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.     

An Architecture of Exception: Transgressing the Everyday – Superflex's Flooded McDonald's

In Flooded McDonald's, a film by Danish artists' collective Superflex, the familiar sight of the fast-food restaurant is replaced by ‘a slowly emerging apocalyptical composition’, as the interior floods, objects are displaced and the retail space fills with water. Jonathan Mosley describes how this destabilised and other disaster-invoked visions of architecture – structures and spaces breaking down – enable us to use our imagination to test the parameters of the everyday.     

Intimacy: Eragatory's Experiments in Materiality,Deep Texture and Mood

Because of their textural and sensory qualities – even or uneven, smooth or rough, cold or warm, reflective or matt – particular materials tend to evoke particular moods. But this does not mean that their nature and structure cannot be played with in order to create surprising atmospheres. London-based design practice Eragatory's ‘Intimacy’ series of interiors does just that, producing visual anomalies that distort the viewer's material understanding of space. Isaie Bloch , the firm's founder, describes how.     

Urban [IM]plants Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonheiden,Belgium

Bonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its exceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remained protected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environment has been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creating public spaces that use the town's ‘original landscape as the base material’. 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.     

Animating Architecture: Coupling High-Definition Sensing with High-Definition Actuation

Ruairi Glynn , lecturer on interactive architecture at the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, University College London (UCL), puts the pressing question: ‘What does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?’ Despite the pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing – the Internet of Things (IoT) – and students' ability to speculate, build and test responsive lifesize installations, could practice itself be in danger of getting left behind?     

Medium-Scale Anatolian Cities: Conceptual and Physical Routes of Urban Transformation

Banu Tomruk investigates the post-1980s transformation of the built environment of medium-scale Anatolian cities. She examines the subject through a conceptual and physical framework that places as much emphasis on populist rhetoric – ‘identity crisis’, ‘historicisation’, ‘the making of a tourist city’ – as on the built structures themselves and their realisation as standardised apartment blocks and gated communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture Autonomous (Gerard da Cunha)

Gerard da Cunha maintains his practice from the old Portuguese colony of Goa, which he considers has a novel history in that it was the site of the ‘first sustained encounter between the East and the West’. This encounter has engendered a unique culture and architecture that is evident in da Cunha's lively and rather Gaudíesque work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mapping in Hackney Wick and Fish Island: Observation is Proposition

Hackney Wick and Fish Island, adjacent to the London 2012 Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, has developed a special character over time, accommodating 700 artists' and other creatives' studios in old warehouses. The under-designed ‘scarce’ quality of the public realm contrasts with the highly designed spaces of the Olympic Park. Liza Fior describes how muf has developed an urban strategy that could help assimilate the two sites and cater for the greater expected densities in housing, while retaining the under-determined character of the existing area.     

Pastoral Manoeuvres: Ecologies of City,Nature and Practice

In the 21st century, the greening of public open spaces has proved one of the most compelling marketing teasers, but also one of the biggest ‘elephants in the room’. Architect, educator and urban designer Duncan Berntsen describes how students within the School of Architecture, Design and Construction at the University of Greenwich were encouraged to tackle this by developing ‘measurable innovative disruptions’ that could contribute positively to an urban sense of place.     

Arup Associates

A specialist architectural division of the wider Arup group, Arup Associates has a unique composition and ethos. In its studios, teams of architects, structural engineers, environmental engineers, urban designers and product designers work alongside each other on the design of buildings from a project's inception. It is an interdisciplinary approach that the practice pioneered in the 1960s, and which has been reinvigorated in the last few years by a new emphasis on ‘unified design’ – a radical wholeness in thinking and execution. Here, Jay Merrick talks to Arup Associates' principal Declan O'Carroll and considers his vision of an architecture capable of addressing complexity and sustaining humanity in the face of modernity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cultivating the Field in the Global Hinterland: Community Building for Mass Housing in the Amazon Region

The large-scale residential settlements that have sprung up over the last decade to house migrants flocking to join Brazil's burgeoning rural industries are in urgent need of retrofitting with infrastructure and community facilities if they are to become sustainable. To this end, international urban design practice the BAÚ Collaborative has initiated the ‘Eden’ project – a participatory design process that involves state authorities, local NGOs, residents and social workers. Rainer Hehl , a cofounder of BAÚ, outlines the problem, the project, and its test-site: the mining town of Parauapebas.     

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.     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

The New Delfina

Peter Cook eulogises the exuberant: he urges us to recognise its potential for release, as a true opportunity to let go creatively – and, in fact, to let it all ‘rush out in a torrent’. In tandem, he redraws the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica from his hotel window, as an exuberant pile or liveable conglomeration of grotto-like spaces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Augmented Landscapes and Delicate Machinery

Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen describe how for them drawing is instrumental, enabling them to pursue preliminary investigations that establish ‘a speculative method with which to examine the dynamic force of environmental and architectural processes’. This is illustrated by their Wet Lands: Architectural Waterscapes and Soft Infrastructures research project for London's Thames Estuary.     

In Conversation: Peter Zumthor and Juhani Pallasmaa

The ‘New Nordic – Architecture & Identity’ exhibition (July–September 2012) at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark is significant for the way that it has defined architectural identity in a Northern European context. Here its co-curator, Michael Asgaard Andersen , provides an edited version of a conversation between Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor that was featured on a large screen at the show and included at full length in the museum catalogue.