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.     

The Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has increasingly become ‘the new frontier for exploitation’ and why there is currently ‘a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the fields of the life sciences’ in which life itself becomes a raw material.     

The Instinctive Sense of Space and Boundary

Petra Blaisse of Inside Outside describes how the studio focuses on the boundary of interior and exterior space, adding and subtracting highly tactile and sensuous layers. She highlights the significance of the invisible to her work - whether light, scent or texture - and how the future of design will be opening the way to ‘the sheer biology of things’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hertzian Space: Material Response to Spatial Presence

Mark Taylor describes how an interest in the possibilities of generating spaces that fully respond to people's presence and their activities led him and Mark Burry to undertake a project with students at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand, that spatialises the dynamics of a full body massage. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

One Space,Many Worlds

‘Cities hold two-thirds of their residents in slums, and the rest in stiflingly limiting, inflexible structures.’ Thus the impoverished parochial Mumbai is one and the same metropolis as the cosmopolitan globalised ‘Bombay’. Ramesh Biswas examines how the speculative housing developments of the aspirational middle classes are creating townships that intensify sprawl and further decentralise cities, squandering the potential for upgrading public space and creating an architecture for the common good. Copyright © 2007 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.     

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.     

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.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

以景观为框架的组团空间——健康生活视野下的城镇空间拓展模式探讨

针对目前我国城乡一体化过程中城镇空间发展出现的问题,借鉴国外城镇空间拓展的经验,结合案例,提出了因地制宜的组团式拓展空间的结构模式,通过以景观框架来建构组团空间结构,城与绿的编织,此与彼的切换,并融入原有城市的特色空间肌理,塑造有机、灵活、多样的城郊结合部的空间形象与生态肌理,为积极健康的聚居生活提供舒适的物质环境。     

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.     

Urban [IM]plants Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonheiden,Belgium

Bonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its exceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remained protected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environment has been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creating public spaces that use the town's ‘original landscape as the base material’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The World's Biggest Sculptor: The Architecture of Massimiliano Fuksas

At the start of the new millennium, Massimiliano Fuksas was one of the most significant Italian architects working outside his home country. His reputation in Italy and abroad, however, was taken to a further level by his completion of the New Milan Trade Fair. Stefano Casciani, an ex-student of Fuksas, provides an insightful and intriguing account of his ‘old’ professor: a robust and seemingly contradictory figure who is capable of great voluminous expression and delicacy. Casciani also finds constancy in his unrelenting energy, freshness and wit. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun , Editor-in-Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. 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.     

On the Threshold of Rationalism

No longer a leading architectural trend, Rationalism has fallen out of fashion. At best ‘marginalised’, even its tenets appear questionable. Guest-editors Andrew Peckham, Charles Rattray and Torsten Schmiedeknecht describe what motivated them to uncover and reassess the Rationalist sensibility among current European practices. Copyright © 2007 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.     

A History of Territories,Movements and Borders: Politics of Inhabitation

If the city is as much about culture as nature, then a cultural understanding of the shaping of the urban is as essential as a scientific one. Here, architect and critic Marina Lathouri , who directs the graduate programme in History and Critical Thinking at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, describes how the concept of planning in the 19th century became intrinsically linked to notions of territory, borders and spatial organisation. She questions whether this might now be tested, and new design technologies used, to expose underlying emerging patterns of disruptive flows beckoning the possibility of the logic of a new social disposition.