Nothing More than a Fragile Edge: Blurring the Boundaries with Mario Cucinella

The main focus of Mario Cucinella's work is an overlapping preoccupation with technology and the natural environment. In his hands buildings are transformed into complex climatic machines. Anna Giorgi explains how, when combined with an instinctive sense of place, these concerns allow Cucinella's buildings to remain open objects, fragments of a greater natural or urban system. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)

A new generation of architects, urban designers and planners are rethinking the city. Bill Menking describes how the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) has orchestrated a number of art-based collaborations in the New York boroughs that enable the community to participate in the reimagining of urban space. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ville-Port,Saint-Nazaire The Historic Periphery

The harbour town of Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast of Brittany in northern France remains divided both by its memories and its built environment. Manuel de Solá-Morales describes how his Ville-Port project seeks to address the structural, visual and mnemonic divisions that have grown up over time between a working port and seaside resort. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prosthetic Mythologies

The forest wilderness of Kielder in Northumbria is one ofEngland's remotest areas. Sharing an ecology similar to much of northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, it shares none of its native culture or folklore. Only planted in the 1920s, the conifer forests are relatively recent - a graft on the natural landscape. Kate Davies and Emmanuel Vercruysse of LIQUID FACTORY describe how their site-specific performance piece sought out the psychological power of the forest, embuing it with ‘Prosthetic Mythologies’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

言不尽意的当代环境艺术美感生成

该文从环境艺术语言的内意和外意入手,提出只有通过对符号的抽象性、意义的含蓄性和作品阐释的多义性的解读,用充分的想象和思索,才能真正生成言不尽意的环境美感。     

Radical Sources of Design Engineering

The German architect and structural engineer, Werner Sobek is internationally renowned for his expertise in lightweight structures - an approach that is epitomised by the dramatic elegance of his glazed House R128. Here, Sobek explains how his practice has extended a highly specialised focus on ultra-lightweight facades to that of building structures, facade planning, and sustainable and low-energy solutions, interweaving research and innovation with design and consultancy work. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robotic Membranes: Exploring a Textile Architecture of Behaviour

The robot and the textile seem like a contradiction in terms - the robot standing for everything that is automated and mechanical, and the textile for sensual materiality. Can it be possible to reconcile the two? Here Mette Ramsgard Thomsen demonstrates through her Vivisections and Strange Metabolisms projects, exhibited at the Centre for Information, Technology and Architecture (CITA) in Copenhagen, how it is possible to unite the seeming polarities of the digital and the physical, engaging‘intangible digital data with tactile physical material’. Copyright © 2008 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.     

Shankland and Cox at Cergy-Pontoise. Passing on British town planning working practices in France

ABSTRACT

Between 1967 and 1970, Bernard Hirsch, director of the Mission (town planning commission) for Cergy-Pontoise invited the architectural practice Shankland and Cox to assist the employees at the Mission in designing the new town. During the four years of their collaboration Shankland and Cox produced several reports and assisted the French in the creation of the planning briefs for the design of the new town. The correspondence between the Mission and Michael Welbank, who worked for Shankland and Cox, regarding the design of the préfecture neighbourhood in Cergy-Pontoise, as well as the internal notes at the Mission, in addition to the written testimony of Bernard Hirsch in his famous book Oublier Cergy (Forgetting Cergy), show how the employees at the Mission integrated the British methods and concepts into their work practices. Through their collaboration with Shankland and Cox, it was the working methods of the London County Council Architect’s Department planning division which were directly passed on to those creating new towns in France.     

Urban Villages

Is the Village in the City (ViC) potentially an urban scar or a vibrant community? Meng Yan , principal of urban design think tank and architectural firm URBANUS, advocates a design approach to the urban village phenomena that recognises the vitality of the social conditions they provide and how they might, with some intervention from designers, prove a ready-made solution to China's housing problem. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New Curricula: Syntonic Systems

The ‘syntonic’ in psychology refers to an emotional responsiveness to the environment. Here Guest-Editors Christian Derix and Åsmund Izaki explain how they developed syntonic systems that place an emphasis on the representation of the occupant-user during a guest-professorship at the Technical University of Munich (2012-13). This was explored as a means of enabling students to bridge the gap between the mutually exclusive specialisation of the architect as computer programmer and architect-designer.     

