In Conversation: Peter Zumthor and Juhani Pallasmaa

The ‘New Nordic – Architecture & Identity’ exhibition (July–September 2012) at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark is significant for the way that it has defined architectural identity in a Northern European context. Here its co-curator, Michael Asgaard Andersen , provides an edited version of a conversation between Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor that was featured on a large screen at the show and included at full length in the museum catalogue.     

Urban planning practices for bikeable cities – the case of Copenhagen

Cities are increasingly looking to cycling as a means to promote sustainability, liveability, and public health. Denmark is one of the European countries where cycling has remained significant – even in the motor age, and national strategies now aim to support and further increase cycling. The article presents the state of cycling in Denmark and Copenhagen – as well as the cycling promoting efforts of the city of Copenhagen which is one of the forerunners in the field.     

Common Artefacts

With offices in Beijing, Mumbai and London, Serie Architects is an international practice that spans Asia. Here, co-founder and principal Christopher CM Lee looks beyond the superficial ‘exotic’ stereotypical image of ‘orientalism’ that was traditionally imposed on Asia by the West. With particular reference to Serie Architects' Tote, Mumbai, and Yan Zhenqing Museum in Linyi, China, he shifts the question of identity to what is common within the context of architectural production: what might imbue architecture with social and cultural validity? How might it be possible to attempt to create ‘common artefacts’ through the most typical elements – the ‘dominant types’.     

Medium-Scale Anatolian Cities: Conceptual and Physical Routes of Urban Transformation

Banu Tomruk investigates the post-1980s transformation of the built environment of medium-scale Anatolian cities. She examines the subject through a conceptual and physical framework that places as much emphasis on populist rhetoric – ‘identity crisis’, ‘historicisation’, ‘the making of a tourist city’ – as on the built structures themselves and their realisation as standardised apartment blocks and gated communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The City as Dining Room,Market and Farm

Food has been sold on the street ever since people have lived in town settlements. Encouraging social exchange and interaction, the public consumption of food brings vitality and conviviality to urban life. In recent years, the sale of food in upmarket cafés and speciality shops has intensified, becoming a tool of urban regeneration. Here, Karen A. Franck, the guest-editor of this issue, introduces the themes behind ‘Food + the City’ and suggests why architects and planning professionals should pay attention to ‘the city's multiple functions as dining room, market and farm’.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

Clarion Quay

A high-rise housing scheme in Dublin that disperses affordable units in the same blocks as privately owned apartments, Clarion Quay was planned as a key piece in the city's docklands regeneration. As Robert Payne describes, the architects, Urban Projects, chose to elevate the high-rise as a ‘heroic’ and ‘expressive’ form rather than turning their backs on the building type's Modernist past. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Soho Court,London

Bruce Stewart describes how a patient and ever-persistent approach to planning have paid off for Archer Architects, the designers of a mixed-use housing scheme in the centre of London's Soho. The designers/ considered response to ‘community benefit’ and the existing urban fabric have enabled them to overcome the stalemate on a site that has suffered from ‘planners' blight’ since the 1970s. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Redesigning Domesticity: Creating Homes for the Elderly

Sally Stewart , Deputy Head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, highlights how nurturing a sense of ‘home’ can be a key ingredient in the creation of successful accommodation for the elderly and those with dementia. What, however, sets a ‘home’ apart from mere housing provision, and how can architects engender it? Stewart looks at some recent projects in the UK, Japan and the Netherlands in search of the answer.     

An Architecture of Exception: Transgressing the Everyday – Superflex's Flooded McDonald's

In Flooded McDonald's, a film by Danish artists' collective Superflex, the familiar sight of the fast-food restaurant is replaced by ‘a slowly emerging apocalyptical composition’, as the interior floods, objects are displaced and the retail space fills with water. Jonathan Mosley describes how this destabilised and other disaster-invoked visions of architecture – structures and spaces breaking down – enable us to use our imagination to test the parameters of the everyday.     

