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.     

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.     

Emerging Technologies and Drawings: The Futures of Images in Architectural Design

Mark Garcia , Senior Lecturer in History and Theory in the Department of Architecture, University of Greenwich, explores the technologically mediated future of drawings in architecture ‘without hands’. He highlights how multiple technological innovations are putting us on the brink of an exploding spectrum of possibilities for the image, and looks at three distinct areas of potential: new media and materials; emerging and future technologies; and theory embodied in fiction and art.     

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.     

Rethinking Minha Casa,Minha Vida: The Resurgence of Public Space

Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV – My House, My Life) is a federal programme started in 2009 that provides low-interest finance to construction companies in an attempt to plug the housing crisis and roll out millions of homes for low-income families across Brazil. Architect Nanda Eskes of Atelier 77 and photographer André Vieira look at the impact that this fast-track, hands-off approach has had on the overall quality of housing provision and the urban environment; they also highlight some innovative initiatives that have been conceived to ameliorate its impact.     

Alpha: From the International Style to the International Space Station

How has a Modernist predilection for the modular contributed to the design of Space Architecture? Leading space architects Constance Adams and Rod Jones highlight how by embracing a diligent modularity in the early 1980s, NASA initiated a design approach that has enabled replicability, flexibility and technological transparency, and has proved the International Space Station resilient in the face of multiple logistical, financial and political challenges.     

Two Sides of the Page: The Antifact and the Artefact

For Bryan Cantley technology has introduced new possibilities for drawing with ‘the ability to render conditions of transformation, phase shifting, entropy and revolution’. It has also prompted a rethink of the phenomenological relationship of architectural drawing with the world; between the page and objects; between the antifact and the artefact. He makes an analogy between the legal status of the unborn child and nascent, unbuilt drawn architecture.     

The Future of Information Modelling and the End of Theory: Less is Limited,More is Different

The computational design strategist Cynthia Ottchen , who was previously Head of Research and Innovation at OMA, offers insights into the future of building information modelling (BIM). Now in the Petabyte Age of the data deluge, she argues that in our adoption of BIM we have to surpass mere data collection and technical optimisation and open up new ways of thinking with the creative use of ‘soft data’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tracking,Tagging and Scanning the City

The proliferation of social media and software, such as building information modelling (BIM), has led to an unprecedented accumulation of data in the last few years, which can be tracked, tagged and scanned.With it, buildings and cities have been transformed into portals for information. Andrew Hudson-Smith , Director at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (UCL), describes how the ability to use emerging urban analytic tool kits provides the possibility of a real-time view of the city and a crystal-ball-like glimpse into urban networks of the future.     

Meeting the New Boss: After the Death of Theory

Christopher Hight seeks to find out what might be left over after the death of theory. Have theoretical questions become merely replaced by reproducible techniques and business plans? How should architects think and practise if they no longer - in the wake of Koolhaas - solely think architecturally? Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Form,Force and Structure: A Brief History

Over the last century, engineers' and architect-engineers' approach to the relationship between form, force and mass has changed significantly, both on a conceptual and methodological level. It is a shift only made possible by the collaborative efforts of design, engineering and construction expertise. Professor Remo Pedreschi discusses the work of Robert Maillart, Pier Luigi Nervi, Eduardo Torroja, Felix Candela, Heinz Isler and Eladio Dieste to illustrate the important changes and contributions that have taken place and how they influence the way we think about performance from an engineering point of view today. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transgression in and of the City

For Turkish artist and educator Can Altay ‘today's cities are full of limits’. This unevenness can be regarded as the manifestation of current investment patterns and political and cultural conflicts. Does, however, transgression offer opportunities to subvert this? Is it possible for a city's inhabitants, artists and architects to open up boundaries and through the power of presence to intervene in the status quo?     

Changing Building Sites: Industrialisation and Automation of the Building Process

The introduction of robotics in construction is part of a much longer history of industrialisation and automation on the building site. Thomas Bock of the Technical University of Munich and Silke Langenberg of the University of Applied Sciences, Munich, highlight how the Industrial Revolution and the development of a transport infrastructure in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe first triggered the shift in the building trade from a largely localised industry into a national and mechanised one, leading to the highly advanced automated construction techniques that continue to be developed in Japan and other Asian countries to this day.     

The Return of the Future: A Second Go at Robotic Construction

The last few years have witnessed a robotic revival with a reinvigoration of interest in what the robot can offer the construction industry. Martin Bechthold looks back at the first robotic boom during the 1980s and 1990s when millions of Japanese yen were invested in developing robots that could address the shortage of construction labour. Bechthold further explores the similarities and dissimilarities of the current and previous periods of activity, as supported by his research at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD). 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.     

Teapots,Dresses and Chairs

Contrary to the impression given throughout this issue of 2, the future of the architectural profession is not to be found in scaling down to the level of household products and fashion items. So argues London-based architect Gilles Retsin , who teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture. While embracing transdisciplinarity and engagement with multiple scales in architectural practice and education, he sees these as evidence of a more research-based turn, rather than an abandonment of architects' key calling. Although also opening up the profession to a product rather than service-based business model, small-scale objects essentially offer a context for experimentation with new technology that then begs to be scaled up.