Blurring the Lines Case Studies of Current CAD/CAM Techniques - BIX

The design of buildings is usually regarded as taking place before – or at latest during – their construction, yet arguably they continue to evolve via passive or active processes throughout their lifetimes, affected as they are by everything from the weather to occupant-induced modifications to responses by environmental control systems. Another, more overt kind of change is observable at the recently built Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria, where the bix installation transforms the building's primary facade in accordance with programming by invited artists. This animated field of light fixtures both literally embodies an example of ‘performative’ architecture and foreshadows a whole range of potentially creative effects achievable through in-service alterations of a building's state, as posited by André Chaszar in this fifth instalment of AD's ‘Blurring the Lines’ series of CAD/CAM case studies. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

One city's ‘urban cosmography’

Illustrations of urban scenes naturally describe the physical characteristics of the places depicted. These representations also express implicitly broader beliefs which tie the spatial order of the surrounding world to local systems, institutions, and human actions. Images of a city embody, therefore, an ‘urban cosmography’, a concept inspired by early modern artisans' attempts to chart the contours of the world, both known and unknown. Seen from this perspective, historical graphics such as maps, posters, and birds-eye views document a city's position within a continually evolving universal order. This paper will review graphics drawn from the history of one city in particular: Baltimore, Maryland. Like other cities on the eastern seaboard of the US, Baltimore has been represented by diverse visual arts for more than two centuries. With the advent of digital and social media, Baltimore's development will depend even more upon the city's local and global interrelationships. ‘Urban cosmography’ is, therefore, a useful conceptual prism through which one may perceive the link between the city's historical legacy and contemporary urban challenges. One consequence is that visual tropes for traditional urban polarities – ‘growth’ versus ‘decay’, for instance – may be superseded by new symbols that incorporate both.     

Arup Associates

A specialist architectural division of the wider Arup group, Arup Associates has a unique composition and ethos. In its studios, teams of architects, structural engineers, environmental engineers, urban designers and product designers work alongside each other on the design of buildings from a project's inception. It is an interdisciplinary approach that the practice pioneered in the 1960s, and which has been reinvigorated in the last few years by a new emphasis on ‘unified design’ – a radical wholeness in thinking and execution. Here, Jay Merrick talks to Arup Associates' principal Declan O'Carroll and considers his vision of an architecture capable of addressing complexity and sustaining humanity in the face of modernity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Development of the SfB system

A revised presentation of the SfB system has just been published by CIB's SfB Development Group as CIB Report No. 22. In this article Ingvar Karlén, director of the SfB Bureau and co-ordinator of CIB Working Commission W58 – SfB Development Group, discusses the development of the system as an international ‘common language’ for the co-ordination, storage and retrieval of information relating to building operations, nationally and internationally. The new CIB report includes revised Basic Tables which form the ‘core’ of the system, and these tables are supplied as an enclosure with the present issue of ‘Building Research and Practice’.     

Becoming Architectural: Affirmative Critique,Creative Incompletion

When Greg Lynn embraced digital animation software in the 1990s, he not only redefined architectural production, but also the designer's relationship to the generative process. In this extract from an unpublished essay written in 2000, the philosopher Brian Massumi describes Lynn's ‘in-folding’ open-ended approach, which renders the design process ‘less an external conduit for the artist's creativity’ than the artist ‘a conduit for creativity of the design process’.     

The Point is to Change It

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how planning practices contribute to the reification of the ‘state’ through the case of Singapore’s new urban waterfront, Marina Bay. Instead of assuming Singapore’s state-led planning model as inherently ‘top-down’ and ‘long-term’, it disaggregates the planning process into three specific modes of abstraction – calculation, historicity and imagination – and analyzes the role of each in reifying the ‘state’ as the singular author of history and development. The case contributes to the literature by illuminating how ‘states’ can appear to have different forms, spatialities, agencies and ultimately consequences, without compartmentalizing planning models based primarily on ideological or geopolitical divisions.     

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’.     

High-rise Dubai urban entrepreneurialism and the technology of symbolic power

Twenty-first century metropolises are often engaged in a rivalry for primacy in many different geographical scales. Dubai, a relatively new urban settlement, is not immune from such endeavor. The Emirate has undertaken an impressive urban revolution in a rather explicit attempt to become a novel New York.This viewpoint explores the present evolution of the city, illustrating how a centralized and hyper-entrepreneurial approach has characterized Dubai’s attempt to ascend in the ‘world urban hierarchy’ and establish itself as the image of the 21st century metropolis. Contrary to much of the eulogistic take that often features in city rankings, an analysis of this venture through the city’s contemporary urban restructuring unveils the problematic social effects of Dubai’s quest for “symbolic power” – that technique of ‘worldmaking’ that confers influence by constituting the given by stating and mediating it. The compulsive sprawl of ‘icons’ and ‘vertical cities’ associated with this practice might set the Emirate on a perilous course with disastrous social consequences. In this view, the article draws upon some of the most astonishing works-in-progress of this city – and the Burj Dubai in primis – to explain the complexity of this power, and the many contradictions that can arise with it as quickly as Dubai’s skyscrapers.     

