The Young Sensualists

Pino Scaglione perceives a new sensuality at play in Italy. He takes us on a tour that takes in the elegant and sober forms of +Arch's new headquarters for Dolce & Gabbana in Milan and the highly original new soccer stadium in Siena by Iotti + Pavarani. Heading south he highlights some remarkable new architecture in Naples, Sardinia and Sicily injected with a rare poetic sensibility. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

3+1 architects

Without the predominance of a single presiding tradition of modern architecture in Estonia, the way has been clear for a younger generation of architects to make their mark. Andres Kurg describes the work of 3+1 architects, who launched their career in the mid-1990s with an Estonian Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania. Through their trend-setting domestic work, they have proved able to appeal to a new wealthy client base, while also developing their own interests in programme and architecture's relationship to the physical landscape. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’. Copyright © 2007 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.     

Architectural Geometry as Design Knowledge

The onset of digital design has enabled a new level of experimentation with free-form shapes in contemporary architecture, which has made geometry a fertile area of research over the last decade or so. Helmut Pottmann describes how geometry not only has the potential to inform a more exciting generative approach for architects, but can also make design much more construction aware for the whole design team, enabling a wholly digital workflow from design to fabrication. 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.     

Biodiversity Targets as the Basis for Green Design

Mike Wells , the Director of Biodiversity by Design, and Ken Yeang outline the need for biodiversity targets in architecture to provide a more far-reaching basis for green design. Rather than just literally ‘greening’ a building by covering it with foliage, they seek to encourage designers to engage with wider ecological processes and in more specific detail. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Shatotto: Architecture for Green Living (Rafiq Azam)

Rafiq Azam, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has produced interventionist architecture in Dhaka city's unchallenged urbanity where owner-developer profits tightly dictate the terms of engagement. His designs for apartment buildings are regarded as compelling revisions of given typologies. In his urban projects, Azam has dematerialised the obtrusive and anti-urban boundary wall that characterises the city with new layerings of gardens, plantings and other architectural fragments such as gardens in the air. His contribution to the ‘greening’ of apartments is original and clearly an achievement in the rigid mathematics of the market. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ex Silico Ad Vivo: Computational Simulation and Urban Design at Foster + Partners

What makes a successful city? Can this be replicated simply by following tried-and-tested urban typologies? Francis Aish, Adam Davis and Martha Tsigkari of Foster + Partners' Applied Research + Development (ARD) group argue that technology allows other approaches to urban design. They explain that computational simulation is increasingly valuable in predicting how the dynamic and complex systems of a city might play out in an urban context, forging an exciting new alliance between computation and intuition.     

Parallel Biological Futures

Neil Spiller looks beyond the digital and envisions a surreal future of ‘biological parallelism’ that pushes the boundary of architecture deep into the natural sciences, potentially creating ‘huge rafts of new architectural flora and fauna’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Concrete Constructs: The Limits of Rationalism in Swiss Architecture

Ákos Moravánszky explains why for him ‘the traces of Mediterranean Rationalism in the new Swiss-German architecture are like the imitation stitching on the moulded plastic dashboard of a new car’. It is an influence which, despite the undeniable impact of Aldo Rossi and the Ticino School at ETH Zurich in the 1970s, remains skin-deep, sharing little with the present in terms of ideology or the interpretation of the historic past. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Shared Play’: Italo Rota

An enthusiastic collector of plastic toys and the kitsch, Italo Rota approaches architecture with a joyous sense of play. As Luca Molinari explains, for Rota architecture is a ‘game for adults’, offering opportunities for a colourful inclusion of elements yet also an essential joie de vivre. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Surrealistic Exuberance – Dark Matters

For Neil Spiller, there is a current vacuum in much of contemporary parametric design. It is devoid of embodied cultural experience and character. Much can be learnt by rediscovering the dark matter of Baroque and Surrealistic art and architecture, which through repressed eroticism optimised on the simultaneous presence of the secular and the profane - the heaving physicality of the everyday world and the repressed strictures of the Catholic church. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Architectural Chemistry

Protocell technology has a precedent in the innovative use of plastic in the 1960s, when chemistry first came up with an innovative new material that could be applied to architecture, interiors and product design. Omar Khan describes how at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the University at Buffalo in New York, he is developing a line of research that builds on the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s for soft materials and the capabilities of an elastic responsive architecture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Breeding the Future

For Zbigniew Oksiuta energy from the sun offers the greatest potential for architecture, as the essential life-giving force for all living things. Here he urges a future of architecture that is biological, as demonstrated by his own featured bioforms that investigate the cultivation of new types of organisms and living biological products outside the confines of natural evolution. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture

Interactive design has come about as a result of the intermingling of disciplines. As a consequence, the language it uses has become blurred - borrowed or stolen with little restraint from elsewhere. Though particular terms have become ubiquitous, the original concepts that lie behind them have been lost. This means that all too frequently they are no longer knowingly used. Usman Haque sorts the wheat from the chaff and brings clarity to bear on the vocabulary and thinking behind interactivity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Otherwise Engaged: New Projects in Interactive Design

What are the possibilities of interactive technologies delivering a new level of social engagement in architecture? Taking 2002, with the ETH Ada project and Diller & Scofidio's Braincoat project, as an important watershed, Mark Garcia reviews the advances that have been made per se, and with four projects in particular, in socially interactive spatial design. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

One Space,Many Worlds

‘Cities hold two-thirds of their residents in slums, and the rest in stiflingly limiting, inflexible structures.’ Thus the impoverished parochial Mumbai is one and the same metropolis as the cosmopolitan globalised ‘Bombay’. Ramesh Biswas examines how the speculative housing developments of the aspirational middle classes are creating townships that intensify sprawl and further decentralise cities, squandering the potential for upgrading public space and creating an architecture for the common good. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Initiating Change: Architecturing the Body-Environment with Arakawa and Gins

New York-based artists Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010) and Madeline Gins (1941–) used architecture in their work in an approach that they have referred to as ‘architecting’. Jondi Keane explains how as artists-turned-architects, Arakawa and Gins have not been particularly interested in innovating architecture, but in approaching architecture as a way to innovate, or change the world'.