Building as Refined Object: The Architecture of Antonio Citterio

Sebastiano Brandolini describes the work of Antonio Citterio who, despite a low-key personal presence on the Italian architectural scene and an architecture of quiet restraint, has gained an enviable international reputation for his elegant and ‘impeccably well-made’ buildings. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Informalising Architecture: The Challenge of Informal Settlements

Transgression is often driven by the power to exercise choice and consciously cross the line. As Kim Dovey , Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne, explains, informal settlements, which have grown up globally out of immediate need for shelter and community, and are legally precarious, transgress established codes of ‘land tenure, urban planning, design and construction’. Their condition requires transgression, even if they are subversion through necessity rather than by design. So what is architecture's future role in informal settlements? And what can be learnt from this more ad hoc and incremental model of urban design?     

Complex Systems Architecture

Neil Spiller reveals the complexity of architectural systems to us, or is it the complexity of the architectural mind? For Spiller, the potential of a single notation as a seed for a truly ecological architecture provides an essential catalyst, triggering a multifaceted musing that takes in diagrams, Paul Preissner's new competition entry for the Taiwan Centre of Disease Control and his future work with Dr Rachel Armstrong on complex biological systems. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture

Interactive design has come about as a result of the intermingling of disciplines. As a consequence, the language it uses has become blurred - borrowed or stolen with little restraint from elsewhere. Though particular terms have become ubiquitous, the original concepts that lie behind them have been lost. This means that all too frequently they are no longer knowingly used. Usman Haque sorts the wheat from the chaff and brings clarity to bear on the vocabulary and thinking behind interactivity. Copyright © 2007 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.     

Natural Methods of Interaction Or Natural Interaction in the Everyday Digital World

Computers, mobiles and automatised machines are so omnipresent that the means by which we interact with digital devices is now generally regarded as a given. Italian practice iO Agency, though, questions our use of mechanised interfaces and the language that they require us to learn. Valentina Croci explains how iO Agency has developed more natural ways for people to interact with digital environments through physical or tactile ‘triggers’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of the Post-Fordist City

In A Simple Heart, DOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara) develops an archetype for the contemporary European city. An ‘Edufactory’ of 22 residential units, it has its direct antecedent in Cedric Price's Potteries Thinkbelt (1964–6) project that proposed transforming a redundant railway network in North Staffordshire into a university campus.     

The Gold Mine: A Ludic Architecture

As an educator and architect, Nic Clear is renowned for his passion for film and science fiction; he teaches a unit in film and animation at the University of Greenwich, London, where he is Head of the Department of Architecture and Landscape. Here, in a recent speculative project, the Gold Mine, he weaves together a science fiction-like narrative that is heightened by its attention to visual and narrative detail.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Meteorological Architecture

Philippe Rahm hails the emergence of a new meteorological architecture, in which the invisible takes precedence over the visible, and the atmospheric, conduction of heat, perspiration and shifting weather and climate conditions are foregrounded. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive Strategies for an Ecological Architecture

Simos Yannas , Director of the Environment & Energy Studies Programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, calls for a rethink of architectural processes. Presently, architecture is conceived as an inanimate material system, but to become truly bioclimatic it needs to become adaptive in tune with the behaviour and the comfort of occupiers. Shifting from an emphasis on providing fixed interior conditions, it requires a dynamic approach to building performance and the resultant interactions between occupants, buildings and engineering appliances. Copyright © 2011 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.     

World of Similitude: The Metamorphosis of Iranian Architecture

How can an ancient architectural heritage become a rich resource for inspiration rather than a burden or a limitation? Moving away from a conventional formal analysis of historic architecture, which identifies particular periods with specific styles or characteristics, Farshad Farahi suggests an approach that unites the contemporary philosophically and spiritually with its past - by seeking out an imaginary dimension or ‘World of Similitude’.     

Reading the Wind and Weather: The Meteorological Architecture of Studio Mumbai

Architectural writer and educator Kazi Ashraf likens the work of Studio Mumbai to that of a tree, in which landscape and architecture converge. As he explains, such a position is realised by a profound commitment to the act of building in which native materials are condensed into temporary structures. This requires due attention to the process of making, reflected in a workshop practice that incorporates craftsmen and artisans, and by necessity has to stand outside the conventional expectations for construction and economies of time.     

The Chinese City: A Self-Contained Utopia

Could the utopian ideal of building a tabula rasa city from scratch be slipping away? Neville Mars , Director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF), Beijing, highlights how in the last decade development has become focused on the periphery of existing metropolises. Fuelled by the aspirant middle classes' inexorable appetite for settling in modern cities, urbanisation is manifesting itself in ‘self-contained utopias’: walled-off, slick cities that are dormitory, satellite towns rather than independent urban settlements. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.