Otherwise Engaged: New Projects in Interactive Design

What are the possibilities of interactive technologies delivering a new level of social engagement in architecture? Taking 2002, with the ETH Ada project and Diller & Scofidio's Braincoat project, as an important watershed, Mark Garcia reviews the advances that have been made per se, and with four projects in particular, in socially interactive spatial design. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Boston Institute of Contemporary Art

Perched on the edge of a wharf overlooking downtown Boston, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's new Institute of Contemporary Art takes advantage of its strange dramatic site, providing useful, unusually provocative spaces for the various arts it was built to house. While it is not surprising that Diller and Scofidio, who are artists themselves, were able to accommodate the complex programme imaginatively, their new firm's handling of the site in their first freestanding American building is impressive indeed. Jayne Merkel explains how the interiors are individualised and energised by the embrace of the harbour in a scheme that minimises the location's drawbacks and turns a visit into an art experience in its own right. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Alice Tully Hall,New York

This sensuous redesign of a 40-year-old concert hall at the Julliard School is the first major project completed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in their planned remodelling of the entire Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. Jayne Merkel believes this lively, elegant, personal and welcoming building bodes well for the dozen other public places and performance spaces that the architects will be renovating there over the next few years. It also suggests that the most respectful way to treat historic structures may be to meet them head-on. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Initiating Change: Architecturing the Body-Environment with Arakawa and Gins

New York-based artists Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010) and Madeline Gins (1941–) used architecture in their work in an approach that they have referred to as ‘architecting’. Jondi Keane explains how as artists-turned-architects, Arakawa and Gins have not been particularly interested in innovating architecture, but in approaching architecture as a way to innovate, or change the world'.     

对传统建筑空间中模糊空间的初探

通过分析传统建筑中的模糊空间,探求了模糊空间在中国传统建筑中的模式和相应的处理手法,希望有助于吸取传统建筑文化营养,启发设计思路,创作出具有时代性和民族特色的建筑。     

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.     

Bugs,Bats and Animal Estates: The Architectural Territories of ‘Wild Beasts’

For architecture, animals and insects have conventionally represented the threat of infestation - a parasitic and insanitary uninvited presence. Could the animal world, however, offer previously untapped opportunities for design innovation? At a time when the relationship between architecture and nature is coming under question, Ben Campkin takes the opportunity to bring attention to the wider social and geographical processes lying beneath the occupation of the man-made environment by insect and animal life. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

定位、移位和再定位——迪勒＋斯科菲迪奥的针对具体场地/视点的三件作品

迪勒＋斯科菲迪奥的许多建筑方案很难说是建筑,没有明确的使用功能,没有内外的围合,常常源于建筑师自己界定或假想的命题：具体的场地激发了简单的观念,这个观念虽然是独立于功能以外的东西,是建筑师个人感性的出发点。但他们运用建筑师的思维、手段或方式再把观念表达出来,最后的形式本身就是观念直接呈现的产物。这种建筑创作和实践方式的典型例子便是1991年未完成的“缓慢的房子”和2002年在瑞士博览会上的“朦胧”临时展示建筑;然而当一个观念不能再独立存在的时候,当建筑的实用性和社会性进入的时候,观念建筑师又如何面对和适应这种转变？波士顿当代艺术馆作为迪勒＋斯科菲迪奥在美国本土的第一座公共建筑效果又如何？文章主要通过剖析迪勒＋斯科菲迪奥的三座“建筑”来探讨观念、观念的妥协和它的表达方式之间的问题。     

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.     

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.     

传统山地建筑视觉造型分析

传统山地建筑是人们在长期实践经验的积累下发展起来的一类建筑形式。这类建筑巧妙地利用山地地形来建造,在视觉造型艺术上有着独特的风格和魅力。本文分析了传统山地建筑视觉造型特征,希望对山地建筑创作有所启发。     

Appropriating,Reclaiming and Inventing Identity Through Architecture

Local received knowledge once ensured buildings had a strong connection with their environment and the surrounding community. With rapid urbanisation and the professionalisation of design and construction, architects working internationally with a finely attuned sensibility to place and context have been able to take up the baton and take the opportunity to develop notions of locality and identity. For the last two decades, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture has been recognising the contribution of design teams that have been responsible for producing exceptional architecture for Islamic communities worldwide. Here, the award scheme's director, Farrokh Derakshani , defines some key treatments of identity in architecture.     

‘Never Mind All That Environmental Rubbish,Get On With Your Architecture’

Could the primacy of green architecture in recent years be eroding the discipline? Is it reducing architecture to a mere ‘environmental techno-science’? Penelope Dean argues for a revised environmental agenda that is driven by ideas and concepts rather than subservient technologies. Copyright © 2009 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.     

‘To Go Beyond or Not to Be’ Unsolicited Architecture: An Interview with Ole Bourman

The complex dynamics of today's architecture require a deep intellectual freedom. This is something that Dutch architectural critic Ole Bouman espouses through his provocative writings and lectures and his advocacy of ‘unsolicited architecture’. Luca Guido invited Bouman to reflect on what it means to be an architect today and how it might be possible to pursue critical practice beyond the conventional construction processes. Copyright © 2009 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.     

Galapagos: On the Logic and Limitations of Generic Solvers

A graduate in architecture and urbanism from TU Delft, David Rutten works with software company Robert McNeel & Associates (RMN). The developer of Grasshopper®, he was recently awarded the ACADIA 2012 award for innovative research. The Galapagos plug-in, which Rutten has developed for Grasshopper®, implements two generic solvers (one using a genetic algorithm and one using a simulated annealing algorithm). A generic solver will find a solution to a problem that can be expressed in a mathematical way; however, as he explains here, while these solutions may not be exact, they will be very good.     

Mapping the Invisible Landscape: An Exercise in Spatially Choreographed Sound

Paul Bavister of Audialsense describes how a series of auditory research installations in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern presented the opportunity to play with the relationship between sound and the built, inverting the usual relationship in which architecture accommodates the acoustic. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy Forms

What impact does an energy-driven architecture have on form? Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda of AMID (Cero9) outline their formulation of a new system for architecture that is founded on a spatial understanding of thermodynamic exchange and environmental systems and effects. Copyright © 2009 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.