Deus Ex Machina: From Semiology to the Elegance of Aesthetics

Architecture's ability to realise large-scale effects permits its emphasis to shift aesthetics on a project-by-project basis. Elegance unleashes a specific visual intelligence that can be achieved by refinement and precision of surface. Here, Mark Foster Gage investigates how elegance can be designed into a project. This requires a ‘visual and formal expertise’ combined with a careful curation of mutation and awareness of ‘extreme differentiation’. Elegance often only reveals itself partially, acquired, in the design stage, through ‘isolated views and expertly calibrated moments’ and perceived fleetingly in built work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Biodiversity Targets as the Basis for Green Design

Mike Wells , the Director of Biodiversity by Design, and Ken Yeang outline the need for biodiversity targets in architecture to provide a more far-reaching basis for green design. Rather than just literally ‘greening’ a building by covering it with foliage, they seek to encourage designers to engage with wider ecological processes and in more specific detail. Copyright © 2010 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.     

建筑电气工程应适应时代发展

根据现代建筑功能的提高 ,在建筑电气工程建设中不但要做到适用、安全、节能、经济、方便、美观、便于安装与维修 ,而且还要在电气设计、配电系统及电气设备的选择、安全措施、信息化智能化方面考虑人们的生活和社会活动的需要 ,以适应时代发展的要求     

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Renewable Types and the Urban Plan

The notion of designing according to building type for some might imply constraint, or even a reversion to convention. In Diploma Unit 6 at the AA in London, Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby have proved typology can be used to liberating effect, producing series that harness ‘the cumulative intelligence’ of type, while ‘surpassing both its idea and its deep structure’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Royal Institution

David Littlefield describes how Sir Terry Farrell's rethinking of the Royal Institution in Mayfair has led to a rationalisation and redesign that has transformed the premises from a tatty Georgian labyrinth into an airy series of modern spaces, Farrell having effectively re-imagined ‘the building while retaining the essence of what made it special in the first place’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Radical Sources of Design Engineering

The German architect and structural engineer, Werner Sobek is internationally renowned for his expertise in lightweight structures - an approach that is epitomised by the dramatic elegance of his glazed House R128. Here, Sobek explains how his practice has extended a highly specialised focus on ultra-lightweight facades to that of building structures, facade planning, and sustainable and low-energy solutions, interweaving research and innovation with design and consultancy work. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban Wash

Sean Lally of WEATHERS urges designers to realise the performative capabilities of the ambient effects of the urban wash – the artificial light given off by cities at night. Taking up this principle of a wash within his designs for the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, he demonstrates how a ‘climatic wash’ could create an artificial microclimate that extends the seasonal activities of the museum's programmes.     

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.     

Le monde de la pratique

The Green Building Materials '96 (GBM '96) conference brought manufacturers of building materials and products into the process of defining what may be called ‘green building materials’. Forty-seven manufacturers and associations presented information on environmental and associated quality criteria of their products. In addition, materials analysis and certification, building design, implementation, information sources and marketing were discussed. Charles J. Kibert and Gisela Bosch report.     

Galapagos: On the Logic and Limitations of Generic Solvers

A graduate in architecture and urbanism from TU Delft, David Rutten works with software company Robert McNeel & Associates (RMN). The developer of Grasshopper®, he was recently awarded the ACADIA 2012 award for innovative research. The Galapagos plug-in, which Rutten has developed for Grasshopper®, implements two generic solvers (one using a genetic algorithm and one using a simulated annealing algorithm). A generic solver will find a solution to a problem that can be expressed in a mathematical way; however, as he explains here, while these solutions may not be exact, they will be very good.     

