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.     

Hertzian Space: Material Response to Spatial Presence

Mark Taylor describes how an interest in the possibilities of generating spaces that fully respond to people's presence and their activities led him and Mark Burry to undertake a project with students at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand, that spatialises the dynamics of a full body massage. Copyright © 2007 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.     

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.     

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.     

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 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.     

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.     

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.     

Mathew & Ghosh Architects

The work of Mathew & Ghosh Architects (Nisha Mathew-Ghosh and Soumitro Ghosh) boldly extends an abstract Modernist language and at the same time draws from the vitality of places. While the firm's early works were small in scale, mostly residential in nature and based on a reappraisal of the early Corbusian idiom, recent projects include large-scale urban and landscape interventions with diverse conceptual and metaphorical imperatives. They have moved from a more reticent stance to the urban exuberance of their more recent projects (for example, their own office building), something akin to a ‘savage architecture’ as posited by Kazuo Shinohara in the context of the unsynchronised nature of the modern city. The architects' object of contemplation is the urban ‘box’, whether a private residence, office or part of a church. The box is first fractured and reconstructed as a bricolage of tectonic fragments, memories and events, all tenuously related as if unity in a contemporary culture is for ever denied. Like the Japanese notion of ‘ma’, the moment between fragments - a slit or an emptiness between two hovering planes - is telling. Mathew & Ghosh participate in the continuity of a historical narrative yet mark out the fissures and disjunctions; sometimes negotiations with the continuity emerge from unintended interstices. While these configurations of the contemporary urban ‘box’ are both contextual and abstract, they are also phenomenologically rich. There is a sustained dialect to the architecture of Mathew & Ghosh that includes consummate materiality and fine crafting, light as a medium, and always, as Nisha Mathew-Ghosh states, ‘good spatial possibilities’. Copyright © 2007 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.     

Alice in Technoland

At their most supernatural, interactive design environments can have a transformative effect. They take the visitor to somewhere else. By actively involving the public they are both ‘porous’ and ‘responsive’, beckoning us like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland to enter and participate in another world. Here Lucy Bullivant kicks off her introduction to this issue of AD by looking at an installation designed by Daan Roosegaarde for the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam which epitomises this approach. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

51% Studios

Howard Watson profiles a London-based studio whose practice results from the interplay of a wide range of influences spanning contemporary culture, history, nature, landscape and the ephemeral. Working at a variety of scales from the domestic to the urban, partners Peter Thomas and Catherine du Toit demonstrate a natural bent for the arts-related in undertaking collaborations with artists and exhibition installations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.