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.     

The Poetics of the Island of Vessels

Since 2000, Neil Spiller has been engaged on a ‘long project’: a series of hundreds of drawings that through a potent mix of cyborgian fantasy and Surrealism, imbued with poetry and biotechnology, evoke a psycho-geographical island inhabited by an irascible alter ego, ‘The Professor’. Spiller seeks out in this work ‘an unusual and startling architecture’ that reveals a ‘loving, enigmatic and ragged beauty’.     

Good Natured Stuff

Neil Spiller ruminates on nature and what ‘the odd naughty leaf’ has contributed to art and architecture over the years - culminating in evolutionary design and parametrical modelling today. He flags up the work of two of the most ‘talented young bucks’ in the field - Dennis Dollens and Cloud 9. But how realistic is it for us to really expect biomimicry to influence how and what we build? Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Basking in a World of Your Own Making

As the credit crunch bites in, are pockets of young architects reviving a battle against commodified materialism? Neil Spiller describes how he has experienced this close to home with his own class of 2009 at the Bartlett which has reactivated its own brand of Surrealist cybernetic research, inspired by Dalí. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture of Disbelief: Is Architectural Speciation a Good Thing?

Can visionary architects have their cake and eat it, luxuriating in pecuniary success while also continuing to assert their avant-gardism? Neil Spiller attended a conference in Cornell that brought the role of the architectural visionary under the spotlight and gave him much food for thought. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Putting the ‘I’ back into Architecture

Neil Spiller gets personal in a bid to put the ‘I’ back into architecture. He celebrates the spatial experimentation of the work of Charlotte Erckrath. Creating a space of desire, she produces a subjective ‘synthesis of architect, body, space and view’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It's All Inside My Head

The physical manifestations of built architecture are often discussed in terms of a single architect's inspiration, overemphasising and romanticising the intellectual contribution of the signature architect. Here Neil Spiller describes the extraordinary departure that Marcos Novak is undertaking at the University of California's Santa Barbara campus, where Novak's own scanned brain becomes a literal, reflexive generating force in the formation of a spatial environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

白头到此终休戚 青史凭谁定是非——林则徐墓散记

福建省会福州市北郊的马鞍村狮石山麓有一座朴素无华的陵墓，它就是中国近代史上著名的民族英雄林则徐的安息之地。林则徐在清朝为官的三十八年中，主张兴利除弊，进行改革。他在湖广总督任上禁烟、销烟，为了维护国家利益，把个人生死置之度外，死后，当地老百姓为他在此地修坟墓、祠宇，供后人前往凭吊。     

What Are You Looking At?

There is a rebirth of interest in anamorphic perspective - that erudite artistic trick that allows one to represent different points of view in a single plane or view. Neil Spiller sees a new future for this arcane spatial practice that enables objects to dissolve their muteness. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital Solipsisim and the Paradox of the Great ‘Forgetting’

Neil Spiller counters the main theme of this issue by questioning the dominant focus on production and new technologies in architectural culture, which places a premium on the generation of ‘ever more gratuitous complex surfaces and structures’. Could this inward-looking emphasis on process and obsessive love of new technologies be at the expense of the final product? Are we in danger of producing artefacts that lose sight of human expression and poetics in the competitive drive for greater complexity? Are we, in fact, heading towards a great ‘forgetting’ in which humanity is subtracted from the architectural product?     

Radical Experimentation As Research: AVATAR

For four years, AVATAR at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London has been advancing the ‘digital and visceral terrain’. As its main exponent, Neil Spiller explains how its preoccupations fan out far beyond the merely technological, encompassing the aesthetic, philosophical and the natural, enabling it to question current stylistic tyrannies in architecture. Copyright © 2008 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.     

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.     

Fiddling While the World Burns

Neil Spiller sharpens his claws and puts some bite into his final ‘Bits' in this closing edition of AD+. He addresses the pressing question of climate change and politicians’, architects' and the construction industry's general proclivity to bury their heads in the sand or to ‘fiddle’ tangentially in another direction. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Getting Wet About Urban Design

Neil Spiller is thrilled by IwamotoScott's Hydro-Net - a futuristic design proposal for San Francisco that thinks about water in an entirely new way. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Telling Stories …

Neil Spiller celebrates ‘the messier sides to architectural discourse’, which take in myth-making, collaged semiotics and moreover the untidy art of narrative. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Jan Kaplický (1937-2009): Homage to an Extraordinary Life of Unfulfilled Dreams and Major Successes

Jan Kaplický's visionary work for Future Systems was some of the most imaginative and inspiring of the last few decades. His passion and excitement for architecture exudes through such remarkable forms as the Lord's Media Centre and Selfridges in Birmingham. It was also effectively disseminated through his publications: most notably the For Inspiration Only picture books that he produced for Wiley-Academy in the late 1990s. A staunch believer in the power of books and journals, he was a loyal supporter of AD and an editorial board member for many years; always generous with his time and willing to express his ideas candidly. Here, close friend and fellow Czech architect and writer Ivan Margolius, celebrates not only Kaplicky the architect, but also the extraordinary life and sensibility of the man behind his work. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Magical Transubstantiations: A Voyage to Italy

Visiting Italy in 1978 as part of his own Grand Tour, Lebbeus Woods was able to see some of the treasures of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The ensuing mix of reality and imagination prompted the Editors of this 2, Aleksandra Wagner and Neil Spiller , to consider the visual travelogue –Cityscapes – in a similar manner, combining speculation and truth.     

Architects as Hairdressers

Neil Spiller reactionary? Spiller finds himself recoiling into a ‘grumpy old man’ as he observes the emergence of an alarming new trend in architecture schools that prioritises style over matter. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

自出手眼 标新创异（一）——李渔造园美学思想掇要

发端于汉代的中国私家园林，在明清两代得到了极大的繁荣。我国著名的古代造园理论家——李渔，生性巧慧，又博览名园、胸有丘壑，且有亲身实践，是一个多方面的艺术家，更是一个美学家，他在丰富的艺术理论知识和实践经验的基础之上构筑起虑周而精深的美学体系。他对造园艺术的特性作了准确而深刻的把握，对造园的美学法则作了高度的概括，对加强园林审美功能的许多基本手法作了系统的研究，李渔在中国造园美学史上占有一定的地位。