To the Micron: A New Architecture Through High-Resolution Multi-Scalar Design and Manufacturing

Rapidly shrinking tolerances and increasing fidelity of emerging additive layer systems are beginning to afford a new opportunity: the ability to design below the macroscopic scale. This is resulting in the engineering of hybrid materials in which every element of their properties can be prescribed at the point of design conception. Richard Beckett of the Digital Manufacturing Centre (DMC), London, and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and Sarat Babu of Betatype explore a potential new architecture that encompasses a scalar hierarchy of matter, enabling design to take place concurrently at scales ranging from the micrometre to the metre.     

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.     

CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects: Through the Looking Glass

CJ Lim is one of architecture’s greatest illustrators, visualising through his beautiful and delicate drawings and models an enchanted world inspired by Lewis Carroll, William Heath Robinson and Chinese fables. Howard Watson describes how Lim is now breaking through the visionary’s glass ceiling with his realisation of a tunnel installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and a project at an altogether different scale for an eco-city in China. Copyright © 2008 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.     

Works In/On//Around///Behind Progress

Artist Hilary Powell describes how her work in film, food and the pop-up book offers playful critiques of regeneration and place making. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Planet Moon: The Future of Astronaut Activity and Settlement

Ceaseless demographic growth and the depletion of the Earth's natural resources make the colonisation of space an increasingly compelling prospect. Madhu Thangavelu , an expert in the design of complex space projects, including space stations and exploratory missions, and a professor in the Department of Astronautical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), explores the possibilities and extreme environmental challenges posed by human settlement of our closest planetary neighbour, the Moon.     

Comings and Goings

As a throwback to the idealism of the 1970s, with its contemporary layering of ‘obscure language, extreme ideas and incomprehensible rhetoric’, is EcoRedux helpful to architects? Brian Carter , Professor and Dean at the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo, thinks so. A licensed architect in the UK, who most recently worked in practice with Arup Associates in London before taking up an academic position in North America, Carter regards environmental issues as a single but important aspect of design. He urges architects and architectural educators to make the direct engagement with the difficulties of designing and constructing buildings their priority. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Club Cinemetrics: New Post-Perspectival Design Methodologies

Cinemetrics is a post-perspectival, cinematically inspired drawing system that encourages a way of working that is multilayered and multiscalar, responding to the complexities of contemporary life and the city. Here Brian McGrath , in collaboration with Hsueh , Cheng Leun , Paul CHU Hoi Shan , José De Jesús Zamora and Victoria Marshall , demonstrates how in field work in the US, Thailand and Taiwan, Cinemetrics enabled them to adopt an interdisciplinary process addressing transdisciplinary issues. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multisensory Architecture: The Dynamic Interplay of Environment,Movement and Social Function

Early difficulties with motor skills are a common indicator of autism. Overcoming these can improve both the health and the social opportunities of those affected. Sean Ahlquist, Leah Ketcheson and Costanza Colombi – respectively academic specialists in architecture, kinesiology and psychiatry – here describe their cross-departmental collaboration at the University of Michigan which aims to do just that, through specially designed interactive sensory environments.     

Towards a New Relationship with Nature: Research and Regenerative Design in Architecture

Here Peter Busby, Michael Driedger and Max Richter of Perkins+Will Canada (P+W) describe the office's core focus on ‘regenerative design’: an approach where each operation in a building's construction is measured by its positive impact on human and natural systems. This is supported by an in-house research team of architects, engineers and sustainability strategists that concentrates on the advancement of sustainable building practices. They describe how this is played out in projects such as the Living with Lakes Centre at Laurentian University in Sudbury and the VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre, Vancouver. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Looking and Drawing

Peter Cook is the doyen of the architectural drawing world. He enthuses and champions the graphic in architectural schools across the globe, while producing extraordinary images within his own London-based practice. Here he offers us the rare chance to look over his shoulder at CRAB studio, proffering some rare tips and insights; he shares his graphic predilections and recounts the evolution of some of his most recent drawings.     

Simulation and the Future of Design Tools for Ecological Research

In sustainable terms, the complexity and inefficiencies of buildings present the most challenging environmental problem. Simulation remains the primary tool for the designer to develop intuitions and analysis of performance. As Azam Khan, Head of the Environment & Ergonomics Research Group at Autodesk, and Andrew Marsh, Senior Principal Engineer at Autodesk , explain, simulation can only be improved through the development of three key areas: more detailed modelling, building integration and by becoming indispensable to the design process. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Developmental Route to Local Specificity. Nested Catenaries

Architect Defne Sunguroğlu Hensel and engineer Guillem Baraut Bover describe the Nested Catenaries design and construction system they have developed as part of a research project at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). They explain how their innovative development of an unreinforced masonry shell structure made up of a single layer of bricks is informed by ancient building traditions and has been further evolved to be attuned to local context.     

Adaptive Knowledge in Architecture: A Few Notes on the Nature of Transdisciplinarity

New digital technologies allow unprecedented levels of collaboration across fields of expertise. The international transdisciplinary practice Open Source Architecture has been exploring the possibilities in this area for over ten years. Two of its cofounders, Aaron Sprecher and Chandler Ahrens , reflect on key related themes – intensity and extensity of information, and potentiality (or collaborative iteration) – through three of its projects.     

Detoured Installations: The Policies and Architecture of the Norwegian National Tourist Routes Project

Since its inception in 1994, the Norwegian National Tourist Routes Project has become a flagship for Nordic architecture worldwide, showcasing installations by local practices along a network of historic tourist roads. The former Rector and Professor of Urbanism and Landscape at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), Karl Otto Ellefsen , explains how the initiative has adeptly tapped into sustainability trends ‘with its emphasis on untouched nature and local authenticity’, while also strategically providing a tool for realising wider social, economic and political aims.     

Membrane Morphologies: Heterogeneous Forces and Articulated Material Form

Material behaviour is induced at the moment a structure, with its accompanying system of energies, is assembled. The research introduced here by Sean Ahlquist , Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, in textile manufacturing and membrane structures challenges the concept of assembly in an architectural context, where form emanates not only from the integration of forces and differentiated materials, but also through the pervasive influence of structural action at the moment of fibre construction and composition.