The Collision of Scarcity and Expendability in Architectural Culture of the 1960s and 1970s

Architecture as a practice assimilates contradictions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approaches to materials and sustainability. New finishes, details and products are continually specified and often fetishised, while architects are at pains to show their minimal impact on the environment. Steve Parnell highlights an era in the pages of Architectural Design in the late 1960s and early 1970s that congregated these incongruities by simultaneously advocating low-energy solutions and expendability, most notably the inflatable.     

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.     

Defining Distinction,or Four Good Reasons for Success: The Extraordinary Career of Renzo Piano

For 30 years, Renzo Piano has been producing distinguished buildings and delighting the world with his innovation and sensitivity. Here, Livio Sacchi attempts to tease out some of the reasons behind Piano's sustained success. Having gained an almost unparalleled international profile during the last couple of decades, a period that has been notoriously difficult for Italian architects, Piano's career has an almost mythic quality. It boasts one of the most unlikely competition wins of all time that ceded one of the most prestigious sites in the world, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to two completely unknown architects in their late 20s. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima: The Making of a Neighbourhood

The original vision at PREVI-Lima was only ever partially realised: less than a third of the 1,500 planned housing units were built and the governmental crisis of the late 1960s meant that the occupants were left to their own devices. Fernando García-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti and Nicolás Tugas look at how, abandoned by the authorities, the families at PREVI turned into incidental architects, completing the project and rendering the neighbourhood an integrated part of the city. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modular Mountain Retreat

This prefabricated tree house in the Catskill Mountains two hours north of New York City nestles into its evergreen site. Designed by Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz of Resolution: 4 Architecture, it combines two types of existing prefabricated components and two prototypes that the architects have developed out of their own research. Jayne Merkel explains how the design supports the owner's rugged outdoor lifestyle with an airy refined retreat that is tailored to the bachelor art director's particular needs. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PREVI-Lima’s Time: Positioning Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda in Peru’s Modern Project

Launched in 1968, the PREVI-Lima housing competition brought informal urbanisation to the attention of architects worldwide. The competition brief required the design of low-rise, high-density expandable homes, grouped in neighbourhoods. Here Sharif S Kahatt puts PREVI’s experimental project within the social, political and theoretical context of the time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Field Guide to Radical Post-Modernism

Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob of FAT curate and classify the work of a diverse and international grouping of Radical Post-Modern architects. They range from the recently defunct Foreign Office Architects (FOA), known for their proclivity for pattern and ornament, to Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow who are rigorous in their pursuit of the ordinary. They run the gamut of the highly figurative, as exemplified by Melbourne-based practice ARM, to the expressive austerity of Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign

Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang call for architects to play a more proactive role in building performance modelling. They look at how this is all made possible with the emergence of accessible, cost-effective web-based systems for practices and the way that this can further be enhanced by integrated performance-based design approaches. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

20世纪30年代到40年代日本建筑中关于“传统”的想法与实践 通过现代建筑的滤镜转译日本建筑传统

文章主要介绍了日本现代主义建筑师如何思考和表达本国建筑传统。在20世纪30至40年代的民族主义背景下,这一主题引起了很多日本建筑师的注意,他们热衷于将现代建筑表现为在钢筋混凝土建筑上加上一个倾斜的瓦屋顶。但也有日本建筑师认为这只是对中国建筑的继承而非日本建筑本质的转译,并进而在现代主义的视角下发展了自身的传统。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Architectural Geometry as Design Knowledge

The onset of digital design has enabled a new level of experimentation with free-form shapes in contemporary architecture, which has made geometry a fertile area of research over the last decade or so. Helmut Pottmann describes how geometry not only has the potential to inform a more exciting generative approach for architects, but can also make design much more construction aware for the whole design team, enabling a wholly digital workflow from design to fabrication. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emerging patterns in the construction of Sejima's,Sanaa's and Nishizawa's domestic spaces,from 1987 to 2010

Sejima and Nishizawa have developed their work without explicitly referencing a theoretical discourse. However, they have stated that their housing projects describe their “architectural biography.” This study presents the hypothesis that systemic theories had influenced their housing projects at a spatial and constructive level. With the aim of testing it, the research produces four lines of results. Firstly, we observe that the word system is prominently current in a significant sample of their published texts. We describe how architects like Tominaga, Ito, Taki, and Shinohara, who influenced Sejima when she was still a student, discussed this concept inspired by Christopher Alexander's texts. The second line brings together all the couple's single-family housing projects published between 1987 and 2010 for the first time in a single document, as well as an original graphic-constructive reconstruction of the most outstanding ones. Thirdly, we unveil the emergence of four constructive patterns by applying these theories to the graphic material developed. Finally, we summarize the results in diagrams, showing the frequency, intensity, and continuity of the identified patterns in the four phases throughout the studied period. Verifying the hypothesis facilitates further research relate their domestic work and their other types of projects.     

Standardising Heterogeneity: Public Housing and the Absent(ed) Architect

Does the decentralisation of housing provision by government necessarily lead to a less standardised and more diverse approach to design and planning? Can targeted financial programmes effectively trigger the forces of the free market to deliver more innovative and varied solutions to housing? Michael Bell , Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in New York, reviews the impact of the introduction of tax credits and other initiatives, brought in to encourage public/private partnerships and the involvement of speculative developers in the 1980s and 1990s, on the quality of public housing in the US. In doing so, he puts out a call to architects to acquaint and engage themselves with the complexities of the financial markets.     

Can Architectural Design Be Research?

So far the Unit Factor series has focused on design research within the context of the Architectural Association in London. Here the series editor, Michael Weinstock, discusses the possibilities of architects undertaking research in practice. He draws on the experience of Chris Bosse, who is responsible for the competition-winning design for the Watercube, Beijing's National Swimming Centre. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Young Experimentalists

Experimental architecture in Italy began to take a new form in the 1990s when young architects, who were embracing new digital technologies, also began to go abroad to study and practise in greater numbers. Anna Baldini outlines a fecund strand in Italian architecture which, while no longer wholly new or youthful, retains its vitality. She highlights, in particular, the contributions of: Avatar Architettura, Gianluca Brini, Elastico spa+3, Exposure Architects, Giuliano Fausti, Luisa Fontana, Giorgio Goffi, ian+, Iotti+Pavarani Architetti, Fabrizio Leoni, ma0/emmeazero, Antonella Mari, Metrogramma, Open Building Research (OBR), RoccAtelier, studio.eu and Vulcanica Achitettura. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structural Emergence: Architectural and Structural Design Collaboration at SOM

At Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) there is a strong culture of collaboration between architects and engineers, and innovation in computational technologies - the firm fervently embraced the computer over 50 years ago. Here a cross-disciplinary team from SOM, architects Keith Besserud and Neil Katz and structural engineer Alessandro Beghini , describe their current work on FE algorithms and how this has informed recent projects.     

No More Stopping

The dissolution of the conventional breaking points in the construction and completion phases of a building's delivery has blurred ‘the distinction between the production of design intent and the transmission of information’. Here Richard Garber , Director of the School of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), advocates that architects should use this as an opportunity to widen their remit, gaining agency and with it responsibility and the financial rewards to practice. Here he draws from the examples of UNStudio, GLUCK+ and his own New-York based practice, GRO Architects.