Performing Elegance

At the level of global culture, the impact of elegant buildings is magnified where there is a seamless integration of complex parts and fabrication expressed through a mastery of techniques and transformative set of features. Hani Rashid of Asymptote explains how, in working at an international scale, the practice is now seeking to propagate innovative design through a ‘developed understanding of the multiple levels of local responses that affect both local and global conditions’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bricked House: How Code and Law Can Lock You Out

Could we be unwittingly divesting too much control in technology? In so doing, could we be sleepwalking into a future in which our personal assets are no longer ours, but all too easily relinquished by the bank or mortgage company? Molly Wright Steenson , an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks so. She evokes an arresting vision of a close future in which our smartphones and the operating systems integrated within our cars and homes become our friend-enemy, immediately locking us out when they are no longer programmed to respond directly to our touch.     

New York City (Steady) State

What would happen if New York became a self-sufficient city state, entirely self-reliant in terms of food, waste, energy, movement, manufacture, building, water and clean air? Michael Sorkin provides a masterplan for the metropolis with an ecological footprint that coincides with its political boundaries. Controversially, he explores the possibilities of urban autonomy and what the necessary steps might be in transforming a city's form.     

Ex Silico Ad Vivo: Computational Simulation and Urban Design at Foster + Partners

What makes a successful city? Can this be replicated simply by following tried-and-tested urban typologies? Francis Aish, Adam Davis and Martha Tsigkari of Foster + Partners' Applied Research + Development (ARD) group argue that technology allows other approaches to urban design. They explain that computational simulation is increasingly valuable in predicting how the dynamic and complex systems of a city might play out in an urban context, forging an exciting new alliance between computation and intuition.     

How Protocells Can Make ‘Stuff’ Much More Interesting

Rachel Armstrong explains why living systems with their own metabolisms provide more exciting and far-reaching solutions than conventional building materials. She also explicitly explains why the pursuit of protocell technology, which enables us to artificially design living systems, is so much more promising than established methods, such as incorporating high-maintenance biological features – green walls or roofs – into existing urban context or applying biomimicry to traditional materials. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Studio Mumbai Architects ( Bijoy and Prija Jain)

Studio Mumbai Architects presents an exquisite architectural poiesis through the crafting or weaving of the building with the landscape, and the crafted fabrication of the building itself. The result is a choreographed architecture, compelling also in its Zen-like sparseness and delightful elegance. The intense sensuality of the practice's work is palpable without ideological mediation, through the modulation of light, material crafts, tactility, contrasting colours, and a heightened awareness of the site. Seeking ‘tradition’ through materiality and crafting, the architects incorporate ‘local’ construction techniques as a Modernist aestheticisation of the unselfconscious tradition. Secret gardens, structures embedded in the landscape inviting flexible uses, materials that interact with garden, sky and weather, and the transformative effects of time (weathering) are just some of the terms of engagement for the work of Studio Mumbai. Very few architects since Geoffrey Bawa have established such a compelling and instructive relationship with the landscape, as this requires the patient botanical metaphor of cultivation. The question of landscape is not just a pictorial one, but one that must be substantiated by ecological and sustainable programmes. Directed by Bijoy and Priya Jain, Studio Mumbai is a collaborative, multidisciplinary firm integrating architecture, landscape and interior design with product and furniture design. With a focus on crafting, the practice maintains its own established, year-round fabrication facilities in two locations where the timber structures, finished carpentry and furniture are handcrafted for each of its projects. Here, teams of skilled craftspeople, many originating from a long lineage of regional artisans, collaborate in a flexible and highly precise manufacturing process. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Why We Need Architecture of Tolerance

Professor and Chair in Integrated Design at the University of Calgary Faculty of Environmental Design, Branko Kolarevic has established an international reputation as an author and commentator on digital design and manufacturing in architecture. Here he questions the importance of high-definition tolerance in construction itself. As an industry that operates at far greater sizes and scales than other manufacturing bases, has the ‘messy world of building’ not always had to allow for a reasonable tolerance of errors? Should high-definition processes, which negate or negotiate zero tolerance, really be for architects and construction professionals the Holy Grail that they first appear?