Et in Arcadia ego,Et in Arcadia est

Architect, academic and broadcaster Kevin Rhowbotham scrutinises the reasoning and value of the New Pastoralism project. He dispels the Arcadian impulse as ‘a specious and mythicised image of the rural’, calling upon architects to seek a true understanding of rural conditions in relation to the urban.     

Ashmolean Museum,Oxford

In November 2009, the Ashmolean Museum opened a new extension that doubled its gallery space on its existing city centre site. Howard Watson looks at how the redevelopment of the museum has been to its benefit curatorially, optimising the display space available for its extensive collections, but also enabling new connections to be made between artefacts in a way that fully tells the stories of civilisations across the globe. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collaborative Design: Combining Computer-Aided Geometry Design and Building Information Modelling

The spatial expression and ordering of social processes is one of the primary aims of architecture. Such is the view of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), where Shajay Bhooshan heads the computation and design group (CoDe). Here he explains how the practice has followed in the footsteps of the automotive, aircraft and shipbuilding industries in adopting a hybrid approach to design development. As demonstrated by a mathematics-themed gallery conceived by ZHA for London's Science Museum, it assimilates historical knowledge while facilitating fabrication and allowing for future flexibility.     

The Persistence of the Pastoral

Architect, animator and educator Nic Clear challenges the contemporary notion of the pastoral to go beyond the simplistic binary opposites of the untainted rural idyll and the industrialised city. He explores how the narratives of the pastoral have provided a mainstay for science fiction and how this can be used to re-imagine nature itself with the aid of advanced biotechnologies to create new architectures for the 21st century.     

Designing for an Earlier Age

While the need for suitable housing to accommodate burgeoning numbers of elderly citizens is undeniably great worldwide, Jayne Merkel puts the case that the necessity for affordable housing among young adults is arguably even greater, at least in the US and the UK, and particularly in New York, London and Los Angeles. The relationship between the demands of these two very different age groups is direct, since young people tend not to have children until they can find suitable housing. Forestalled childbearing means fewer members of later generations to financially support growing numbers of aged over time.¹ And young people without suitable housing tend to move back in with ageing parents or drain their financial resources.     

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.     

Serving,Owning, Authoring

Service provider or creative – which is the architect's primary role? And what legal, economic and ethical implications does each aspect carry? Architect and theorist David Ruy examines evolving business models in the architectural profession, from forays into property management to a focus on intellectual property rights, and considers the complexities of copyright law in the digital era.     

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.     

Decoding Modern Hospitals: An Architectural History

The various currents in post-Second World War hospital architecture have shared one central aim: to ‘normalise’ the healthcare environment. Rather than looking obviously like hospitals, these buildings have gone from resembling office blocks, to shopping malls, to techno-utopias, to zoned campuses with a distinct local feel and a focus on sustainability. Professor Annmarie Adams , of Montreal's McGill University, refers to examples across North America and Europe to illustrate the different ways architects have found of putting the patient experience at the heart of their hospital design strategy.     

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.     

Interconnected Approaches to Sustainable Architecture

Is minimising the negative effects of human activity on people and the planet enough, or can we aim even higher? Guest-Editor Terri Peters introduces the concept of superarchitecture: architecture that is not merely sustainable, but offers positive benefits for both human wellbeing and the environment. As demonstrated by the three international case studies she presents, it is applicable not only to healthcare architecture, but also to the spaces in which we live and work, and the wider urban realm. At its heart is a deep connection with nature.     

Tectonism in Architecture,Design and Fashion: Innovations in Digital Fabrication as Stylistic Drivers

After ‘foldism’ and ‘blobism’ comes ‘tectonism’ – a new branch of the epochal style of parametricism that allows greater expressive and formal variety. It is made possible by an evolving range of digital tools for structural form-finding and physics analysis, linked directly to fabrication. As Patrik Schumacher , principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, underlines, these do not remove the need for architects to collaborate with engineers and fabricators, but they do enable them to acquire more reliable intuitions about the logics of these other disciplines. This can only enhance their capacity to produce works that successfully combine communication and social functionality with technical integrity.     

Regenerative Agents: Patient-Focused Architectures

Holistic care is nothing new. There are well-known examples across the world and throughout history – from ancient Greece, China and India to early 20th-century northern Europe – of approaches that prioritise placemaking as a facilitator for health and healing. Inspired by such precedents, London-based architects Penoyre & Prasad produce buildings that engage with nature and help put patients back in control of their recovery process. Sunand Prasad , one of the firm's cofounders, explains.     

Site/Non-Site: Extending the Parameters in Contemporary Landscape

As the world teeters on the verge of environmental collapse, landscape architecture has taken on a new significance offering a longed-for sanctuary for our increasingly urbanised lives. Here, in his introduction to the issue, guest-editor Michael Spens explains how by taking its impetus from land art, landscape architecture, as an expanded field, transcends the conventional confines of site. This renders it possible to read architecture ‘as landscape, or as non-landscape, as building becomes non-site’ and the ‘site indeed materialises as the work per se’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.