Jamie Fobert Architects: Inside Out

The architect of several artists' homes, Jamie Fobert is now landing himself a string of acclaimed arts and commercial commissions. From his warehouse in Old Street in London, he explained to Howard Watson how the sensitive integrity of his architecture has developed out of ‘an inside-out approach’, which puts particular store in ‘framing light and views’ and the sculpting of space aided by physical model-making, rather than the synthetic top-down views that are imposed by widely used CAD programs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

It's in Your Nature: I'm Lost in Paris

R&Sie(n)'s installation I'm Lost in Paris (2008), a disturbing take on the ecological house, epitomises the preoccupation of the French architect François Roche with the contradictions of modern nature. Javier Arbona tracks how Roche's notion of nature as ‘a partly human artifice’ which is both alien and personalised play out in his various projects, capitulating between attempts at overcoming alienation and heightening it. Copyright © 2010 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.     

It's Not Where You're From,It's Where You're At

Climate change and sustainability expert Mark Watts imagines what it might be like to look back from the year 2050. What might the view be from his position as Executive Director of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group? What crucial political moves and actions might be required from global megacities if they are to address climate change and make the ultimate shift to a low-carbon world?     

Almost All Right: Vienna's Social Housing Provision

The aim of social housing is to manage scarcity by providing affordable accommodation for everyone. Responding to shifts in demand, it also has to adapt to ever-changing economic, political and social conditions. Here, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Michael Klein and Georg Kolmayr look at Vienna's social housing provision, which for over a century has been ‘dealing with scarcity and its ghosts in order to avoid its negative effects’.     

‘Happy Meals’: Finding Happiness with Hans Becker and the Humanitas Care Model

Hans Becker , originally a professor at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam, is a seemingly unlikely guru for elderly care. In 1992 he was appointed Chair of the Rotterdam-based housing association Humanitas with the task of overturning the outmoded and failing commercial model of its nursing homes. He set about replacing them with ‘apartments for life’ that promoted independent living. In order to understand more about the successful Humanitas model, David Birkbeck , Chief Executive of Design for Homes in the UK, interviewed Becker and found out how the move to a new housing type was enabled by a philosophical shift that placed an emphasis on the engendering of happiness among its residents – with food and the creation of convivial on-site restaurant facilities proving a critical tool.     

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.     

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun , Editor-in-Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urbanism Without Density

The predominance of sprawling, low-density urban environments throughout the world begs the question: What constitutes a city? Such environments also require us to rethink public space, traditionally at the core of city centres. Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel outline the challenges and opportunities that cities of dispersal raise. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Putting the ‘I’ back into Architecture

Neil Spiller gets personal in a bid to put the ‘I’ back into architecture. He celebrates the spatial experimentation of the work of Charlotte Erckrath. Creating a space of desire, she produces a subjective ‘synthesis of architect, body, space and view’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

All Night Long: The Architectural Jazz of the Texas Rangers

In the mid-1950s, a group of young faculty at the University of Texas School of Architecture in Austin - aka the Texas Rangers - entertained themselves with weekly sessions of a sophisticated, collective drawing game, ‘Dot-the-Dot’, in which there was an emphasis on inventive fluency in hand drawing as well as an innate knowledge of historic European city plans. What happened when Mark Morris , Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University, decided in a design studio to ask present-day students to revive the game?     

An Interview with Giorgio Grassi

In January 2007, Lucia Tozzi visited Giorgio Grassi's office in Milan. Their conversation touched on Grassi's recent work on Leon Battista Alberti, which is examined here in the context of Grassi's obliquely expressed views on contemporary architecture and the cult of personality. As perhaps the most intellectually rigorous and formally consistent Rationalist architect of his generation, Grassi's work and thinking retain a hermetic aspect, but one notable for its philosophical self-questioning and underlying political commitment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has increasingly become ‘the new frontier for exploitation’ and why there is currently ‘a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the fields of the life sciences’ in which life itself becomes a raw material.     

Deus Ex Machina: From Semiology to the Elegance of Aesthetics

Architecture's ability to realise large-scale effects permits its emphasis to shift aesthetics on a project-by-project basis. Elegance unleashes a specific visual intelligence that can be achieved by refinement and precision of surface. Here, Mark Foster Gage investigates how elegance can be designed into a project. This requires a ‘visual and formal expertise’ combined with a careful curation of mutation and awareness of ‘extreme differentiation’. Elegance often only reveals itself partially, acquired, in the design stage, through ‘isolated views and expertly calibrated moments’ and perceived fleetingly in built work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross the River by Touching the Stones: Chinese Architecture and Political Economy in the Reform Era: 1978-2008

China's Open Door Policy and economic development set in motion in 1978 can be regarded as the triumph of pragmatism over theory - specifically Chairman Mao's brand of Marxist theory. Tao Zhu traces the progress of reform over the last 30 years, and its impact on Chinese architectural culture. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Language,Life, Code

Software increasingly determines what can be designed, constructed and even how design occurs. Here, Alexander R Galloway and Eugene Thacker present a series of investigations with the collaborative Radical Software Group (RSG). Their practice examines the nature of software code as a form of language. Addressing theoretical issues regarding meaning and representation, they argue for thinking more abstractly and generatively about language, and propose a new, or liberated, computer language in which the representational determinations implicit to any software are geared towards innovation in communication and design. By rewriting the software that allows for the transmission and translation of knowledge across previously discrete fields of production, programming allows for new and productive cross-pollination. Indeed, programming becomes a new site of design that enfolds disciplines not traditionally seen as part of the creative processes of innovation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.