Designing for a Lifetime in New York and Other US Cities

In the next 30 years, the number of senior citizens in the US will increase to become larger than any other single age group. How are cities starting to prepare for this huge expansion in the numbers of over-65s? Jerry Maltz and Christine Hunter of the Design for Aging Committee of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIANY), aided by Eric Cohen and Susan Wright , describe how New York and other US cities are laying the necessary groundwork through the World Health Organization's Age-Friendly Cities programme, while also setting up innovative centres for senior citizens, making much-needed modifications to the physical environment and developing new approaches to affordable housing.     

Ageing in Suburbia: Designing for Demographic Change in Australia and New Zealand

In the next half-century, Australia's population of people aged over 65 is set to almost double. As a consequence, there is an urgent need in both Australia and New Zealand, where older people value their independence, for housing that fully supports them in their own suburban homes. With only a handful of models in place, Mark Taylor , Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Laurie Buys , a Professor in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, have tracked down some promising precedents for suburban living in adapted homes and within community-based shared housing.     

Transcending Type: Designing for Urban Complexity

David Grahame Shane , the author of a major new study Urban Design Since 1945: A Global Perspective, looks at type with the benefit of historical hindsight. Warning against its potential inflexibility and its use over the centuries as a reductive instrument in city creation, he is insistent that type should only be applied if deformed to respond to the informal patchwork of hybrid urban conditions.     

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.     

Multivalent Performance in the Work of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis

Four recent built works by Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki and David J Lewis of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL Architects) document a practice of reconceptualising interior space as a site of innovative material surfaces assembled from the repetition of readily available elements. The goal in this work is to intensify and expand the impact of a reduced set of operations, asking less to be more, through the interweaving of functional engagements and material conditions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Weisz + Yoes (WXY architecture + urban design)

Few small avant-garde practices have an impact on visitors to New York like that of WXY, as the firm is sometimes called. Theirs is particularly surprising since, as Jayne Merkel notes, they have only completed a handful of freestanding buildings. But this mid-career husband-and-wife team of Claire Weisz and Mark Yoes - and their new partner, Layng Pew, whom they met at Yale 20 years ago - are changing the face of Times Square and redesigning historic Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan where ferries leave for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. These heavily used public places are only the most recent ones that they have inventively improved over the last decade and a half. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interiorities

Ali Rahim emphasises the importance for design of overlaying a mastery of digital techniques with a nuanced and developed aesthetic sensibility. Here he illustrates his fascination with the formal with his exploration of ‘interiorities’, or internal logics of tectonic structures, in his design research at the University of Pennsylvania. The strive to create variation and atmosphere in buildings effectively places a stress on different part-to-whole relationships, organisations, material qualities and colours and their various rates of transformation. 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.     

Cities and Grids: In Search of New Paradigms

The wider global influences of expanded populations, new technologies and economies in both Europe and the Far East are having a direct impact on the pattern and planning of urban form. Joan Busquets , the principal of B Arquitectura I Urbanisme (BAU) in Barcelona, and Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), describes how the urban grid is continuing to evolve with these changes, becoming ‘a matrix for innovation within urban development, allowing the creation of sustainable and compact cities’, enabling the forming of ‘new networks and innovative city systems’.     

‘New Aging’: Designing Architecture for All Ages

The US is on the brink of demographic transformation, with the bulging generation of baby boomers about to reach retirement. In 2008, New York-based architects Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) anticipated this shift by instigating a ‘New Aging’ initiative that set out to explore imaginative solutions in architecture and urbanism to age-related challenges. Here Matthias Hollwich with Matthew Hoffman of HWKN explain why attitudes and approaches to ageing have to change; and why old age needs to be ‘acknowledged as a state of human existence’ that fully ‘deserves preparation, anticipation and excitement’.     

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'.     

Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism

Does ecological design create a holistic shift in thinking? Jon Goodbun suggests it does. He takes the lead from systems theorist Gregory Bateson, who argued that an ‘ecological aesthetic’ was required to understand how complex systems like cities behave. Goodbun explains how, with this new approach, it is flexibility rather than efficiency that becomes a priority.     

Strength in Numbers

David Salomon examines the history of the original World Trade Center (WTC) competition of 1962 and the more recent 2003 competition, finding interesting parallels in terms of how commercial and bureaucratic, as well as progressive, forces of innovation intersect over larger debates about control, power and questions of collaborative identity and practice within the city as a political machine, and which figure 9/11 in implicitly provocative ways. The 1962 competition featured another progressive architectural collaboration: Walter Gropius's The Architect's Collaborative (TAC). Not unlike the 2003 competition in which United Architects (UA) and other collaborative practices lost to the more stable, individual celebrity identity, TAC lost to Minoru Yamasaki. Salomon also argues that the organisational and structural qualities of UA's WTC proposal sought to embed collective operations of multiplicity rather than mere duplication of the previous WTC Twin Towers within the form of the design itself. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Peak Oil and Transition Towns

If economic growth is only possible with the availability of cheap energy, what happens as production of oil peaks, and petroleum extraction declines? Rob Hopkins , an activist behind the Transition movement, argues for a new bottom-up approach to economic development that is also more localised and nourishing. Shifting the emphasis from sustainability towards resilience, he seeks a rethinking of the way local communities feed, house and power themselves.     

Urban American Landscape

Landscape architecture has emerged from the deep sleep it entered during the Modernist period and remained in for most of the 20th century. Now, valued because of the environmental movement, stimulated by collaborations with architects and artists, and presented with opportunities to transform abandoned industrial sites, landscape architects are enthusiastically producing new kinds of parks on brownfields, along waterfronts, even on rooftops and in garbage dumps. Jayne Merkel here looks at ways the designed landscape is creating outdoor public space in a country where it has not always been valued. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.