The Public and the V2

The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness and bonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypal view of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and its community were ultimately destroyed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Architecture of the Mouse

The mouse is a potent prosthetic. When placed in front of our desktop we do not even have to think consciously about reaching for it. Mark Wigley's eulogy to this seemingly humble but transformative technology highlights the power that such a discrete device can have on the human ecosystem, providing a seamless interface between body and brain that is still only to be dreamt of in architecture. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cities and Grids: In Search of New Paradigms

The wider global influences of expanded populations, new technologies and economies in both Europe and the Far East are having a direct impact on the pattern and planning of urban form. Joan Busquets , the principal of B Arquitectura I Urbanisme (BAU) in Barcelona, and Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), describes how the urban grid is continuing to evolve with these changes, becoming ‘a matrix for innovation within urban development, allowing the creation of sustainable and compact cities’, enabling the forming of ‘new networks and innovative city systems’.     

Synthetic Neoplasms

Marcos Cruz explores the cultural precedents for the evolution of synthetic neoplasms - artificial matter and bio-synthetic flesh composites. He draws on a rich artistic and filmic lineage, ranging from the hybrid forms of 16th-century Breugel to Patricia Piccinini's more recent mutant creations, and most vividly and perhaps alarmingly the flesh formations of the game-pods in David Cronenberg's 1999 film eXistenZ. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Networks and the City

‘Cities need to change to survive. As living beings that are constantly replacing their cells, rebuilding their veins and arteries, and pumping energy and matter or producing waste, cities are also growing and evolving as they age.’ Just how complex, though, are cities? Sergi Valverde and Ricard V Solé of the ICREA-Complex Systems Lab at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona look at how network theory and emergent dynamics might be bringing us closer to an overarching theory of urban organisation.     

The Living: Surface Tensions

‘Our work begins with the premise of a dynamic world. Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response?’ New York-based team The Living, led by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, have developed a practice of deep, open-source interfaces of participation. Jordan Geiger describes how for The Living their home city and its environs is a site of evolving forms of public space whether on land, air or water. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Virtual Corpses,Figural Sections and Resonant Fields

The ‘figural section’ is one of the most potent but under used forms of architectural communication. It enables slices, extrusions, fragments and surfaces of buildings to become the media of the non-expressive and deadpan. Here Sean Griffiths of FAT looks at Venturi Scott Brown's influence in the development of the figural section and how it has evolved into a key trope in his practice's own work. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Urban Complex: Scalar Probabilities and Urban Computation

Guest-editor Anthony Burke redefines complexity in relation to the city as ‘a dynamic and luminal organisational condition “growing at the edge of chaos”’ and in so doing shifts our understanding of urban trauma as an event intrinsic to the contribution of the metropolis rather than external to it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Behavioural Complexity: Constructing Frameworks for Human-Machine Ecologies

Founded by Patrik Schumacher and Brett Steele in 1997, the Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) Master's programme,based at the AA in London, provides an important research base for Parametricism. The current Director of AADRL, Theodore Spyropoulos , continues to push the boundaries of advanced computing and machine intelligence. Here he describes the work that he has undertaken at the AA and through his practice Minimaforms into adaptive ecologies that employ responsive machine learning to enable spatial transformations.     

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.     

Stalker/ON

How might we ‘reboot’ architecture and ‘regain the critical’? American architectural critic and professor Peter Lang finds in Stalker's interactive field study of a Romany community around Rome a trigger for a re-energised way of thinking that questions how we might effectively live communally and economically. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Italian Architecture from the Inside

Fulvio Irace focuses on the internal tendencies of Italian contemporary architecture. In his identification of national characteristics, he recognises the part that a consolidated approach to Modernism has played. Looking backwards as well as forwards, Modernism in Italy, in all its manifestations, has been simultaneously concerned with ‘the exaltation of the new’ and ‘the obsession with memory’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patterns,Fabrics, Prototypes,Tessellations

New technologies have enabled architects to develop sophisticated patterning techniques. This is epitomised by the expressive possibilities now available to the building envelope: smooth geometries, tessellation, material textures and layers, such as solar shading. For Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects, though, patterns have cultural and political possibilities far beyond mere decoration, enabling new practices to address in the urban context some of the crucial problems posed by globalisation: bridging the dichotomy between tabula rasa and contextualism, and the articulation between the local and global. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Relational Interactive Architecture

In her concluding ‘Userscape’, Valentina Croci assesses the state of interactive design as it becomes an increasingly mature practice, with over 10 years of activity behind it. Looking at works by some of the most significant designers internationally, she emphasises how this new field of spatial design has enabled new sensory investigation and innovative explorations into the relations between people. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.