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.     

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.     

从一组早期校舍作品解读圣约翰大学建筑系的设计思想

上海圣约翰大学建筑系是中国近代时期最早全面引进现代建筑思想的教学机构。文章研究了该系师生设计的一组早期校舍作品——原山东省中等技术学校校舍(1951年建成),分析建筑所蕴藏的现代特点,指出设计者在注重功能、结构等现代建筑的基本特征之外,采用"流动空间"的处理、"风格派"的造型、多种材质的精心搭配等多重现代设计方法。文章进一步揭示了这些手法源自于西方现代建筑运动中的多条探索路线,包括密斯的空间处理、"风格派"的建筑形态操作方式、格罗比乌斯和包豪斯的教育中对材质的关注等。同时文章分析了中国传统园林空间对该系师生探索现代建筑的重要影响,阐述了他们在建筑创作中融合传统文化的独特方式。     

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.     

Formalisation: An Interview with Hernando de Soto

The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is internationally renowned for his writings on the informal economy. Through his work as the President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, he has effectively advocated the creation of a legal system to help the poor access property rights. In his latest book, The Amazon is not Avatar, he makes a significant shift away from the problems caused by massive urban migrations to cities to focusing on the benefits of property and business rights for resource-rich indigenous communities in the Amazon. Angus Laurie interviews De Soto on his current thinking and highlights why he has had such an important influence on social housing in Latin America. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Public and the V2

The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness and bonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypal view of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and its community were ultimately destroyed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

美国盖提艺术中心(Getty Center)的建筑和花园

盖提艺术中心位于加利福尼亚州圣塔莫尼卡山区,是专为来访者提供艺术感受、欣赏和研究的地方。总体规划及建筑群设计是由对现代主义建筑做出巨大贡献的著名建筑师瑞查德·梅尔(Richard Meier)所做。此中心铺展于两条山脊之上,梅尔运用方形与圆形,完美地组织和调理了各具风格的所有建筑物,整个中心可以说是有机组合于方格网络之中。所有的建筑贴面和庭院、广场地面,均是用产于意大利的石灰华岩所建。中心内迷人的中央花园是由艺术家罗伯特·艾尔文所创作,他认为这是一个以艺术花园的形式所构成的雕塑,是随季节而不断进行雕琢的雕塑。一条小径和溪流导引你进入一个杜鹃盛开的水境迷宫花坛中。     

Miesian Grids and the Domain of Ink

What happens when you subvert the standardised repetition of the Modernist grid? In Building the Picture, a series of drawings that architect Elena Manferdini produced for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago that ran during the spring and summer of 2015, visual effects and colour were applied to counteract Mies's highly uniform and modular mass-producible systems.     

Parametric Regionalism

Philip Yuan , Founding Director of Shanghai-based firm Archi-Union Architects, applies parametric techniques to his design and research in China. Here he explains how Parametricism can provide a highly adaptive and open approach to architectural knowledge and spatial organisation, accommodating regional variations in culture and environment, through an emphasis on local climate, materials and craft traditions.     

Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“多面”建筑 天津近代工业博物馆设计解读

天津近代工业博物馆及天津城市历史博物馆是运河商贸文化区重要的公益性建筑。文章主要分析这座给人留下独特印象的建筑的"多面"内涵。     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

After After Geometry

Michael Meredith of MOS Architects examines his own practice's preoccupation with physics and the particle-oriented world, and the persistent problem of meaning and meaninglessness against the backdrop of the architecture of a previous era: a period that spanned the Deconstruction movement of the late 1980s and closed with Greg Lynn's seminal 1997 Architecture After Geometry edition of AD.     

Behavioural Complexity: Constructing Frameworks for Human-Machine Ecologies

Founded by Patrik Schumacher and Brett Steele in 1997, the Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) Master's programme,based at the AA in London, provides an important research base for Parametricism. The current Director of AADRL, Theodore Spyropoulos , continues to push the boundaries of advanced computing and machine intelligence. Here he describes the work that he has undertaken at the AA and through his practice Minimaforms into adaptive ecologies that employ responsive machine learning to enable spatial transformations.     

The Affects of Realism: Or the Estrangement of the Background

Affect is not just about mood and fantasy; at its best, it is an aesthetic provocation that can generate a profound questioning of the nature of reality. The 19th-century Realist writers and artists understood this – and its political implications – well. After examining the theme with reference to the writings of an international array of cultural critics, architect Michael Young – cofounder with Kutan Ayata of the New York-based studio Young & Ayata – presents a project by his firm that is subtly designed to trigger affective sensations of defamiliarisation.     

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun , Editor-in-Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Old Dispersions and Scenes for the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity

The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Collision of Scarcity and Expendability in Architectural Culture of the 1960s and 1970s

Architecture as a practice assimilates contradictions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approaches to materials and sustainability. New finishes, details and products are continually specified and often fetishised, while architects are at pains to show their minimal impact on the environment. Steve Parnell highlights an era in the pages of Architectural Design in the late 1960s and early 1970s that congregated these incongruities by simultaneously advocating low-energy solutions and expendability, most notably the inflatable.