The Reluctant Architect: An Interview with Wang Shu of Amateur Architects Studio

On the announcement of the awarding of the Pritzker Prize to the first Chinese architect, Wang Shu, in May 2012, jury chair Lord Palumbo commended him for an architecture that is ‘timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal’. Visiting Wang and his work in the ancient city of Hangzhou in Eastern China, shortly afterwards Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren sought to understand why Wang might have succeeded where other architects have failed in a Chinese and international context, forging an innovative approach to architecture, which is in tune with tradition while being of a ‘genuine and often sublime originality’.     

Building In and Out of Place

To seize the opportunities that designing globally afford – albeit in a disorientated and displaced manner – or to continue practising at the small scale in an informed and sensitive way, is the predicament that most ambitious offices are confronted with today. Here David Leatherbarrow , Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that there could be a third way that manifests itself in the land itself and a project's site. He suggests terrain ‘has the power to allow and to resist the dislocations we experience today, recalling what a location has been while indicating what it is becoming’.     

Proto-Design: Architecture's Primordial Soup and the Quest for Units of Synthetic Life

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Neri Oxman is engaged on the Material-Based Computation project. It takes an approach that can be regarded as analogous to protocells. It places a similar emphasis on material properties as intermediary agents for the built environment, containing the information for behaviour and evolution. Here she outlines three methods that define her research. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

China's Macro-Planning Policies: Architectural Catalyst or Constraint?

China is undergoing one of the most intense and rapid processes of urbanisation in the world today. It also has one of the most centralised planning systems, which is driven by a Soviet-style, five-year plan. Edward Denison looks at the relationship between China's highly systematised planning process and the high-density, standardised form that urban development typically takes. Amidst this formal context, he locates a ‘whisper’ of change afoot for architects.     

Newness,Tradition and Identity: Existential Content and Meaning in Architecture

At a time when novelty and aesthetic invention have become the established norm for contemporary architecture, the esteemed Finnish author and architect Juhani Pallasmaa speaks out in defence of tradition. He explains how nuance, expressive subtlety and an ambition for an experiential and existential quality in a work require a sense of historical continuum: ‘An embodiment of the essence of tradition’ as a precursor for ‘meaningful creativity’.     

Iran in the Regional Context

For much of its history, Iran was part of an extensive empire with far-reaching trade and cultural networks. The current political situation, however, has often led to a misplaced patriotism that has emphasised the heritage of the nation state over its connections across the region. Farrokh Derakhshani flags up the danger of appropriating a wider common heritage from a local rather than a global perspective, and looks at Iran in the wider context of its immediate neighbours.     

Outside the Terrestrial Sphere Greg Lynn FORM: N.O.A.H. (New Outer Atmospheric Habitat) and New City

Renowned architect and educator Greg Lynn describes two projects - N.O.A.H, a science-fiction film, and New City, a design exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York - that directly ‘engage the theme of Space Architecture as the new frontier for design research in terms of the spatial character and navigation of environments with alternative gravities’.     

Curating the Digital: An Interview with MoMA's Paola Antonelli

As Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Paola Antonelli treats digital and analogue design with equal regard. Here she talks to Guest-Editor Neil Leach about some of her decisions. She discusses the distinctions between design, art and architecture; how she keeps a clear head amid the prevailing euphoria over new technologies, in order to choose only those pieces that also represent successful design; whom she views as paragons of design in the digital age; and why she believes that architectural education needs to be reinvented.     

Site/Non-Site: Extending the Parameters in Contemporary Landscape

As the world teeters on the verge of environmental collapse, landscape architecture has taken on a new significance offering a longed-for sanctuary for our increasingly urbanised lives. Here, in his introduction to the issue, guest-editor Michael Spens explains how by taking its impetus from land art, landscape architecture, as an expanded field, transcends the conventional confines of site. This renders it possible to read architecture ‘as landscape, or as non-landscape, as building becomes non-site’ and the ‘site indeed materialises as the work per se’. 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.     

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?     

Developing a Sensitivity to Locale and ‘Human Experience’

Most of the architects featured in this issue, who are known for their sensitivity to place, studied abroad and continue to practise and teach internationally. Jayne Merkel explores how a broadening of personal experience through travel has helped hone their affinity to the particular and the local over the standard and the global.