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.     

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.     

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.     

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 Ecological Facades of Patrick Blanc

The urban geographer Matthew Gandy explores the work of French botanist Patrick Blanc, who applies his scientific knowledge and preoccupations to urban design. After his invention of the mur végetal (green wall), a botanical and structural system for greening buildings, in 1988, Blanc's work has gone on to transcend the creation of merely living walls. Through his landscape schemes Blanc has recognised the city's rich potential for verdant metamorphosis, transforming fern- and moss-covered streets and buildings into unlikely ravines or rainforests. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Between Pragmatism and Theory

For the last three decades, Italian architecture has been characterised by an extreme polarisation. At one end of the spectrum have been the neo-conservators, who are subsumed by Italy's history, and at the other end the avant-garde for whom innovation is the Holy Grail and the present is a clean slate. Francesco Proto outlines the current potential for steering a middle course that will afford a greater eclecticism, enabling a natural balance between pragmatism and theory. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It's in Your Nature: I'm Lost in Paris

R&Sie(n)'s installation I'm Lost in Paris (2008), a disturbing take on the ecological house, epitomises the preoccupation of the French architect François Roche with the contradictions of modern nature. Javier Arbona tracks how Roche's notion of nature as ‘a partly human artifice’ which is both alien and personalised play out in his various projects, capitulating between attempts at overcoming alienation and heightening it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Confronting the Contemporary: Stefano Boeri

Diego Caramma describes Stefano Boeri's pervasive influence on architectural thought in recent years as editor of Domus, exhibition curator and founder of the Multiplicity urban research platform. As he explains, Boeri's significance lies in his ability to confront contemporary conditions for architecture rather than just the dissemination of current trends and ideas. 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.     

A Two-Speed Landscape: The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary

Tom Noonan describes how, for this award-winning project, he took up the pen and developed a hybrid drawing technique that exploited the benefits of both the analogue and the digital - characterised by the tactility of the hand and the precision of the computer. He explains that a preoccupation with representation was further ‘reflected and supported by the programme, narrative and language of the architecture’.     

Illuminating Embodiment: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Relational Architectures

Art and architecture have a strong tradition of humanism in which man and the human body are the centre and measure of all things. Maria Fernández describes the work of artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer whose work transgresses and challenges these preconceptions through performance, seeking to expose the body and society's receptivity to instability, fluctuation and re-imagining. Copyright © 2007 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.     

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.     

Recent History - Art In Ruins

Some two decades on, guest-editor Nic Clear returns to the work of Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks of collaborative art practice Art in Ruins. As cited by Brian Hatton on their behalf in 1989: ‘in the city of the future everything will be historical (ie visited) for fifteen minutes’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forensic Architecture

The urban destruction captured by black and white photos of London after the Blitz or bomb-damaged Berlin are emblematic of the desolation brought by modern warfare. Eyal Weizman , Paulo Tavares , Susan Schuppli and Situ Studio describe, though, how the built environment now represents more than a means of violation in conflict, as it has become an important source of evidence bearing witness to the event when international justice is sought. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.