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’.     

Socially Inclusive Design in Denmark: The Maturing Landscape

With a tradition of social inclusion and innovative contemporary design, Denmark leads the way internationally in its architectural provision for an older population. Architect, author and researcher Terri Peters highlights some pioneering housing schemes in Denmark that use architecture to reduce the stigma of old age in the creation of environments that are overtly ‘homey’ or domestic – breaking away from the sanitised environment of the ‘nursing home’ – and that employ nature and landscape to positive effect, as a means of promoting healing and health.     

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’.     

安亭新镇:以建筑的名义定义未来的生活方式

本文从整体规划、街区与建筑的尺度,建筑的细部设计,多样的住宅户型设计,高效的技术系统等方面,介绍了安亭新镇的规划建设特点,并指出这些特点将有助于新的生活方式的形成.     

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.     

Make No Big Plans

In the face of ‘derivative architecture’, artificial commercial speculation that was a feature of the previous economic boom, Michelle Provoost and Wouter Vanstiphout of Crimson Architectural Historians call for a new understanding of the real city and its actual needs, basing interventions on observations rooted in society and spatial structures.     

Italian Architecture from the Outside In

Hans Ibelings, the Dutch editor of A10: new European architecture, provides a reticent but entirely perceptive account of the Italian architecture scene from a wider European perspective. Architectural culture in Italy may be nascent in comparison to some of its continental neighbours, but it is ‘richer and more versatile’ than it has been for many years. He emphasises the role that ‘an intermediate generation’ has played in smoothing the way for a more confident, emerging generation of designers. Copyright © 2007 Hans Ibelings.     

The Reluctant Architect: An Interview with Wang Shu of Amateur Architects Studio

On the announcement of the awarding of the Pritzker Prize to the first Chinese architect, Wang Shu, in May 2012, jury chair Lord Palumbo commended him for an architecture that is ‘timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal’. Visiting Wang and his work in the ancient city of Hangzhou in Eastern China, shortly afterwards Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren sought to understand why Wang might have succeeded where other architects have failed in a Chinese and international context, forging an innovative approach to architecture, which is in tune with tradition while being of a ‘genuine and often sublime originality’.     

Not So Radical: An American Perspective

Jayne Merkel relishes the opportunity to talk about architecture in the light of communication, context, wider culture, ‘the ordinary’, new technology and aesthetic affect - all topics that are back on the agenda with this issue on Radical Post-Modernism. However, she provides a view from Manhattan that calls into question the possible re-emergence of a ‘Radical Post-Modern’ movement in North America, although some members of the American architectural establishment continue to practice PoMo even if they do not preach it. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Evolutionary Dynamics of Sentience in Cities

Cities, and their component buildings and infrastructural systems, have developed rapidly in responsive and adaptive capacities. Ubiquitous computation and new informational technologies are increasingly embedded in the physical and social processes of the city. Here, Michael Weinstock identifies ‘sentience’, or the ability to be aware, as the primary driver of innovation in the urban environment; as the extended ‘nervous system’ of a city develops the potential to sense changes in the city's flows, and in its internal and external environments.     

The Grand Work of Fiction: The Detail as Narrative

A practising architect and Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Edward Ford is the leading expert on the architectural detail and the author of three seminal books on the subject. Here Ford explains that, though the decision ‘to abstract or to articulate’ architecture ‘may be largely subconscious’, it is never ‘arbitrary’. For ‘in the well-designed building, it is done in the service of the creation of a larger narrative, a unity of vision’.     

We Will Be Making Active Form

In response to the relative redundancy of architect-designed buildings and the proliferation of commercial structures that are rolled out to a highly formulaic spatial format across the world's cities, Keller Easterling advocates a new architecture of ‘active form’. These active forms potentially perform as ‘verbs’ rather than ‘nouns’ to the city's activities, providing ‘the means by which the field changes’ and the ‘repertoire for how it plays’.     

对刘家琨四川美院新校区设计艺术馆的两种阅读

文章由两部分组成。第一部分“在场阅读”,邓敬基于在场的直接观感,从背景、现场内外空间、材料等多方面文章详细介绍了对刘家琨设计的四川美院新校区设计艺术馆建筑群做了详尽的报道和解读。 第二部分“不在场阅读”,钟文凯从对工业建筑的“再现”、个性的表达、材料的使用等方面对四川美术学院设计系馆进行了分析,从中观察到刘家琨的这一新作品在设计构思和表现形式上有意识地趋向多元、复杂的变化,和一种关注点从内到外的转移。这种转变在某种程度上已经开始偏离现代主义建筑的一些基本信条,反映了刘家琨对现代主义建筑的反思,并在实践中寻找“另一条路”的努力。     

‘Never Mind All That Environmental Rubbish,Get On With Your Architecture’

Could the primacy of green architecture in recent years be eroding the discipline? Is it reducing architecture to a mere ‘environmental techno-science’? Penelope Dean argues for a revised environmental agenda that is driven by ideas and concepts rather than subservient technologies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Textiles in Architecture

‘The cutting edge in architecture is not sharp, but sensuous and soft.’ As textiles begin to emerge as megamaterials, Bradley Quinn explains how architects are pioneering new possibilities for soft structures. Fabric-formed environments are fashioning tensile buildings and inflatable pavilions, while the tailoring techniques of braiding, weaving and pleating are building supple skyscrapers and bioclimatic enclosures. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Extreme Integration

Tom Wiscombe advances an argument for an architecture of ‘extreme integration’, where the sanctity of the single surface responsible solely for affect is challenged by multilayered and multidimensional built surfaces. The new species of architecture is ‘robust enough to be both formally and technologically innovative’, replacing a mechanistic model with a biological jungle ecology of messiness and excess. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Artists of the Floating World: SANNA,Niedermayr and the Construction of Atmosphere

Hugh Campbell expands upon the mutually collaborative spatial qualities evoked in the photographic works of Walter Niedermayr and the architecture of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based practice SANAA. Describing their relation as forming a ‘thickened presence’, he alludes to a particular atmosphere reliant on an ambiguity of scale, detail and discernible proximity that serves to liberate the architecture and the photographs from mere documentation whereby instead they figure as transparent recordings of spatial intentions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Site/Non-Site: Extending the Parameters in Contemporary Landscape

As the world teeters on the verge of environmental collapse, landscape architecture has taken on a new significance offering a longed-for sanctuary for our increasingly urbanised lives. Here, in his introduction to the issue, guest-editor Michael Spens explains how by taking its impetus from land art, landscape architecture, as an expanded field, transcends the conventional confines of site. This renders it possible to read architecture ‘as landscape, or as non-landscape, as building becomes non-site’ and the ‘site indeed materialises as the work per se’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aggregate Structures: Material and Machine Computation of Designed Granular Substances

In inanimate nature, large masses of granular substances are in constant processes of formation through perpetual cycles of erosion and accretion. What if architecture was to emulate this behaviour and allow for its own continuous reconfiguration? Karola Dierichs and Achim Menges establish the notion of an ‘aggregate architecture’. Composed of large numbers of unbound yet designed granules, aggregates are based on a fundamentally different logic of construction. In contrast to assembly systems, aggregates materially compute their overall constructional configuration and shape as spatiotemporal behavioural patterns, with an equal ability for both: the stable character of a solid material and the rapid reconfigurability of a fluid. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

The work of the New York-based practice of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects is well known for producing lyrical designs that are materially rich and spatially innovative. The terms ‘humanity’ and ‘poetic quality’ have been regularly used in reviewing their numerous residential and institutional projects. The context of an Indian project provides a new opportunity for the finely crafted, tactile architecture the practice is known for. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.