Architecture (and the other 99%): Open-Source Architecture and Design Commons

Under the current commercial practice model, can architecture ever really be cutting-edge or egalitarian in its aims? If only 2 per cent of the world's buildings are designed by architects for 1 per cent of the richest clients, is it possible to design for a wide cross section of the population let alone be truly subversive? Alastair Parvin of architecture studio 00 (zero zero) and co-founder of the Wiki-House puts the case forward for a whole new model of open-source practice.     

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.     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robotic Membranes: Exploring a Textile Architecture of Behaviour

The robot and the textile seem like a contradiction in terms - the robot standing for everything that is automated and mechanical, and the textile for sensual materiality. Can it be possible to reconcile the two? Here Mette Ramsgard Thomsen demonstrates through her Vivisections and Strange Metabolisms projects, exhibited at the Centre for Information, Technology and Architecture (CITA) in Copenhagen, how it is possible to unite the seeming polarities of the digital and the physical, engaging‘intangible digital data with tactile physical material’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Otherwise Engaged: New Projects in Interactive Design

What are the possibilities of interactive technologies delivering a new level of social engagement in architecture? Taking 2002, with the ETH Ada project and Diller & Scofidio's Braincoat project, as an important watershed, Mark Garcia reviews the advances that have been made per se, and with four projects in particular, in socially interactive spatial design. Copyright © 2007 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.     

The World's Biggest Sculptor: The Architecture of Massimiliano Fuksas

At the start of the new millennium, Massimiliano Fuksas was one of the most significant Italian architects working outside his home country. His reputation in Italy and abroad, however, was taken to a further level by his completion of the New Milan Trade Fair. Stefano Casciani, an ex-student of Fuksas, provides an insightful and intriguing account of his ‘old’ professor: a robust and seemingly contradictory figure who is capable of great voluminous expression and delicacy. Casciani also finds constancy in his unrelenting energy, freshness and wit. Copyright © 2007 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.     

Concrete Constructs: The Limits of Rationalism in Swiss Architecture

Ákos Moravánszky explains why for him ‘the traces of Mediterranean Rationalism in the new Swiss-German architecture are like the imitation stitching on the moulded plastic dashboard of a new car’. It is an influence which, despite the undeniable impact of Aldo Rossi and the Ticino School at ETH Zurich in the 1970s, remains skin-deep, sharing little with the present in terms of ideology or the interpretation of the historic past. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Radical Italian Architecture Yesterday and Today

In Italy there is a revival of the spirit of 1960s Radicalism. Fresh from university, young architects ‘pick up a rock band name, enrol in an architectural competition or just invent their own research and project installations’. William Menking, who co-curated the 2003 exhibition at London's Design Museum on Superstudio - the supergroup of Italian radicali - and Olympia Kazi bring the new generation of young protagonists under scrutiny. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Convoluted Flesh: A Synthetic Approach to Analogue and Digital Architecture

Marcos Cruz and Marjan Colletti advocate their own distinct design approach that is intuitive and blissful in its opulence, evoking the sublime.Here they discuss the potential of opening up ‘new spatial, or material possibilities’ that are liberated from the self-imposed restrictions of their more technologically driven contemporaries. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture,Liquid, Gas

Wireless, embedded communication technologies with their emphasis on human connectivity rather than the networking of place to place, no longer require the interface of bricks and mortar. Ole Bouman discusses the implications of this for architecture in an age in which people rather than place become the interface. He also describes how his own curatorial work has, in recent years, engaged with time-based rather than location-based technologies. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture and Dispersal

To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with Stan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocative questions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the public sphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects and urban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have been quick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change? Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Growing Semi-Living Structures: Concepts and Practices for the Use of Tissue Technologies for Non-Medical Purposes

For over a decade, artist/researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have led the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), hosted in SymbioticA - The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. It has provided a unique context for their explorations, enabling them to pioneer new ways of growing tissue for artistic purposes outside the ethical strictures of medical laboratories, while also subverting and questioning scientific tools and techniques. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Time Matters: Transition and Transformation in Architecture

Though the contemporary world in the West has only just started to value architecture that is temporary and highly flexible rather than permanent and timeless, the East has a long building tradition respecting the transitory and ephemeral. Mark Taylor , Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia, looks at ways in which recent architecture in China, Japan and New Zealand has been embracing the limits and passing of time.     

Illuminating Embodiment: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Relational Architectures

Art and architecture have a strong tradition of humanism in which man and the human body are the centre and measure of all things. Maria Fernández describes the work of artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer whose work transgresses and challenges these preconceptions through performance, seeking to expose the body and society's receptivity to instability, fluctuation and re-imagining. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychology and Perception of Patterns in Architecture

Pattern perception is often regarded as highly subjective, dependent on individual taste and preference. Neurologically, however, it has been proven that distinct areas of the brain are stimulated differently by different pattern design and colour combinations. Here Patricia A Rodemann probes into the very real physical and psychological consequences of product design finishes and surface patterning. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.