Evaluation of enhanced design and build system a case study of a hospital project

This study involves an investigation of a hospital project which adopted an ‘enhanced design and build’ form of building procurement. The paper assesses the procurement system from the perspectives of the client, client's consultants, contractor, contractor's consultants, and contractor's subcontractors. A detailed case study of North District Hospital is described to illustrate the process of this procurement system. All the interviewees generally agreed that the hospital project was successful in meeting the time, cost, quality, functional and safety requirements set by the client. As the first project adopting the ‘enhanced design-build’ procurement system in Hong Kong, the benefits of applying this innovative procurement system were demonstrated.     

Perspectives on component-based design in Japanese construction

The industrialization of building production was the subject of heated debate in Japan during the 1960s and into the 1970s. Various concepts of ‘component-based design’ were introduced with the purpose of stimulating innovation and creating a more efficient building process. In this paper these concepts are reviewed from today's perspectives, and the necessary revisions are examined that might make them more useful in contributing to the future development of the Japanese construction industry.     

Quality practices in design organizations

Design organizations play a major role in the construction industry: they are the media that transfer the requirements of the client to the contractor and ensure that they are met. Thus they need to provide a high quality of service to ensure that their client's project achieves the best possible standards of cost, time and quality. Seventy quality practices (QP) were identified as having a bearing on the quality of service provided by the local design organizations. These quality practices were grouped into fifteen sections termed quality sections (QS). The prevalence of these practices among the local design organizations was surveyed and determined. The results indicate a significant need for improvement in the quality sections ‘working relationship’, ‘employee training and education’, and ‘performance quality audit’. The study reveals the need for the establishment of a design code, and evaluation standards for local design organizations.     

The Nomenclature of Style: Brutalism,Minimalism, Art History and Visual Style in Architecture Journals

Naming styles or movements is a basic mechanism of architectural journals. The announcement of phenomena such as ‘critical regionalism’ or ‘deconstructivism’ involves referring architectural developments to a context in socio-politics or philosophy, and thus provides at least an initial resistance to their understanding as formal styles, which they quickly become. A different strategy is the naming of an architectural moment in the traditional form of an art historical style. Peter Reyner Banham and the Architecture Review's promotion of ‘Brutalism’ as an anti-aesthetic, look its conceptual form from explicit movements, with members and agenda, such as Futurism. Architectural Design's promotion of ‘Minimalism’ in the l990s exemplifies a different kind of style. In both cases, apparently divergent uses of ‘style’ are complicated by the process of naming, and by the tendency of the journal's graphic design to become the style—to become self-identifying.     

When a Tree House No Longer Says ‘House’, Are We Virtually There?

In the spring of 2013, Akira Suzuki , the Japanese architectural critic, editor and Professor of Architecture at Musashino Art University, issued an invitation to three architects to design and self-build a tree house for HC Andersen Park in the suburbs of Tokyo. He observes how the resulting ephemeral structures, built out of the trees themselves, invited interaction with visitors and, and were ‘less material buildings with solid roofs and walls than “conditions” or “happenings”’. He discerns that the widespread adoption of social media in Japan has resulted in a paradigm shift. This has moved creativity away from the folly, as an object of contemplation, scale-less and position-less on the landscape's horizon and solitary in the mind. In its place, the solitary browsing of networks is causing people to meet in actual space, which resists the easy flows of internet connectivity without imposing walls or rooms.     

Responsive Systems|Appliance Architectures

Branden Hookway and Chris Perry introduce the Responsive Systems Group (RSG), a newly formed design research collective at Cornell University's School of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, the work here addresses questions of collective intelligence at a number of scales. In terms of practice, collaborative, group-based work is emphasised, with both the students as well as the instructors working in teams of three (Perry and Hookway are co-directors of the Responsive Systems Group along with Ezra Ardolino). The second scale addresses the technologies and methodologies of design itself, exploring problems of ‘responsivity’ in the context of artificial intelligence and the emerging fields of robotic and sensory interaction design. Finally, and by extension, the issue of scale itself becomes a site of inquiry as the RSG's work focuses less on ‘architecture’ and more on ‘design’, implicitly if not explicitly loosening general notions of disciplinarity as a means of revealing new sites for mixture and innovation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Nature as a Model for Large-scale Planting Design

This study was undertaken to arrive at an objective design process to prepare planting designs for large areas of woodland, as found in regional parks, green belts around cities and hillsides along freeways. The method involves preparing a computer program consisting of: (1) a ‘Community Specifier Database’ (CSD), determining the suitable plant community for the project site, based on its climatic and overall soil characteristics; (2) a ‘Law Extracting Package’ (LEP), determining the laws governing the distribution of species within an existing native plant community, with respect to topographic and soil variation; and (3) a ‘Species Assigning Package’ (SAP), which uses the laws from the LEP to assign the suitable species to each location, with its specific topographic and soil characteristics, within the project site. The program is intended to be used as a decision support system for landscape architects in arriving at planting designs resembling natural plant communities.     

