Ever Faster But Still Very Good

Completing a building on time at a high quality is an age-old challenge for design and construction professionals. But what happens when everything speeds up exponentially? Jonathan Mallie is an expert in integrating design innovation with technologically advanced construction solutions. The founder of JLM | design & construction consultancy, he was previously a principal at SHoP in New York. Here he describes how 4D and 5D building information modelling (BIM) technologies allow architects to build quickly in response to clients' needs for speed, but also benefit the design-and-build process.     

Too Good to Be True: The Survival of English Everyday PoMo

‘Intelligent, eclectic, witty, profoundly humanistic, and keen to debunk an inflexible, elitist and dangerously authoritarian Modernism’: Kester Rattenbury evokes the spirit of early British Post-Modernism. She reminds us of how in the early 1980s it spearheaded a spirited community architecture that played a strategic role in protest against wholesale, motorway-led redevelopments and the survival of Convent Garden. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Working with Wiki,by Design

Andrew Burrow and Jane Burry explain the use of online platforms, such as wiki, employed by the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT University in Melbourne. As they demonstrate, these platforms enable projects whose participants span the globe, in turn situating SIAL within an internationally distributed design research network incorporating diverse forms of expertise. This includes the academic research under way at SIAL, much of which is done collaboratively with various other design and research entities, as well as the international work of SIAL's director Mark Burry, who has been developing innovative design and fabrication methods for the completion of Gaudí's complex proposal for the Sagrada Família church. SIAL's wiki platform collapses geographic and temporal distance to allow geographically dispersed agents to collaborate in unprecedented ways, integrating widely diverse sets of knowledge into the design process. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

99.7 Per Cent Pure

The HEPA air filter is only capable of processing 99.7 per cent of airborne particles, leaving 0.3 per cent unaccounted for. Mason White describes the work of Canadian installation artist An Te Liu who made air-filtration appliances his main subject. Copyright © 2009 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.     

Lightness and Fluidity: Remarks Concerning the Aesthetics of Elegance

Over the last century, elegance as a term has been conspicuously absent from discussions centred on both architecture and the philosophy of aesthetics. Elegance's time has, however, now come. David Goldblatt describes how the maturation of digital discourse has led to the onset of a new, multifaceted, sensual rationality that is evident in recent designs and constructed works. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia

The project here, begun in 2009 by the Invisible University,¹ a collaboration between the EXP/University of Westminster and the Architectural Association, speculates on the ‘dis-urban’: new effects on the post-print, post-digital landscape at a local and global level. Samantha Hardingham and David Greene provide the narrative. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Near Futures: Associative Archetypes

How might it be possible to create computational systems that are sufficiently intuitive to make human experience of space a design driver? Guest-Editor Christian Derix and Prarthana Jagannath describe a series of research projects that were undertaken at the Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture (CECA) at the University of East London between 1999 and 2009, which put aside a structuralist, performance-led approach in favour of new learning models based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have the capacity to respond to human activity.     

The Living: Surface Tensions

‘Our work begins with the premise of a dynamic world. Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response?’ New York-based team The Living, led by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, have developed a practice of deep, open-source interfaces of participation. Jordan Geiger describes how for The Living their home city and its environs is a site of evolving forms of public space whether on land, air or water. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Tailored Home: Housebrand

Loraine Fowlow describes how in Calgary, Alberta, Canada's fifth biggest city, John Brown has established Housebrand, a practice that is notable both for its innovative approach to residential design and for its adeptness in understanding its client base and the particular context of the Calgary housing market. The company has masterfully matched its own skills and services to customer demand in a way that is almost unprecedented within the architectural profession. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

El Sur Global: Future Resilient City

Shifting the focus from futuristic visions, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner with Alexis Kalagas of interdisciplinary design practice Urban-Think Tank urge us to ‘forget about utopia’, for in the most part the urban environment of 2050 is already built. Architects’ sights need to be set on the sometimes grim and unfolding reality of favelas and the world's informal cities.     

All Night Long: The Architectural Jazz of the Texas Rangers

In the mid-1950s, a group of young faculty at the University of Texas School of Architecture in Austin - aka the Texas Rangers - entertained themselves with weekly sessions of a sophisticated, collective drawing game, ‘Dot-the-Dot’, in which there was an emphasis on inventive fluency in hand drawing as well as an innate knowledge of historic European city plans. What happened when Mark Morris , Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University, decided in a design studio to ask present-day students to revive the game?     

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.     

Inventing the Rural: A Brief History of Modern Architecture in the Countryside

The rural has long occupied a valuable, if under-theorised position in modern architectural history. Here, Cole Roskam , Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Hong Kong, highlights key moments in this history and, in doing so, illuminates a central paradox at the heart of architecture's various turns to the countryside; namely, can architects maintain the physical and social integrity of the rural when they are themselves a fundamental vector of its changing character?     

The Space-Time of Pre-emption: An Interview with Brian Massumi

The philosopher Brian Massumi is known for his explorations of experience, art, media theory and politics and has recently turned his attention to understanding the impact that sustained fear has on perception in a post-9/11 world. In an interview with guest-editor Charles Rice , Massumi defines threat by distinguishing it from real danger and how it manifests itself in both civil and military spaces of pre-emptive action that are primed to the possibilities of attack. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Upgrading Computational Design

Shajay Bhooshan heads up the computation and design ZHACODE group at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and is a course master at the Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory (AADRL). Here he argues that Parametricism 2.0 has a vital role to play in the progressing of computational design. Assimilating the exploratory developments of the last 15 years, he asserts how the next phase of Parametricism will enable a further consolidation and evolution of digital practices.     

The Architectural Detail and the Fear of Commitment

Mark Burry holds a unique position in architecture, straddling the worlds of practice and academia as Senior Architect to the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona and as Professor at RMIT in Melbourne, where he is Founding Director of the RMIT Design Research Institute. In his Counterpoint to this issue of AD, he puts the spotlight back on construction, asking whether the detail could be in danger of falling victim to an inadvertent and ‘massive separation of design from making’. As he states: ‘to detail effectively is to understand not only what the building “is”, but how it will be made’.     

Baroque Parameters

Andrew Saunders describes how students on Rensselaer School of Architecture's Rome programme were encouraged to explore the geometry and mathematics that underlie the architecture of the Baroque through parametric design. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.