Material Elegance

In the everyday, elegance is a wholly subjective attribute. Whether we deem someone to be ‘elegant’ is entirely dependent on our own personal perception of their outward appearance. Here, Manuel DeLanda provides for architecture an objective interpretation of the elegant or smart solution in which ‘there is a measurable economy of means to achieve a certain outcome’. Through a brief historical survey, he traces an empirical tradition of material elegance. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exuberance,I Don't Know; Excess,I Like

Hernan Diaz Alonso redefines ‘excess’ and ‘exuberance’ on his own terms. Fully au fait and comfortable with the excessive, he describes how in relation to his own work he views excess as more of a tendency or a logic, which sums up his approach; whereas he perceives the exuberant as removed from the design process and more like an ‘adjective’, an ‘emerging quality’ observed by others. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Italian Architecture from the Inside

Fulvio Irace focuses on the internal tendencies of Italian contemporary architecture. In his identification of national characteristics, he recognises the part that a consolidated approach to Modernism has played. Looking backwards as well as forwards, Modernism in Italy, in all its manifestations, has been simultaneously concerned with ‘the exaltation of the new’ and ‘the obsession with memory’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mur Island,Graz, Austria

The New York artist Vito Acconci has chosen to work through architecture, seeing the potential of it as a medium to engage ‘the public with the world around them’. He explains why he believes the location of his highly successful cultural centre for Mur Island, Graz, in Austria missed the opportunity to rejuvenate areas of the city beyond the historic core. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

(Science) Fiction,Ecophysical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines: Animism,Vitalism and Machinism as a Way to Rearticulate the Need to Confront the Unknown in a Contradictory Manner

François Roche of R&Sie(n) ruminates on the contradictory nature of the present: a time that is ‘vibrating’ while ultimately ‘lacking momentum’. Reclaiming ‘the scenarios and substances that condition architecture’, he rejects the large-scale flights of fancy of international signature architects and argues for the reactivation of ‘a throbbing, complex and unfinished “localism”’. In so doing, he advocates a machinism that enables fictionalisation and speculation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Could Architectural Drawings Save Us From Philosophical Bankruptcy?

The work of New-York based architect Mas Yendo explores the intersection of human experience with architecture and technology. Here he describes how at a time of ‘philosophical bankruptcy’ and ‘psychological wilderness’, the creative enterprise of drawing can provide a means of objectifying and exploring personal experiences and overcoming the current economic and political crises.     

Good Natured Stuff

Neil Spiller ruminates on nature and what ‘the odd naughty leaf’ has contributed to art and architecture over the years - culminating in evolutionary design and parametrical modelling today. He flags up the work of two of the most ‘talented young bucks’ in the field - Dennis Dollens and Cloud 9. But how realistic is it for us to really expect biomimicry to influence how and what we build? Copyright © 2007 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.     

Jamie Fobert Architects: Inside Out

The architect of several artists' homes, Jamie Fobert is now landing himself a string of acclaimed arts and commercial commissions. From his warehouse in Old Street in London, he explained to Howard Watson how the sensitive integrity of his architecture has developed out of ‘an inside-out approach’, which puts particular store in ‘framing light and views’ and the sculpting of space aided by physical model-making, rather than the synthetic top-down views that are imposed by widely used CAD programs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The return of the Casa dos Bicos,Lisbon, 1983