Finding Time

What has our sense of the acceleration of time got to bear on our experience of cities? How might it be consciously countered by architects ‘finding time’ through ‘thoughtful design and measured observation’. ‘A self-declared ‘cultural polymath’, Tim Makower is the founder of Makower Architects. A partner at Allies and Morrison for many years, he has significant experience in leading large-scale projects, ranging from the King's Cross Masterplan in London to the Old Doha Regeneration Framework, which he draws on here and in his book Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale (Wiley, 2014).     

We Will Be Making Active Form

In response to the relative redundancy of architect-designed buildings and the proliferation of commercial structures that are rolled out to a highly formulaic spatial format across the world's cities, Keller Easterling advocates a new architecture of ‘active form’. These active forms potentially perform as ‘verbs’ rather than ‘nouns’ to the city's activities, providing ‘the means by which the field changes’ and the ‘repertoire for how it plays’.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hitler's ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’: a case only for Poland? A forgotten dimension of national-socialist spatial and town planning in the former Czechoslovakia

Adolf Hitler constructed his Nazi ideology as a universal worldview aimed at the German Reich's eastward expansion; the ‘Generalsiedlungsplanung Ost’ programme was officially launched in 1940. The forcible establishment of multiple administrative units in 1938/1939 created the conditions for an architecture that would serve the totalitarian regime. Thus began an enormous planning process and the targeted institutionalization of urban development and spatial planning and research. This programme included not only German government agencies and research institutions specifically established or reorganized for this purpose, but increasingly also involved communal politics and independent or government architects. The author pursues the thesis that this Germanization concept, formulated within the framework of the ‘Generalsiedlungspläne Ost’, allowed the relevant agencies to increase their influence or eliminate any opponents. From this basis, the study identifies the role that GBI (Generalbauinspektor) for Berlin Albert Speer, his architects, and local architects played in the planning process in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and analyses the architectural evidence of the Nazi rulers’ Germanization and colonization policies. The initial comparison of the urban planning models applied in ‘Großreich Deutschland’ with those in the annexed regions in today's Poland and Czech Republic offers relevant arguments related to this far-reaching sociological and architecture–historical topic.     

User-Focused Public Space(M)UTOPIA in Denmark

The Danish practice MUTOPIA brings to public space a strong sense of delight and playfulness, while demonstrating an overriding concern with the end user. As Serban Cornea of MUTOPIA explains, a temporary plaza for the extensive development of Orestad Nord in Copenhagen aims ‘to speed up the process of creating the area's own identity’, while the practice's housing for Lyngby-Taarb'k, Hovedstaden, audaciously puts the ‘garden’ back into the ‘garden suburb’ by relocating the transport infrastructure to the rooftops. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Louise T Blouin Institute,West London

The borderlands of Notting Hill and Shepherd's Bush – at the very fringes of the Westway – have become the site of London's largest new privately owned artspace. A nonprofit foundation funded by Louise T Blouin MacBain, the Canadian CEO of a global media business and an arts philanthropist, the institute has been designed both as a home for the Blouin Foundation and as an effective showcase for the work of newly emerging and established artists. Jeremy Melvin describes how architects Borgos Dance have used the ‘intriguing’ exterior of an old coachbuilder's workshop to their advantage, in hewing out a ‘compelling’ new interior. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of ‘early-phase mining’ in reframing net-positive development

The term ‘net-positive development’ has gained significant recognition by both academics and professionals, especially in architecture. A net-positive development increases or creates economic, social and ecological capital(s) and makes a positive contribution to ecosystem services. Designing how excess resources may be used beyond a site's boundary is a very appealing notion, but difficult to put into practice without the tools and methods to support net-positive development. The effectiveness and potential impact on community design of ‘net-positive development’ is questioned when its evaluation is limited to a quantitative analysis only. A broader definition of net positive is offered that equally places social dimensions alongside ecological health through ‘mining’ for synergies and leverage points in the early stages of a design project. An emphasis is placed on the undervalued first step in the design process of ‘mining: evaluating the dormant, inherent potential’. This can be done through a process of questioning the conventional parameters of a context's predefined limits. A framework is also provided that can prove beneficial at this phase. It is posited that strong mining can provide full-spectrum change where true positive benefits, on multiple scales and for multiple stakeholder interests, are achieved.     

