interpretation to the design process. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Relational Interactive Architecture

In her concluding ‘Userscape’, Valentina Croci assesses the state of interactive design as it becomes an increasingly mature practice, with over 10 years of activity behind it. Looking at works by some of the most significant designers internationally, she emphasises how this new field of spatial design has enabled new sensory investigation and innovative explorations into the relations between people. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why We Need Architecture of Tolerance

Professor and Chair in Integrated Design at the University of Calgary Faculty of Environmental Design, Branko Kolarevic has established an international reputation as an author and commentator on digital design and manufacturing in architecture. Here he questions the importance of high-definition tolerance in construction itself. As an industry that operates at far greater sizes and scales than other manufacturing bases, has the ‘messy world of building’ not always had to allow for a reasonable tolerance of errors? Should high-definition processes, which negate or negotiate zero tolerance, really be for architects and construction professionals the Holy Grail that they first appear?     

Tracing Change: Patterns in Landscape Architecture

For Simon Swaffield , landscape design can be regarded as the product of distinctive patterns formed through the intersection of site, technology and idealised nature. Across time and cultures, the interpretation of nature has shifted endlessly, and with it the manner in which the natural world is conceived, transformed and represented. Given its history, what might also be the future patterns of landscape design?. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross the River by Touching the Stones: Chinese Architecture and Political Economy in the Reform Era: 1978-2008

China's Open Door Policy and economic development set in motion in 1978 can be regarded as the triumph of pragmatism over theory - specifically Chairman Mao's brand of Marxist theory. Tao Zhu traces the progress of reform over the last 30 years, and its impact on Chinese architectural culture. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detailing the Walled Garden for Lebbeus

Neil Spiller , the Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London, has an unrivalled international reputation for the virtuosity of his visionary graphic work. Here, in a highly personal and poetic eulogy to Lebbeus Woods, Spiller pays tribute to his master through the lens of his own work, where detail becomes an important element in an imagined, augmented world in which the concrete or the specific lends credence to the fictional.     

The Urban Complex: Scalar Probabilities and Urban Computation

Guest-editor Anthony Burke redefines complexity in relation to the city as ‘a dynamic and luminal organisational condition “growing at the edge of chaos”’ and in so doing shifts our understanding of urban trauma as an event intrinsic to the contribution of the metropolis rather than external to it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychology and Perception of Patterns in Architecture

Pattern perception is often regarded as highly subjective, dependent on individual taste and preference. Neurologically, however, it has been proven that distinct areas of the brain are stimulated differently by different pattern design and colour combinations. Here Patricia A Rodemann probes into the very real physical and psychological consequences of product design finishes and surface patterning. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Arguing for Elegance

Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects describes how elegance in architecture thrives on and articulates complexity. For elegance to be fully expressed in any work, it must be mastered and refined throughout the building and construction process. This entails the refinement of spatial and structural organisation and the integration of all building systems that are systemic, inflecting and adapt to each other, providing an overall intelligence of assembly. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture as Initiative (A Manifesto)

Estonian architect Veronika Valk of Zizi&Yoyo provides a manifesto for contemporary practice, based on ‘architecture as initiative’; initiative being defined as the basic catalyst for change in a project, whether it is a small-scale art installation or an urban development. As self-contained ideas factories, initiatives generate ‘open and affirmative ways to approach innovation in architecture’.