The Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has increasingly become ‘the new frontier for exploitation’ and why there is currently ‘a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the fields of the life sciences’ in which life itself becomes a raw material.     

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.     

Complex Systems Architecture

Neil Spiller reveals the complexity of architectural systems to us, or is it the complexity of the architectural mind? For Spiller, the potential of a single notation as a seed for a truly ecological architecture provides an essential catalyst, triggering a multifaceted musing that takes in diagrams, Paul Preissner's new competition entry for the Taiwan Centre of Disease Control and his future work with Dr Rachel Armstrong on complex biological systems. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture + Textiles = Architextiles

A hybrid term, ‘architextiles’ encompasses a wide range of projects and ways of thinking that unite architecture and textiles. By way of introduction to this issue, guest-editor Mark Garcia highlights the significant rise of interest in this confluence by theorists, architects, engineers, textile designers, materials scientists and artists. He also explains how, as a hybrid mode of design and practice, architextiles is better able to respond to society's fast-changing cultural and consumer demands, enabling the production of more dynamic, flexible, interactive, event and process-based spaces. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exit Ltd

For London-based editor, author and curator Shumon Basar , The Temple of Janus Revisited by Exit Ltd is an effective critique of post-9/11 politics and culture. A virtual re-enactment of the Roman Temple of Janus in Washington DC, it evokes the imminent collapse of the American Empire. Copyright © 2009 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.     

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.     

Convoluted Flesh: A Synthetic Approach to Analogue and Digital Architecture

Marcos Cruz and Marjan Colletti advocate their own distinct design approach that is intuitive and blissful in its opulence, evoking the sublime.Here they discuss the potential of opening up ‘new spatial, or material possibilities’ that are liberated from the self-imposed restrictions of their more technologically driven contemporaries. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emerging Technologies and Drawings: The Futures of Images in Architectural Design

Mark Garcia , Senior Lecturer in History and Theory in the Department of Architecture, University of Greenwich, explores the technologically mediated future of drawings in architecture ‘without hands’. He highlights how multiple technological innovations are putting us on the brink of an exploding spectrum of possibilities for the image, and looks at three distinct areas of potential: new media and materials; emerging and future technologies; and theory embodied in fiction and art.     

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.     

The Life of Space

The digital has revolutionised the notion of space that was formulated on the two-dimensional page in the Renaissance with the discovery of perspective and the printing press. Derrick de Kerckhove and Antonio Tursi explore how our ideas about space have been overturned since the onset of the computer and the many different ways that architects are reinterpreting them. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychology and Perception of Patterns in Architecture

Pattern perception is often regarded as highly subjective, dependent on individual taste and preference. Neurologically, however, it has been proven that distinct areas of the brain are stimulated differently by different pattern design and colour combinations. Here Patricia A Rodemann probes into the very real physical and psychological consequences of product design finishes and surface patterning. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mathew & Ghosh Architects

The work of Mathew & Ghosh Architects (Nisha Mathew-Ghosh and Soumitro Ghosh) boldly extends an abstract Modernist language and at the same time draws from the vitality of places. While the firm's early works were small in scale, mostly residential in nature and based on a reappraisal of the early Corbusian idiom, recent projects include large-scale urban and landscape interventions with diverse conceptual and metaphorical imperatives. They have moved from a more reticent stance to the urban exuberance of their more recent projects (for example, their own office building), something akin to a ‘savage architecture’ as posited by Kazuo Shinohara in the context of the unsynchronised nature of the modern city. The architects' object of contemplation is the urban ‘box’, whether a private residence, office or part of a church. The box is first fractured and reconstructed as a bricolage of tectonic fragments, memories and events, all tenuously related as if unity in a contemporary culture is for ever denied. Like the Japanese notion of ‘ma’, the moment between fragments - a slit or an emptiness between two hovering planes - is telling. Mathew & Ghosh participate in the continuity of a historical narrative yet mark out the fissures and disjunctions; sometimes negotiations with the continuity emerge from unintended interstices. While these configurations of the contemporary urban ‘box’ are both contextual and abstract, they are also phenomenologically rich. There is a sustained dialect to the architecture of Mathew & Ghosh that includes consummate materiality and fine crafting, light as a medium, and always, as Nisha Mathew-Ghosh states, ‘good spatial possibilities’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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 World's Biggest Sculptor: The Architecture of Massimiliano Fuksas

At the start of the new millennium, Massimiliano Fuksas was one of the most significant Italian architects working outside his home country. His reputation in Italy and abroad, however, was taken to a further level by his completion of the New Milan Trade Fair. Stefano Casciani, an ex-student of Fuksas, provides an insightful and intriguing account of his ‘old’ professor: a robust and seemingly contradictory figure who is capable of great voluminous expression and delicacy. Casciani also finds constancy in his unrelenting energy, freshness and wit. Copyright © 2007 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?     

It's in Your Nature: I'm Lost in Paris

R&Sie(n)'s installation I'm Lost in Paris (2008), a disturbing take on the ecological house, epitomises the preoccupation of the French architect François Roche with the contradictions of modern nature. Javier Arbona tracks how Roche's notion of nature as ‘a partly human artifice’ which is both alien and personalised play out in his various projects, capitulating between attempts at overcoming alienation and heightening it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patterns,Fabrics, Prototypes,Tessellations

New technologies have enabled architects to develop sophisticated patterning techniques. This is epitomised by the expressive possibilities now available to the building envelope: smooth geometries, tessellation, material textures and layers, such as solar shading. For Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects, though, patterns have cultural and political possibilities far beyond mere decoration, enabling new practices to address in the urban context some of the crucial problems posed by globalisation: bridging the dichotomy between tabula rasa and contextualism, and the articulation between the local and global. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structuring Materiality: Design Fabrication of Heterogeneous Materials

What happens when we invert the usual sequence of the design process - form-structure-material - so materiality becomes the generative driver? Taking nature as her model, Neri Oxman advocates a new material method, Variable Property Design (VPD), in which material assemblies are modelled, simulated and fabricated with varying properties in order to correspond with multiple and continuously shifting functional constraints. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.