Textile Tectonics: An Interview with Lars Spueybroek

‘Architectural design is not about having ideas, but about having techniques, techniques that operate on a material level. It's about making matter think and live by itself.’ Here Lars Spuybroek of NOX talks to Maria Ludovica Tramontin about his engagement with the work of Gottfried Semper and Frei Otto and how it has led him to his own brand of textile tectonics or ‘soft constructivism’, in which textiles are transformed into the tectonic through conventional textile techniques - weaving, bundling, interlacing, braiding, knitting or knotting - effectively building structure through softness and flexibility. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post-War Modernism: Maxwell Fry's buildings at the University of Liverpool

This paper considers the architecture and design process of Liverpool University's Veterinary School and Civil Engineering building, designed by the modernist pioneer architect, Edwin Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) in the period 1955–60. The architecture of Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War marked a departure from the modernism associated with the International Style, ‘white cubes’ and ‘primitive functionalism’, and there was a move amongst architects and reports in the architectural press that sought to review architecture through the agendas of ‘expressive’, ‘formal’ and even ‘vernacular’ design. Both of Fry's buildings initially appear as subscribers to the functionalist doctrine, adopting a sombre, even aloof exterior, but a closer inspection reveals that they are not just the routine, clichéd modern buildings that became so prevalent and scorned throughout the 1950s. They demonstrate some of the wider concerns architects had at that time, namely: monumentality, the use of art and murals as a means of conveying meaning, and a concern for context within a functional-vernacular tradition. These notions were also astutely tracked through the architectural journals along with ‘formalism’ (leading to Brutalism) and perhaps most significantly through Nikolaus Pevsner's determination to bind the English picturesque tradition with the lineage of Modernism.     

Design of steel sheathed cold-formed steel framed shear walls

A method for the design of steel sheathed cold-formed steel framed shear walls has been developed for inclusion in the American Iron and Steel Institute's North American standards for lateral design using a comprehensive database of single-storey shear wall tests carried out in Canada and in the United States. The wall configurations differed in terms of wall aspect ratio, framing and sheathing thickness, screw fastener schedule and framing reinforcement. The Equivalent Energy Elastic–Plastic (EEEP) analysis approach was used to derive key design information from the test data, including: nominal shear resistance, a resistance factor, an over-strength factor for capacity based seismic design and ‘test-based’ seismic force modification factors for ductility and over-strength.     

An Art of Connectivity

Do building information modelling (BIM) systems sufficiently cater for the subtleties of the architect's role? Tristan Gobin, Sebastian Andraos and Thibault Schwartz of London-based robot control specialists HAL Robotics think not. They advocate the development of systems that offer more levels of abstraction, allowing architects, engineers and others who are not necessarily familiar with source code to assist in the elaboration of platform languages. Only then will they become true tools for creativity that reinforce continuity between the various actors involved in building design and construction.     

The uncanny side of the fairy tale: post-apocalyptic symbolism in Terunobu Fujimori's architecture

Having first established himself as an architectural historian, Terunobu Fujimori (b. 1946) is now more famous for his design work than for his academic publications. He has even been praised as ‘the most influential architect in Japan’ by the critic Kenjiro Okazaki (2006). Fujimori's popularity is attributable in particular to the fairy tale-like image of his architecture, which tends to appear playful as well as natural and nostalgic. However, this research focuses on the other side of the ‘fairy tale’—specifically, the strangely unfamiliar, even unsettling, feeling that his architecture evokes. Using Freud's and Vidler's notions of ‘the uncanny’ for analysis, this study identifies the contradictory sentiment residing in the hidden clashes between the natural and artificial qualities of his design. Arguably, the uncanny aspect of Fujimori's architecture stems from a post-apocalyptic sensibility imprinted in the Japanese unconscious, which is haunted by the trauma of ruin, whether caused by natural or man-made disaster. This research focus can lead to a broader cultural discourse beyond the scope of a single architect's work, relevant to all ‘modern unhomely’ societies.