The ‘Background’ in Bangalore; Architecture and Critical Resistance in a New Modernity

As the centre of India's new information and biotechnology industries, Bangalore has been at the forefront of the country's globalisation. As Prem Chandavarkar explains, the city's architectural culture continues at the leading edge to be one of ‘intellectualism’, valuing ‘the background’, a sense of place and contextualism over the more brash facadism of other cities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Our Overdeveloped Sense of Vulnerability

Industrialised development and the suburban megalopolis are commonly regarded as a threat to nature, contributing to the increasing frailty of the planet and its delicate ecosystems. Here, Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, looks beyond the immediate environmental factors and assesses the root causes of our ensuing sense of vulnerability, as our worldview is increasingly informed by a collapse in social self-confidence.     

Metasystems of Urban Flow: Buro Happold's Collaborations in the Generation of New Urban Ecologies

When regarded as a whole, the flows of a city – made up of people, water, energy, information, materials and waste – constitute a large and complex ‘metasystem’. Wolf Mangelsdorf , Head of Structural Engineering at Buro Happold, describes a number of projects that Buro Happold has collaborated on with architects, urban planners and landscape architects that mark a significant shift in the design of urban infrastructures, recognising the importance of the metasystems of flow.     

Customised ‘Care-Ready’ Living: A HAPPI-Inspired Design for Evolutionary Housing by Walter Menteth Wren Architects

In 2013, Walter Menteth Architects entered the 2013 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Re-imagine Ageing Design Competition with an entry that focused on the delivery of customised housing to suit individual specifications. Here Walter Menteth , a director of the practice, describes the research the office undertook as part of the project and how it led to a solution that radically questioned the current procurement process for development-led retirement housing by proposing a new, distinctively ‘branded’ delivery vehicle that improves access to consumers while expanding buyer choice and engagement.     

Building In and Out of Place

To seize the opportunities that designing globally afford – albeit in a disorientated and displaced manner – or to continue practising at the small scale in an informed and sensitive way, is the predicament that most ambitious offices are confronted with today. Here David Leatherbarrow , Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that there could be a third way that manifests itself in the land itself and a project's site. He suggests terrain ‘has the power to allow and to resist the dislocations we experience today, recalling what a location has been while indicating what it is becoming’.     

Animating Architecture: Coupling High-Definition Sensing with High-Definition Actuation

Ruairi Glynn , lecturer on interactive architecture at the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, University College London (UCL), puts the pressing question: ‘What does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?’ Despite the pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing – the Internet of Things (IoT) – and students' ability to speculate, build and test responsive lifesize installations, could practice itself be in danger of getting left behind?     

The 21st-Century Welfare City: Aalborg + Copenhagen,Denmark

Under the scientific eye of satellite surveillance, the world's urban conglomerations often appear heterogeneous. On the ground, differences and special features of a city remain of utmost importance to the quality of life of its citizens. Hans Kiib and Gitte Marling assess how the welfare system in Denmark, which is so dear to many Danes, is holding up. If the physical, Modernist urban model of the welfare city is to endure, can it withstand the irresistible, less tangible pull of consumption and aspirational individualised lifestyles that are penetrating the globe worldwide? Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Century of Ecological Innovation

As humanity faces its greatest disruption to date – climate change – placing the planet and its long-term survival in jeopardy, visionary designer Mitchell Joachim of Terreform ONE incites optimism. Rather than being defined by disruption, he predicts that the 21st century with be characterised by innovation, which ‘promises to solve the global challenges we face’.     

Beyond Le Corbusier and the modernist city: reframing Chandigarh's ‘World Heritage’ legacy

Mounting concern about the slow progress of the drive to reconstruct Britain's cities in the late 1940s and 1950s led to a sustained debate about strategies and priorities. This paper offers insight into the climate of ideas of a key period in the recent past by considering the work of the Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal (SPUR). A pressure group that campaigned for resuscitation of urban reconstruction under the banner of ‘urban renewal’, SPUR staged exhibitions and published manifestoes that reasserted core urban values, reconfigured decentralization on an intraurban basis, proposed multi-level circulation systems and, latterly, sought to redress the balance of rehabilitation and conservation strategies against comprehensive redevelopment. After a contextual introduction, the opening section of this paper clarifies two key concepts – ‘reconstruction’ and ‘renewal’ – that shaped thinking about the replanning of British cities in the early postwar period. The ensuing sections analyse the origins and founding ideals of SPUR and examine its key projects and manifestoes. The conclusion reflects on consensus and plurality in the group's work in the context of wider currents of thought about urban renewal.