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’.     

Drawing into the Cloud

Architectural designer, maker and researcher Birgir Örn Jónsson describes Islands of Vision, a speculative design project that he developed while in Unit 23 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). Acknowledging the predominance of the image and the underutilisation of the full range of visual experience in contemporary life, Jónsson set out to explore the entire field of vision, reasserting the periphery ‘as a rich and dynamic mode of sensation’. With the aid of ScanLAB Projects and their 3D point cloud scanner, Jónsson scanned the project's site at Lee Valley Park, East London.     

Drawing Time

Head of the Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Greenwich, Nic Clear is renowned for his role in championing film and animation techniques in architectural education. Here he challenges architects to put aside their assigned roles as mere imagers or practice technicians and embrace ‘the spatial possibilities offered by a whole range of emerging design activities - actual, augmented and virtual’.     

Telling Stories …

Neil Spiller celebrates ‘the messier sides to architectural discourse’, which take in myth-making, collaged semiotics and moreover the untidy art of narrative. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Manipulation and Control of Micro-Organic Matter in Architecture

Steve Pike looks to a future in which architects will work alongside microbiologists and mycologists, in much the same way as they now engage with a team of engineering consultants. He explains how, with the merging of the design studio and laboratory, the manipulation and control of micro-organisms themselves have to take precedence in any successful design and production process. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Juxtaposing the New and the Old

The reputation of the renowned London-based architect Eric Parry rests on his contemporary, but highly contextual approach to the designing of buildings in historic and highly visible city-centre sites. The author of Context: Architecture and the Genius of Place (Wiley, 2015), Parry acknowledges here the debt that he owes to the thinking of Dalibor Vesely, while describing how it plays out in his renewal project for St Martin-in-the-Fields in London and the extension of the Holburne Museum in Bath.     

Spatial Computing for the New Organic

In the last few years, parametric design has predominated in architectural research and practice. Christian Derix and Åsmund Izaki of the Computational Design and Research (CDR) group at Aedas|R&D explain how the research and design unit, based at Aedas in London, has pursued an alternative course by shifting the focus to behavioural and perceptive occupant simulation of spatial configurations. A human-centric approach, it draws its inspiration from earlier British pioneers in spatial computation, as well as the designers of the Organic Architecture movement of the early 20th century.     

Tracking,Tagging and Scanning the City

The proliferation of social media and software, such as building information modelling (BIM), has led to an unprecedented accumulation of data in the last few years, which can be tracked, tagged and scanned.With it, buildings and cities have been transformed into portals for information. Andrew Hudson-Smith , Director at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (UCL), describes how the ability to use emerging urban analytic tool kits provides the possibility of a real-time view of the city and a crystal-ball-like glimpse into urban networks of the future.     

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.     

Alice in Technoland

At their most supernatural, interactive design environments can have a transformative effect. They take the visitor to somewhere else. By actively involving the public they are both ‘porous’ and ‘responsive’, beckoning us like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland to enter and participate in another world. Here Lucy Bullivant kicks off her introduction to this issue of AD by looking at an installation designed by Daan Roosegaarde for the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam which epitomises this approach. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Plug-In,Clip-On,Tune-Up: A Throwaway Architecture with Optional Extras

For Simon Herron drawing is an innate, even an addictive, compulsion. Here he lets us into his own personal world of drawing: ‘a private haptic language of invention’, which simultaneously has the power to shock and resonate with its time. He traces his graphic lineage back to the work of his father, Ron Herron of Archigram, and projects it forwards through the output of his students.     

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.