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’.     

Soil and Protoplasm: The Hylozoic Ground Project

Housed in the Canadian Pavilion in the Giardini in Venice during the 2010 Architecture Biennale, the Hylozoic Ground project provided visitors with the unique experience of interacting with a responsive and ‘live’ textile matrix. Philip Beesley and Rachel Armstrong describe the extraordinary ‘soil-less’ environment that they collaborated on and how it provides a new model for a synthetic but evolutionary ecology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Land of Scattered Seeds

Architect John Puttick is now responsible for leading Make Architects' work in China. His diploma project for the Bartlett School of Architecture, Land of Scattered Seeds (2001), featured here and on the cover, has now taken on seminal status. Produced in book form, a copy was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.     

An Interview with Giorgio Grassi

In January 2007, Lucia Tozzi visited Giorgio Grassi's office in Milan. Their conversation touched on Grassi's recent work on Leon Battista Alberti, which is examined here in the context of Grassi's obliquely expressed views on contemporary architecture and the cult of personality. As perhaps the most intellectually rigorous and formally consistent Rationalist architect of his generation, Grassi's work and thinking retain a hermetic aspect, but one notable for its philosophical self-questioning and underlying political commitment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Sonic Spectacle of the Enhanced Body

Florida design practice MONAD Studio's focus is rhythmic affect at all scales. Having already experimented with 3D-printed musical instruments, they embarked upon SONIFICA: a collaboration with interaction designer Anouk Wipprecht and the world's first ‘bionic’ pop singer, Viktoria Modesta. Sensors and actuators in a sonic bustier, and an integrated accelerometer in a prosthetic leg, transform Modesta into a living musical instrument. MONAD Studio cofounder Eric Goldemberg outlines how this was achieved and argues that it is reflective of a new mode of expression, defined and driven by transdisciplinarity.     

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.     

The Ebb and Flow of Digital Innovation: From Form Making to Form Finding - and Beyond

Architectural historian and theorist Mario Carpo examines the status quo of digital innovation. Whereas the espousal of animation software in the 1990s placed architects conspicuously at the forefront of new technologies as early adopters and adapters, in the new millennium they have less enthusiastically embraced the participatory opportunities of Web 2.0 and open-source modes of working. Could the desire for single authorship be holding designers back?     

Tracking,Tagging and Scanning the City

The proliferation of social media and software, such as building information modelling (BIM), has led to an unprecedented accumulation of data in the last few years, which can be tracked, tagged and scanned.With it, buildings and cities have been transformed into portals for information. Andrew Hudson-Smith , Director at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (UCL), describes how the ability to use emerging urban analytic tool kits provides the possibility of a real-time view of the city and a crystal-ball-like glimpse into urban networks of the future.     

The Deep Structure of the Picturesque

The late Paul Coates was one of the first students at the Architectural Association (AA) in London to submit an international computation-based diploma, in 1969. Responsible for introducing a series of computational techniques, Coates was also the founder of the MSc in Computing and Design at the University of East London, and in 2002 the Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture (CECA). In this unpublished article from 2008, which has been prepared and rewritten for publication by Christian Derix , Coates recounts his pursuit of ‘the particle physics of architecture’ - geometric rules that inform both unplanned and planned human occupation of space.     

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.     

The Tailored Home: Housebrand

Loraine Fowlow describes how in Calgary, Alberta, Canada's fifth biggest city, John Brown has established Housebrand, a practice that is notable both for its innovative approach to residential design and for its adeptness in understanding its client base and the particular context of the Calgary housing market. The company has masterfully matched its own skills and services to customer demand in a way that is almost unprecedented within the architectural profession. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Persistence of the Pastoral

Architect, animator and educator Nic Clear challenges the contemporary notion of the pastoral to go beyond the simplistic binary opposites of the untainted rural idyll and the industrialised city. He explores how the narratives of the pastoral have provided a mainstay for science fiction and how this can be used to re-imagine nature itself with the aid of advanced biotechnologies to create new architectures for the 21st century.     

Pastoral Manoeuvres: Ecologies of City,Nature and Practice

In the 21st century, the greening of public open spaces has proved one of the most compelling marketing teasers, but also one of the biggest ‘elephants in the room’. Architect, educator and urban designer Duncan Berntsen describes how students within the School of Architecture, Design and Construction at the University of Greenwich were encouraged to tackle this by developing ‘measurable innovative disruptions’ that could contribute positively to an urban sense of place.     

Too Good to Be True: The Survival of English Everyday PoMo

‘Intelligent, eclectic, witty, profoundly humanistic, and keen to debunk an inflexible, elitist and dangerously authoritarian Modernism’: Kester Rattenbury evokes the spirit of early British Post-Modernism. She reminds us of how in the early 1980s it spearheaded a spirited community architecture that played a strategic role in protest against wholesale, motorway-led redevelopments and the survival of Convent Garden. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emerging Technologies and Drawings: The Futures of Images in Architectural Design

Mark Garcia , Senior Lecturer in History and Theory in the Department of Architecture, University of Greenwich, explores the technologically mediated future of drawings in architecture ‘without hands’. He highlights how multiple technological innovations are putting us on the brink of an exploding spectrum of possibilities for the image, and looks at three distinct areas of potential: new media and materials; emerging and future technologies; and theory embodied in fiction and art.