The intervention in Casa dos Bicos (‘House of Spikes’), in Lisbon, is a transposition of Manuel Vicente’s work in Macau, a territory under Portuguese administration until 1999, now an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. From 1963 to the 1990s, Manuel Vicente designed a set of unique buildings in Macau, a practice interrupted between 1968 and 1969 when he worked with Louis Kahn. The Casa dos Bicos can be seen as in continuity with Vicente’s experience in Macau, which helps to explain the controversy it generated in the 1980s. The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake damaged the Casa dos Bicos (1521/1523) and only two of the original four floors survived. The 1983 intervention restored its façade and introduced elements of contemporary architecture. The ‘spikes’ façade was remade based on a panel of eighteenth-century azulejos (blue-glazed tiles). However, the interior is a fictionalisation of the old city, a mediaevalist figuration intersected with expressionist references in an exercise of fearless post-modernism: a fable with a monumental staircase, arches, alleys and small openings, which are intended to disorient and conceal. Thus the Casa dos Bicos is not a ‘repositioning’, neither does it opt for the morality of distinguishing the new from the old. In this inaccuracy it is radically post-modern. It disqualifies authenticity, preferring a refined set of mirrors. The façade is a replica, where the free historicism of the window frames conveys a spectral dissonance; the interior consists of ‘lights and shadows’; the ‘curtain wall’ on the rear façade has a provisional character that refers to buildings in Macau. The temporal fluency and the spatial randomness display a free enjoyment of history, equivalent to an ‘historical novel’ or perhaps a Hollywood film based on a true story. Here, the ‘presence of the past’ is not only a slogan, but a reality turned into a fantasy.     

How Henri Lefebvre missed the modernist sensibility of Mies van der Rohe: vitalism at the intersection of a materialist conception of space and a metaphysical approach to architecture

This paper looks at two theoretical statements about ‘space’, both of which are grounded in a vitalist philosophy. The first is Henri Lefebvre's formulation of ‘spatial architectonics’, a structure of concepts which he develops in The Production of Space; the second is Mies van der Rohe's intuition of something he termed ‘authentic form’, a means of triggering new experiences and understandings through sensual engagement with space. Since there are other philosophers and other architects whose thinking about space has been influenced by vitalist philosophy, the discussion will begin with an explanation as to why Lefebvre and van der Rohe have been selected for reciprocal examination.     

Frozen Void: The Elegant Affect of the Evolved Object

The notion of elegance tends to focus on the finished object - the complete and seamless work - rather than the expression of process per se. Here, Kivi Sotamaa shows how he set out with his Frozen Void ‘to achieve an elegant affect in the evolved object’. In so doing, he reveals how this type of intensification is, in fact, fundamental to the emergence of the new elegance, where intensity renders a greater potential for features within the surface to emerge to different parameters. Copyright © 2007 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.     

Local Climates of the City

A specialist in urban effects on climate, particularly the heat island effect, Iain D Stewart is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Here he describes how the emergence of ‘borderless’, ‘patchwork’ and ‘polynucleated’ cities has led climatologists to develop a new classification system of urban landscapes. The system divides cities into local climate zones (LCZs) according to their surface structure, cover, fabric and metabolism.     

Rapid Re(f)use: 3-D Fabricated Positive Waste Ecologies

Mitchell Joachim calls for a radical revision of our approach to waste management. Rather than the low-level recycling that goes on through municipal authorities, he advocates the proactive use of waste to regenerate our cities. This he illustrates with Terreform One + Terrefuge's Rapid Re(f)use and Homeway projects that aim ‘to capture, reduce and redesign New York's refuse infrastructure’. Copyright © 2010 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’.     

Becoming Architectural: Affirmative Critique,Creative Incompletion

When Greg Lynn embraced digital animation software in the 1990s, he not only redefined architectural production, but also the designer's relationship to the generative process. In this extract from an unpublished essay written in 2000, the philosopher Brian Massumi describes Lynn's ‘in-folding’ open-ended approach, which renders the design process ‘less an external conduit for the artist's creativity’ than the artist ‘a conduit for creativity of the design process’.     

Plus,plus ça change at the museum of modern art in New York

The selection of Yoshio Taniguchi, in 1997, to design the Museum of Modern Art's enormous expansion was generally considered conservative, if not outright old-fashioned. When the museum reopened in November 2004, most critics described the new scheme as ‘contextual’ or ‘subtle’, and noted that the architect had said he had tried ‘to make the architecture go away’. Now that enough time has passed to blur expectations, Jayne Merkel looks at MoMA as it is today. She contends that the choice was progressive in exactly the way the museum has been all along, and that the architecture is very much there. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital Cottage Industries

Mike Aling 's ProunStretcher project engages with the recent global revival of cottage industries, fuelled by the application of digital technologies, as a means to address ‘the manifold social issues present across our rural landscape-as-urban-extension’.