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.     

Hitler's ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’: a case only for Poland? A forgotten dimension of national-socialist spatial and town planning in the former Czechoslovakia

Adolf Hitler constructed his Nazi ideology as a universal worldview aimed at the German Reich's eastward expansion; the ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’ programme was officially launched in 1940. The forcible establishment of multiple administrative units in 1938/1939 created the conditions for an architecture that would serve the totalitarian regime. Thus began an enormous planning process and the targeted institutionalization of urban development and spatial planning and research. This programme included not only German government agencies and research institutions specifically established or reorganized for this purpose, but increasingly also involved communal politics and independent or government architects. The author pursues the thesis that this Germanization concept, formulated within the framework of the ‘Generalsiedlungspläne Ost’, allowed the relevant agencies to increase their influence or eliminate any opponents. From this basis, the study identifies the role that GBI (Generalbauinspektor) for Berlin Albert Speer, his architects, and local architects played in the planning process in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and analyses the architectural evidence of the Nazi rulers’ Germanization and colonization policies. The initial comparison of the urban planning models applied in ‘Großreich Deutschland’ with those in the annexed regions in today's Poland and Czech Republic offers relevant arguments related to this far-reaching sociological and architecture–historical topic.     

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’.     

Interpretation of Simon Stevin's ideas on the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East Indies Company) settlement of Malacca

Simon Stevin's (1548–1620) treatises had an influence on the construction of settlements in Southeast Asia as well as on the settlement of Malacca. In the treatise ‘Ideal Plan for a City’, published in 1649, Stevin developed a city design in which he was influenced by ideas of an ideal town according to the principles of the Italian Renaissance (fourteenth century until the sixteenth century). This treatise had an influence on the development of settlements in Southeast Asia. The settlement of Malacca was influenced, apart from the Dutch, by Portuguese design and architecture. The influence of Simon Stevin's treatise was also noticable on the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East Indies Company – VOC) settlement of Jayakarta (Batavia). VOC architecture and town planning in general was influenced by the ideas of Simon Stevin. The findings are that the three requirements, defence, agriculture and location, are met as mentioned by Stevin in ‘Ideal Plan for a City’. The other requirements of design (as mentioned in his treatise Vande Oirdeningh der Steden of 1599) – arithmetic, symmetry, placement of buildings and a system of streets – are not met.     

Contractor financial credit limits; their derivation and implications for materials suppliers

Current methodologies for ‘calculating’ contractors' credit limits (for supply of construction materials) are discussed and critically appraised. It is highlighted that credit limit imposition should be a function of a supplier's financial characteristics as well as potential debtors' probability of defaulting upon repayment. A conceptually new approach is presented to identify whether an additional contractor's trade results in a worthwhile gain in utility for the supplier. It is identified, inter alia, that (i) allowing very few contractors credit facilities that account for a large proportion of suppliers' potential profits, (ii) having inaccurate creditworthiness evaluation procedures, and (iii) operating on low targeted profit margins are the characteristics that inflict maximum financial risk upon materials suppliers.     

Finding Time

What has our sense of the acceleration of time got to bear on our experience of cities? How might it be consciously countered by architects ‘finding time’ through ‘thoughtful design and measured observation’. ‘A self-declared ‘cultural polymath’, Tim Makower is the founder of Makower Architects. A partner at Allies and Morrison for many years, he has significant experience in leading large-scale projects, ranging from the King's Cross Masterplan in London to the Old Doha Regeneration Framework, which he draws on here and in his book Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale (Wiley, 2014).     

Digital Cottage Industries

Mike Aling 's ProunStretcher project engages with the recent global revival of cottage industries, fuelled by the application of digital technologies, as a means to address ‘the manifold social issues present across our rural landscape-as-urban-extension’.     

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.     

Orchard Building,Bedales School

The new classroom and administration building by Walters and Cohen for Bedales School also acts as a new entrance for the campus. Jeremy Melvin describes how as such the architecture is ‘symbolically as well as functionally significant’ in a manner that is in keeping with the school's ethos. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Common Ground in Australia: An Object Lesson in Evidence Hierarchies and Policy Transfer

Developed in New York City in 1990, the Common Ground model of supportive housing has recently been embraced in Australia as a high-profile solution to chronic homelessness. Combining on-site support services with a congregate housing form accommodating ex-homeless people and low-income adults, Common Ground is presented as an innovative model which permanently ends homelessness, enhances wellbeing, and strengthens communities. This article critically examines the process of transferring the model into Australia's social housing sector, drawing on the perspectives of the high-level stakeholders closely involved. It argues that, despite official commitments to evidence-based policy, the ‘advocacy coalition’ driving this international policy transfer employed a ‘knowledge hierarchy’ wherein professional intuition and personal experience were afforded a higher status than formal evaluative evidence. The article provides an example of the contested nature of what ‘counts as evidence’ in housing and homelessness policy, and considers what role academic research – as well as other knowledge sources – should play in the policy development process.