Protocells: The Universal Solvent

Protocell architecture inverts the current economic and procurement processes of construction with their emphasis on cost, speed and quantifiable outcomes. Wet, semi-living and symbiotic with ecological systems and materials, protocell systems promise a pargadigm that is the very antithesis of existing practice and will require the employment of very different skills sets and approaches. To ease the intellectual transition from hard engineering to chemical solutions, Neil Spiller investigates the enduring notion of alchemy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital Solipsisim and the Paradox of the Great ‘Forgetting’

Neil Spiller counters the main theme of this issue by questioning the dominant focus on production and new technologies in architectural culture, which places a premium on the generation of ‘ever more gratuitous complex surfaces and structures’. Could this inward-looking emphasis on process and obsessive love of new technologies be at the expense of the final product? Are we in danger of producing artefacts that lose sight of human expression and poetics in the competitive drive for greater complexity? Are we, in fact, heading towards a great ‘forgetting’ in which humanity is subtracted from the architectural product?     

The Role of the Estates: From Agriculture to Urbiculture

Large swathes of London's West End remain under the ownership of the Great Estates, with the Grosvenor Estate (Duke of Westminster) owning much of Mayfair and the Cadogan family (Earl of Cadogan) much of Chelsea. Terry Farrell looks at how this long-term custodianship has impacted on the development of the fabric of the city and its strong sense of place. He explains how it is a model that he has tried to draw from in his own Earl's Court masterplan. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Persistence of the Pastoral

Architect, animator and educator Nic Clear challenges the contemporary notion of the pastoral to go beyond the simplistic binary opposites of the untainted rural idyll and the industrialised city. He explores how the narratives of the pastoral have provided a mainstay for science fiction and how this can be used to re-imagine nature itself with the aid of advanced biotechnologies to create new architectures for the 21st century.     

Radical Experimentation As Research: AVATAR

For four years, AVATAR at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London has been advancing the ‘digital and visceral terrain’. As its main exponent, Neil Spiller explains how its preoccupations fan out far beyond the merely technological, encompassing the aesthetic, philosophical and the natural, enabling it to question current stylistic tyrannies in architecture. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Instinctive Sense of Space and Boundary

Petra Blaisse of Inside Outside describes how the studio focuses on the boundary of interior and exterior space, adding and subtracting highly tactile and sensuous layers. She highlights the significance of the invisible to her work - whether light, scent or texture - and how the future of design will be opening the way to ‘the sheer biology of things’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Relentless Patterns: The Immersive Interior

What happens when patterns become all pervasive? When pattern contagiously corrupts and saturates adjacent objects, artefacts and surfaces; blurring internal and external environment and dissolving any single point of perspective or static conception of space. Mark Taylor ruminates on the possibilities of relentless patterning in interior space in both a historic and a contemporary context. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Surrealistic Exuberance – Dark Matters

For Neil Spiller, there is a current vacuum in much of contemporary parametric design. It is devoid of embodied cultural experience and character. Much can be learnt by rediscovering the dark matter of Baroque and Surrealistic art and architecture, which through repressed eroticism optimised on the simultaneous presence of the secular and the profane - the heaving physicality of the everyday world and the repressed strictures of the Catholic church. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Water and Asphalt The Projection of Isotropy in the Metropolitan Region of Venice

Through an exploration of the Veneto region close to Venice, in northeastern Italy, Paola Viganò provides an alternative definition of the dispersed territory. Rather than archetypal sprawl, which has developed out of untamed growth of metropolitan areas, this is an ancient landscape of evenly scattered development that has grown up alongside roads and waterways. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Two-Speed Landscape: The Reforestation of the Thames Estuary

Tom Noonan describes how, for this award-winning project, he took up the pen and developed a hybrid drawing technique that exploited the benefits of both the analogue and the digital - characterised by the tactility of the hand and the precision of the computer. He explains that a preoccupation with representation was further ‘reflected and supported by the programme, narrative and language of the architecture’.     

The Aesthetics of Air: Experiments in Visualising the Invisible

Malte Wagenfeld tackles the difficult problem of visualising air, and in his physical experiments reveals a world of eddies, swirls and wafting particles circulating around moving bodies. Here he offers a literal and conceptual glimpse at the invisible nature of atmosphere. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Off the Peg: The Bespoke Interiors of Ben Kelly

Known for his unique ability to assemble disparate materials, colours and textures, interior designer Ben Kelly speaks with Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone about the ideas and intentions behind his work. His thoughts and works indicate a respect for revealing the underlying qualities of existing spaces and serving new programmatic needs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

The Golden Age: Between Wilderness and Utopia

Artist Dominic Shepherd pursues the imaginative and a sense of mystery in his work; his 2012 one-man show at Charlie Smith London was entitled ‘Jerusalem’. Here he reflects on the Golden Age as depicted in Cranach's masterpiece of that name, and ruminates on the cyclical nature of the pastoral, a landscape that is tended and nurtured by generations of hands.     

The Living: Surface Tensions

‘Our work begins with the premise of a dynamic world. Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response?’ New York-based team The Living, led by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, have developed a practice of deep, open-source interfaces of participation. Jordan Geiger describes how for The Living their home city and its environs is a site of evolving forms of public space whether on land, air or water. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Basking in a World of Your Own Making

As the credit crunch bites in, are pockets of young architects reviving a battle against commodified materialism? Neil Spiller describes how he has experienced this close to home with his own class of 2009 at the Bartlett which has reactivated its own brand of Surrealist cybernetic research, inspired by Dalí. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Architectural Detail and the Fear of Commitment

Mark Burry holds a unique position in architecture, straddling the worlds of practice and academia as Senior Architect to the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona and as Professor at RMIT in Melbourne, where he is Founding Director of the RMIT Design Research Institute. In his Counterpoint to this issue of AD, he puts the spotlight back on construction, asking whether the detail could be in danger of falling victim to an inadvertent and ‘massive separation of design from making’. As he states: ‘to detail effectively is to understand not only what the building “is”, but how it will be made’.     

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.