Eat Me… Drink Me…

Sean Lally of WEATHERS lets out a rallying cry to all architects. He calls on them to make environmental conditions the subject of design rather than regarding them as a standardised part of a building's services. Here he highlights the potential of material systems, which are usually applied to conditioning the interiors of buildings, in the generation of new forms and activities; whether it is in the honing of the performance aspect of a building's function, as in the Water Cube at Beijing (2008), or in the seasonal planning that underpins the concept behind WEATHERS' Wanderings project (2008-9). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ecoLogicStudio

From their office in Hackney, in London's East End, Italian duo Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, have established an international reputation as ecoLogicStudio, an innovative practice that fuses digital technologies with environmental design. As Terri Peters explains, the ethos and approach of the studio extends beyond that of finding technological solutions to ecological design projects. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prosthetic Mythologies

The forest wilderness of Kielder in Northumbria is one ofEngland's remotest areas. Sharing an ecology similar to much of northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, it shares none of its native culture or folklore. Only planted in the 1920s, the conifer forests are relatively recent - a graft on the natural landscape. Kate Davies and Emmanuel Vercruysse of LIQUID FACTORY describe how their site-specific performance piece sought out the psychological power of the forest, embuing it with ‘Prosthetic Mythologies’. 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.     

Between Pragmatism and Theory

For the last three decades, Italian architecture has been characterised by an extreme polarisation. At one end of the spectrum have been the neo-conservators, who are subsumed by Italy's history, and at the other end the avant-garde for whom innovation is the Holy Grail and the present is a clean slate. Francesco Proto outlines the current potential for steering a middle course that will afford a greater eclecticism, enabling a natural balance between pragmatism and theory. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Defining Distinction,or Four Good Reasons for Success: The Extraordinary Career of Renzo Piano

For 30 years, Renzo Piano has been producing distinguished buildings and delighting the world with his innovation and sensitivity. Here, Livio Sacchi attempts to tease out some of the reasons behind Piano's sustained success. Having gained an almost unparalleled international profile during the last couple of decades, a period that has been notoriously difficult for Italian architects, Piano's career has an almost mythic quality. It boasts one of the most unlikely competition wins of all time that ceded one of the most prestigious sites in the world, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to two completely unknown architects in their late 20s. Copyright © 2007 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.     

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.     

‘To Go Beyond or Not to Be’ Unsolicited Architecture: An Interview with Ole Bourman

The complex dynamics of today's architecture require a deep intellectual freedom. This is something that Dutch architectural critic Ole Bouman espouses through his provocative writings and lectures and his advocacy of ‘unsolicited architecture’. Luca Guido invited Bouman to reflect on what it means to be an architect today and how it might be possible to pursue critical practice beyond the conventional construction processes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Smart Living Architecture: Solar Prototypes. IAAC Endesa Pavilion Barcelona

Areti Markopoulou and Rodrigo Rubio of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) describe how the institute's Endesa Pavilion in Barcelona responds to the contemporary challenge of constructing intelligent and sustainable prototypes, as a structure that interacts and exchanges resources with its environment. Parametrically designed, it reacts to the data of its specific solar site, and via its flexible solar cells generates twice as much energy as it consumes.     

Natural Methods of Interaction Or Natural Interaction in the Everyday Digital World

Computers, mobiles and automatised machines are so omnipresent that the means by which we interact with digital devices is now generally regarded as a given. Italian practice iO Agency, though, questions our use of mechanised interfaces and the language that they require us to learn. Valentina Croci explains how iO Agency has developed more natural ways for people to interact with digital environments through physical or tactile ‘triggers’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture Autonomous (Gerard da Cunha)

Gerard da Cunha maintains his practice from the old Portuguese colony of Goa, which he considers has a novel history in that it was the site of the ‘first sustained encounter between the East and the West’. This encounter has engendered a unique culture and architecture that is evident in da Cunha's lively and rather Gaudíesque work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sauerbruch Hutton

The bold curves and bright colours in Sauerbruch Hutton's work belie the reasoned, empirical approach they bring to every project. That approach has helped them win numerous competitions, which led to major commissions almost as soon as they opened their office in 1989. Jayne Merkel explains how this apparently whimsical architecture grows out of a commitment to existing context, energy conservation and creating a strong sense of place. The sensual experience the buildings provide, inside and out, is always uppermost in the architects' minds. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Old Dispersions and Scenes for the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity

The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Strength in Numbers

David Salomon examines the history of the original World Trade Center (WTC) competition of 1962 and the more recent 2003 competition, finding interesting parallels in terms of how commercial and bureaucratic, as well as progressive, forces of innovation intersect over larger debates about control, power and questions of collaborative identity and practice within the city as a political machine, and which figure 9/11 in implicitly provocative ways. The 1962 competition featured another progressive architectural collaboration: Walter Gropius's The Architect's Collaborative (TAC). Not unlike the 2003 competition in which United Architects (UA) and other collaborative practices lost to the more stable, individual celebrity identity, TAC lost to Minoru Yamasaki. Salomon also argues that the organisational and structural qualities of UA's WTC proposal sought to embed collective operations of multiplicity rather than mere duplication of the previous WTC Twin Towers within the form of the design itself. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Appropriating,Reclaiming and Inventing Identity Through Architecture

Local received knowledge once ensured buildings had a strong connection with their environment and the surrounding community. With rapid urbanisation and the professionalisation of design and construction, architects working internationally with a finely attuned sensibility to place and context have been able to take up the baton and take the opportunity to develop notions of locality and identity. For the last two decades, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture has been recognising the contribution of design teams that have been responsible for producing exceptional architecture for Islamic communities worldwide. Here, the award scheme's director, Farrokh Derakshani , defines some key treatments of identity in architecture.     

Kieran Timberlake Associates

Nothing about the beautifully detailed buildings that Steven Kieran, James Timberlake and their colleagues are creating, mostly for schools and colleges, suggests that they have a radical agenda. There are no crazy shapes, dayglo colours or other attention-grabbing devices in them. But what these architects are doing in their built work, research and teaching attempts no less than to change the way that buildings are made. Jayne Merkel explains how they are expanding the architect's sphere beyond mere ‘design’ to become ‘master builders’ of a uniquely 21st-century kind - developing new materials and ways to save energy, and introducing methods of collaboration and fabrication drawn from the automobile, aeroplane and shipbuilding industries. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A/B Architecture: Publicly Augmented Design

Architects are sometimes criticised for prioritising aesthetics over functionality; but attempts to involve end users in building design all too often encounter apathy. Is a successful participatory design process possible? Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of MIT's Senseable City Lab have been researching ways to make it so. Their solutions include an adaptation of the A/B testing method used in software development, together with means from questionnaires to immersive virtual systems that can draw both conscious and unconscious public feedback while maintaining architects' central role.     

Domestic Afterlives: Rachel Whiteread's Ghost

Long associated with uncanny atmosphere, ghosts suggest a lingering presence of something past. Rachel Carley's examination of Rachel Whiteread's Ghost belies the role that the plaster-casting process makes towards visualising the invisible. In turn, the vestigial traces of a room's surface are refigured as a solid volume capable of depleting light and heat from the space of the museum. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.