Studio Mumbai Architects ( Bijoy and Prija Jain)

Studio Mumbai Architects presents an exquisite architectural poiesis through the crafting or weaving of the building with the landscape, and the crafted fabrication of the building itself. The result is a choreographed architecture, compelling also in its Zen-like sparseness and delightful elegance. The intense sensuality of the practice's work is palpable without ideological mediation, through the modulation of light, material crafts, tactility, contrasting colours, and a heightened awareness of the site. Seeking ‘tradition’ through materiality and crafting, the architects incorporate ‘local’ construction techniques as a Modernist aestheticisation of the unselfconscious tradition. Secret gardens, structures embedded in the landscape inviting flexible uses, materials that interact with garden, sky and weather, and the transformative effects of time (weathering) are just some of the terms of engagement for the work of Studio Mumbai. Very few architects since Geoffrey Bawa have established such a compelling and instructive relationship with the landscape, as this requires the patient botanical metaphor of cultivation. The question of landscape is not just a pictorial one, but one that must be substantiated by ecological and sustainable programmes. Directed by Bijoy and Priya Jain, Studio Mumbai is a collaborative, multidisciplinary firm integrating architecture, landscape and interior design with product and furniture design. With a focus on crafting, the practice maintains its own established, year-round fabrication facilities in two locations where the timber structures, finished carpentry and furniture are handcrafted for each of its projects. Here, teams of skilled craftspeople, many originating from a long lineage of regional artisans, collaborate in a flexible and highly precise manufacturing process. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Vastu Shilpa Consultants (Rajeev Kathpalia)

As a partner in Vastu Shilpa Consultants in Ahmedabad, established by the master architect Balkrishna Doshi, Rajeev Kathpalia makes his own commentary on the cosmic and mythological dimension of architecture and thus continues the larger-than-building imperatives of the practice. Besides being an intersection of the seen and the unseen, and the current and archaic, his buildings and projects are deeply imbued with a landscape and territorial dimension of architecture. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP Architects

By focusing on a ‘scientific approach’ that emphasises the importance of cause and effect, Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP has developed a design for the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona that is less about spectacle and more about the people it accommodates. Croatian critic and architect Krunoslav Ivanisin admires the structure for the ‘inherent logic of its parts’, but also for its prioritisation of communal life. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Weiss/Manfredi Architects

For at least a decade, Weiss/Manfredi Architects has been considered one of the top New York firms - contenders for prestigious public commissions that require more than a good solid commercial job. Now, with the opening of the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, they are making their mark on the national scene in the US, and their particular talent for place making is being widely recognised. Jayne Merkel talks with partners Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi about that talent and how it developed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

InFORM Architects (Kiran Venkatesh)

Kiran Venkatesh, as co-founder of InFORM Architects, faces head-on what he describes as paradigm shifts in the social and cultural patterns of India, and it is this that informs his architecture. Unlike the overall trend of arbitrary and whimsical responses, his sharply profiled and modulated forms continue to investigate such shifts as well as their spatial manifestation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A)

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A) is taking up where Future Systems left off. Led by Amanda Levete, previous co-director of Future Systems with the late Jan Kaplicky', the practice retains its unique sensibility with its emphasis on new technologies, materials, science and engineering combined with art, design, fashion and the organic. Mark Garcia visited AL_A's Notting Hill-based studios to review the current projects of this 40-strong team and to talk to Levete about the underlying design principles and processes behind the office's work. Copyright © 2010 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.     

Optioneering: A New Basis for Engagement Between Architects and Their Collaborators

Conventionally, architects are somewhat tardy when inviting engineers to join their projects. By only introducing consulting engineers to participate in the later stages of the design process, engineers are commonly assigned a fixing role. This provides little opportunity for creative engineering solutions at the generative stage. Optioneering, a new business management model, however, offers the possibility of a new collaborative method for interaction between designers and their partners. Dominik Holzer and Steven Downing describe how a research project between the Spatial Information Research Laboratory (SIAL) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the engineering firm Arup investigated the capability of this new form of collaboration. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects: Through the Looking Glass

CJ Lim is one of architecture’s greatest illustrators, visualising through his beautiful and delicate drawings and models an enchanted world inspired by Lewis Carroll, William Heath Robinson and Chinese fables. Howard Watson describes how Lim is now breaking through the visionary’s glass ceiling with his realisation of a tunnel installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and a project at an altogether different scale for an eco-city in China. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urbana

Based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and originally formed by Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury and Marina Tabassum, the work of Urbana displays a heightened sense of material crafting within an invigorated Modernist ethos that has earned awards for the practice and been featured in many international publications. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MAXXI,Rome: Zaha Hadid Architects

Mark Garcia , editor of The Diagrams in Architecture (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), one of the first significant accounts of the diagram in architectural design, provides a unique insight into the diagrammatic form of Zaha Hadid Architects' new MAXXI museum in Rome. 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.     

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'.     

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.     

Diving into the Depth-Scape: Exuberance and Personalities

Exuberance is about more than appearance. Yael Reisner argues that it engenders an emotional response. It provides a whole ‘depth-scape’ of expression by offering extensive qualities that go beyond the merely practical or the required. Exuberance proffers a full emotional range from the horrific to the sublime, which requires complexity but also the presence of creative personalities who lend personal interpretation to the design process. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Recent History - Art In Ruins

Some two decades on, guest-editor Nic Clear returns to the work of Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks of collaborative art practice Art in Ruins. As cited by Brian Hatton on their behalf in 1989: ‘in the city of the future everything will be historical (ie visited) for fifteen minutes’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forensic Architecture

The urban destruction captured by black and white photos of London after the Blitz or bomb-damaged Berlin are emblematic of the desolation brought by modern warfare. Eyal Weizman , Paulo Tavares , Susan Schuppli and Situ Studio describe, though, how the built environment now represents more than a means of violation in conflict, as it has become an important source of evidence bearing witness to the event when international justice is sought. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban [IM]plants Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonheiden,Belgium

Bonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its exceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remained protected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environment has been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creating public spaces that use the town's ‘original landscape as the base material’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.