Club Cinemetrics: New Post-Perspectival Design Methodologies

Cinemetrics is a post-perspectival, cinematically inspired drawing system that encourages a way of working that is multilayered and multiscalar, responding to the complexities of contemporary life and the city. Here Brian McGrath , in collaboration with Hsueh , Cheng Leun , Paul CHU Hoi Shan , José De Jesús Zamora and Victoria Marshall , demonstrates how in field work in the US, Thailand and Taiwan, Cinemetrics enabled them to adopt an interdisciplinary process addressing transdisciplinary issues. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Material Performance

A central concern of architecture as a material practice is the way in which built and natural environments interact to provide exciting and sustainable modes of habitation. Key to this is the way in which material performance is understood and instrumentalised. In the first part of this article, Michael Hensel and Defne Sunguroglu research the characteristics of wood in order to explore how a material's variable behaviour and its response to extrinsic stimuli might substantially contribute to performance-oriented design. This leads them to argue for a wider, more inclusive definition for ‘smart materials’ that puts less emphasis on the new and fully recognises the potential of variable behaviour. In the second part, Achim Menges discusses a research project that demonstrates the full impact of this approach to material performance and the integral relationship between formation and materialisation processes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evolving Patterns: Correlated Systems of Interaction

Over the last four decades, the onset of computation has enabled architects and designers to employ generative patterns in their exploration of emergent social, material and spatial systems. Theodore Spyropoulos provides an overview of the field and discusses how it has been developed by the Design Research Lab (DRL) at the Architectural Association into an ‘Adaptive Ecologies’ agenda. In the context of parametric urbanism, the DRL has explored models of living through behavioural patterns found in nature, examining the role of the singular and the collective. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

After the Event: Speculative Projects in the Aftermath

Working on speculative architectural projects in the aftermath of traumatic events requires both fearlessness and sensitivity on the part of the designer. Samantha Spurr describes how architecture studios organised by the University of Technology, Sydney, held in Shenzhen, Berlin and Beirut, have brought students into direct contact with these issues and fragile sites. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Textile Tectonics: An Interview with Lars Spueybroek

‘Architectural design is not about having ideas, but about having techniques, techniques that operate on a material level. It's about making matter think and live by itself.’ Here Lars Spuybroek of NOX talks to Maria Ludovica Tramontin about his engagement with the work of Gottfried Semper and Frei Otto and how it has led him to his own brand of textile tectonics or ‘soft constructivism’, in which textiles are transformed into the tectonic through conventional textile techniques - weaving, bundling, interlacing, braiding, knitting or knotting - effectively building structure through softness and flexibility. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban Voids: Grounds for Change Reimagining Philadelphia's Vacant Lands

Dispersal is most often regarded as an upshot of population rises as the demographic grows and spreads outwards of the city centre. Cities, though, can simultaneously experience contraction and expansion. Despite being the sixth largest city in the US, Philadelphia is a ‘shrinking city’; deindustrialistion has prompted urban abandonment at the same time as the growth of urban sprawl. Deenah Loeb, executive director of the City Parks Association of Philadelphia, describes how the URBAN VOIDS competition was launched in order to trigger public discussion and the reimagining of a greened city. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

城市楼堂式公厕设计探讨

本文针对城市公厕现状进行了一些分析，对公厕自身与其空间和环境的关系做了些探索，提出符合城市发展要求的，可以产生综合社会和经济效益的“楼堂式公厕”设计方案。     

The Dichotomies of Rationalism in 20th-Century Italian Architecture

The two key moments of Rationalism in Italy - the Gruppo 7 of the 1930s and the Tendenza of the 1960s - stand in counterpoint. The Tendenza espoused a very different ideology to its predecessor and thus remained ambivalent to the earlier legacy. Andrew Peckham reveals how this led to a history of discontinuity and, ultimately, recognition of Rationalism's limitations despite the involvement of influential figures such as Giuseppe Terragni, Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

提高手绘能力，青年建筑师责无旁贷

建筑设计与建筑画密不可分。该文作者针对建筑师如何提高手绘能力这一问题,学习前辈建筑师的经验,并结合自身实践体会加以总结,与青年建筑师共勉。