Austeria: City of Minimum Consumption

If a new stringency with economic and material resources is to become a new way of life, how should austerity be recast as a positive force rather than a negative imposition? Daliana Suryawinata and Winy Maas look at definitions of austerity and describes the Austeria project at The Why Factory at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) that looked at new models for combating excessive consumption, such as the ‘Zen road to affluence’.     

Optioneering: A New Basis for Engagement Between Architects and Their Collaborators

Conventionally, architects are somewhat tardy when inviting engineers to join their projects. By only introducing consulting engineers to participate in the later stages of the design process, engineers are commonly assigned a fixing role. This provides little opportunity for creative engineering solutions at the generative stage. Optioneering, a new business management model, however, offers the possibility of a new collaborative method for interaction between designers and their partners. Dominik Holzer and Steven Downing describe how a research project between the Spatial Information Research Laboratory (SIAL) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the engineering firm Arup investigated the capability of this new form of collaboration. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computatonal Intelligence: The Grid as a Post-Human Network

Research and design collaborative EZCT Architecture & Design Research has adopted grid computing to produce a series of furniture systems and other small-scale prototypes using genetic algorithms in combination with automated fabrication technologies. Here, cofounder Philippe Morel relates this design practice to the broader technical and social implications of various grid-computing projects, such as the online organisation Folding@Home, which utilises grid computing and distributed communities for the production and exchange of postindustrial knowledge. He argues that these ‘knowledge farms’ which create an ‘ambient factory’, are perhaps the ultimate form of social-economic production, transforming not only the evolution of design but of the communities that produce and eventually consume its products. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medium-Scale Anatolian Cities: Conceptual and Physical Routes of Urban Transformation

Banu Tomruk investigates the post-1980s transformation of the built environment of medium-scale Anatolian cities. She examines the subject through a conceptual and physical framework that places as much emphasis on populist rhetoric – ‘identity crisis’, ‘historicisation’, ‘the making of a tourist city’ – as on the built structures themselves and their realisation as standardised apartment blocks and gated communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Natural Methods of Interaction Or Natural Interaction in the Everyday Digital World

Computers, mobiles and automatised machines are so omnipresent that the means by which we interact with digital devices is now generally regarded as a given. Italian practice iO Agency, though, questions our use of mechanised interfaces and the language that they require us to learn. Valentina Croci explains how iO Agency has developed more natural ways for people to interact with digital environments through physical or tactile ‘triggers’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Works In/On//Around///Behind Progress

Artist Hilary Powell describes how her work in film, food and the pop-up book offers playful critiques of regeneration and place making. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can Architectural Design Be Research?

So far the Unit Factor series has focused on design research within the context of the Architectural Association in London. Here the series editor, Michael Weinstock, discusses the possibilities of architects undertaking research in practice. He draws on the experience of Chris Bosse, who is responsible for the competition-winning design for the Watercube, Beijing's National Swimming Centre. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ecoLogicStudio

From their office in Hackney, in London's East End, Italian duo Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, have established an international reputation as ecoLogicStudio, an innovative practice that fuses digital technologies with environmental design. As Terri Peters explains, the ethos and approach of the studio extends beyond that of finding technological solutions to ecological design projects. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CJ Lim/Studio 8 Architects: Through the Looking Glass

CJ Lim is one of architecture’s greatest illustrators, visualising through his beautiful and delicate drawings and models an enchanted world inspired by Lewis Carroll, William Heath Robinson and Chinese fables. Howard Watson describes how Lim is now breaking through the visionary’s glass ceiling with his realisation of a tunnel installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and a project at an altogether different scale for an eco-city in China. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Concrete Constructs: The Limits of Rationalism in Swiss Architecture

Ákos Moravánszky explains why for him ‘the traces of Mediterranean Rationalism in the new Swiss-German architecture are like the imitation stitching on the moulded plastic dashboard of a new car’. It is an influence which, despite the undeniable impact of Aldo Rossi and the Ticino School at ETH Zurich in the 1970s, remains skin-deep, sharing little with the present in terms of ideology or the interpretation of the historic past. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

51% Studios

Howard Watson profiles a London-based studio whose practice results from the interplay of a wide range of influences spanning contemporary culture, history, nature, landscape and the ephemeral. Working at a variety of scales from the domestic to the urban, partners Peter Thomas and Catherine du Toit demonstrate a natural bent for the arts-related in undertaking collaborations with artists and exhibition installations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Young Experimentalists

Experimental architecture in Italy began to take a new form in the 1990s when young architects, who were embracing new digital technologies, also began to go abroad to study and practise in greater numbers. Anna Baldini outlines a fecund strand in Italian architecture which, while no longer wholly new or youthful, retains its vitality. She highlights, in particular, the contributions of: Avatar Architettura, Gianluca Brini, Elastico spa+3, Exposure Architects, Giuliano Fausti, Luisa Fontana, Giorgio Goffi, ian+, Iotti+Pavarani Architetti, Fabrizio Leoni, ma0/emmeazero, Antonella Mari, Metrogramma, Open Building Research (OBR), RoccAtelier, studio.eu and Vulcanica Achitettura. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From Product to Process: Building on Urban-Think Tank’s Approach to the Informal City

Adriana Navarro-Sertich interviews a pioneer of the informal in architecture, co-founder and co-director of Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) Alfredo Brillembourg . Brillembourg explains how U-TT's work seeks to connect informal settlements with the formal city, enabling inhabitants to access services and infrastructure. U-TT is now taking the lessons it has learnt in working in Latin American cities, such as Caracas and São Paulo, elsewhere in the world with the aim of ‘working globally and acting locally’. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Objects after Image

For 12 years, the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop has been an annual summer event. Located in a beautiful and remote region of Japan, it encourages a small group of architecture students to respond to the setting by creating projects that read, represent and spatially reconfigure the landscape into new constructions. Shin Egashira reveals how, over time, these constructions in turn act as a continuous form of documentation and reflection. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.