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.     

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.     

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.     

Modernising the Morgan Library

Renzo Piano's recent addition to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York is of interest in its own right because it radically alters the experience at one of the city's most appealing and unique institutions. But it is also worth considering, Jayne Merkel argues, because Piano is now working on more major museums than any architect in the world. At the Morgan, he subtly transformed a magnificent Renaissance Revival private library into a full-fledged modern museum with fine facilities for displaying parts of the collection and making its resources available to scholars. The old parts look as magnificent as ever, though they are now somewhat side-lined. The new parts are strong and elegant. The two are daringly juxtaposed, and the planning for 14,028 square metres (151,000 square feet) of facilities that more than doubles the size of the whole on part of a cramped Manhattan block is skilful. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Eat Me… Drink Me…

Sean Lally of WEATHERS lets out a rallying cry to all architects. He calls on them to make environmental conditions the subject of design rather than regarding them as a standardised part of a building's services. Here he highlights the potential of material systems, which are usually applied to conditioning the interiors of buildings, in the generation of new forms and activities; whether it is in the honing of the performance aspect of a building's function, as in the Water Cube at Beijing (2008), or in the seasonal planning that underpins the concept behind WEATHERS' Wanderings project (2008-9). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

I am a Camera: Electroland

Hugh Hart describes how West Coast practice Electroland has repurposed surveillance technology in an interactive installation in Top of the Rock - the observation platform on top of Rockefeller Center, which has become one of New York's premier visitor attractions. This playful, seemingly whimsical public art is the product of a creative partnership between architect-trained Cameron McNall and programmer Damon Seeley. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Arup Associates

A specialist architectural division of the wider Arup group, Arup Associates has a unique composition and ethos. In its studios, teams of architects, structural engineers, environmental engineers, urban designers and product designers work alongside each other on the design of buildings from a project's inception. It is an interdisciplinary approach that the practice pioneered in the 1960s, and which has been reinvigorated in the last few years by a new emphasis on ‘unified design’ – a radical wholeness in thinking and execution. Here, Jay Merrick talks to Arup Associates' principal Declan O'Carroll and considers his vision of an architecture capable of addressing complexity and sustaining humanity in the face of modernity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Chandavarkar and Thacker

The first architectural firm in Bangalore, founded in 1947 by Narayan Chandavarkar, Chandavarkar and Thacker is currently under the directorship of Prem Chandavarkar and Sai Shankar Bharatan. Continuing the collaborative nature of the practice during its many reorganisations over the years, Prem Chandavarkar has also given the firm a new intellectual edge by confronting Bangalore's new urbanity, and as such is a role model for many younger-generation architects. The practice's current work represents thoughtful and reflective responses as architecture finds itself at a critical juncture in this city of a euphoric present.With the practice's 60-year history, Chandavarkar is particularly aware of the humility and ‘backgroundness’ that once characterised the culture of the city in contrast to the present voluble environment. He has written (including in his essay in this issue) about the nature of practice and production, and has argued why a critical and self-reflexive practice needs to be the order of the day. Chandavarkar and Thacker speak of an ‘aesthetics of absorption’ and a ‘negotiated practice’, both of which should inform a much needed criticality of the exuberant conditions today. ‘A building does not convey meaning as much as it slowly absorbs it,’ declares the practice, and so the test of a building is not the initial impression of its spectacular presentation, but the accrued experiences and memories of its everyday inhabitation. In their understanding of culture as an active and ongoing phenomenon, and hence one not yet susceptible to definition, the architects bring an open-endedness to their own practice. The result is an avoidance of a predetermined language of expression, and thus the variety of spatial, volumetric, site and technofunctional responses, in their array of works. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban American Landscape

Landscape architecture has emerged from the deep sleep it entered during the Modernist period and remained in for most of the 20th century. Now, valued because of the environmental movement, stimulated by collaborations with architects and artists, and presented with opportunities to transform abandoned industrial sites, landscape architects are enthusiastically producing new kinds of parks on brownfields, along waterfronts, even on rooftops and in garbage dumps. Jayne Merkel here looks at ways the designed landscape is creating outdoor public space in a country where it has not always been valued. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Auroville: An Architectural Laboratory

Architect Anupama Kundoo describes how ‘the dream of building a new city’ from scratch for an international spiritual community in southern India has created a magnet for architects around the world. As the city now approaches its 50th anniversary, she asks whether Auroville can keep its architectural culture of innovation and experimentation alight. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Snøhetta

It is not unusual for a practice to take off after winning a major competition. But Snøhetta was founded to enter one. Jayne Merkel explains that the Oslo-based firm flourished almost immediately after winning the international competition to design the Alexandria Library in Egypt in 1989. Ten years later, a victory in a blind international competition for the New National Opera in their home city paved the way for Snøhetta's practice today, which is largely devoted to cultural centres. And although the democratic lifestyle of the office is distinctly Scandinavian, the architects and designers who work there and the projects they work on now span the globe. There is even a New York office in the heart of Wall Street. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Life of Space

The digital has revolutionised the notion of space that was formulated on the two-dimensional page in the Renaissance with the discovery of perspective and the printing press. Derrick de Kerckhove and Antonio Tursi explore how our ideas about space have been overturned since the onset of the computer and the many different ways that architects are reinterpreting them. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Craftsteak,New York

The most chic and beloved restaurants in New York are designed, not by black-garbed hipsters in a downtown loft, but by a family firm of suburban intellectuals on the North Shore of Long Island, over an hour from Manhattan. Craftsteak is the latest in their portfolio which includes Gramercy Tavern, Tabla, Eleven Madison Park, Bluesmoke, Craft, Craftbar, 'Wichcraft, Medi, and the restaurants at the Museum of Modern Art. Jayne Merkel discusses the challenges of restaurant design with architects at Bentel & Bentel, whose once largely local practice is now taking them all over the world, even to Heathrow's new Terminal 5 where they are designing a restaurant for Gordon Ramsay. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

China's Macro-Planning Policies: Architectural Catalyst or Constraint?

China is undergoing one of the most intense and rapid processes of urbanisation in the world today. It also has one of the most centralised planning systems, which is driven by a Soviet-style, five-year plan. Edward Denison looks at the relationship between China's highly systematised planning process and the high-density, standardised form that urban development typically takes. Amidst this formal context, he locates a ‘whisper’ of change afoot for architects.     

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)

A new generation of architects, urban designers and planners are rethinking the city. Bill Menking describes how the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) has orchestrated a number of art-based collaborations in the New York boroughs that enable the community to participate in the reimagining of urban space. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

Looking Beyond Informality

It is all too easy to be optimistic about the economic and social future of Latin America. Daniela Fabricius , the author of 100% Favela: The Informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro (forthcoming), calls into question architects working within the realpolitik of a globalised, post-nationalist world. Could an all too ready acceptance of existing conditions and the adoption of informality leave inhabitants short-changed? For to live informally is also to live precariously - no substitute for secure and prosperous living.     

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.