Unified design: collaborative working at Arup Associates

Global telecommunication networks and the emergence of a new digital tool base have informed the reshaping of design practice worldwide. As discussed in detail in the next issue of AD, Collective Intelligence in Design (no 5, vol 76, 2006), ever-evolving groups of designers, engineers, material scientists, manufacturers, contractors and even financiers are now working together across time zones and organisations. Though these current shifts have certainly facilitated a greater fluidity of exchange between disciplines, working across the professional setting is not a wholly new phenomenon. For over four decades, London-based Arup Associates have collaborated in design as a team of architects and engineers, sitting within the greater corporate framework of the Arup Group. Declan O'Carroll, a principal at Arup Associates, tells Helen Castle how Arup Associates are now launching the Unified Design Unit that is set to recast Ove Arup's ethos of totality in design for the 21st century. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

Fabrication Research

The engineer John Thornton , formerly of Arup, reflects upon a career that has helped shape the architecture of leading design practices such as the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Hopkins, and Richard Rogers Partnership. Looking back almost a quarter of a century to a time that preceded digital manufacturing techniques, this frank account of design development for components of the Lloyd's Building reconsiders the notion of fabrication research as an embedded aspect of practice and reminds us of its value as a stimulant for creativity. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Woven Surface and Form

The Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, founded by Cecil Balmond and Charles Walker, has become synonymous with a highly mathematical, topological approach to architecture. It has, however, collaborated on some of the most exciting experimental fabric structures of recent years, including Anish Kapoor's Marsyas at Tate Modern and Rem Koolhaas's Cosmic Egg at the Serpentine Gallery. Here, the unit's Tristan Simmonds, Martin Self and Daniel Bosia describe how the AGU has progressed research into textile techniques that encompass tailored biomorphic forms alongside knot diagrams. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

An Architectural Chemistry

Protocell technology has a precedent in the innovative use of plastic in the 1960s, when chemistry first came up with an innovative new material that could be applied to architecture, interiors and product design. Omar Khan describes how at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the University at Buffalo in New York, he is developing a line of research that builds on the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s for soft materials and the capabilities of an elastic responsive architecture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pedro and Inês Bridge,Coimbra, Portugal

Jeremy Melvin describes how Cecil Balmond of Arup and Antonio Adao da Fonseca have created ‘the first bridge that does not meet in the middle’ for Portugal's oldest university town. The bridge's dislocated apex provides not only a focus for a formal investigation into dynamic symmetry, but also a layered narrative that makes sense of its historical setting. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Biodiversity Targets as the Basis for Green Design

Mike Wells , the Director of Biodiversity by Design, and Ken Yeang outline the need for biodiversity targets in architecture to provide a more far-reaching basis for green design. Rather than just literally ‘greening’ a building by covering it with foliage, they seek to encourage designers to engage with wider ecological processes and in more specific detail. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Catalytic Urbanism: The Role of Customised Design Solutions in Delivering Transformational Urban Change

Elad Eisenstein is a Director at Arup, leading the firm's urban design and masterplanning practice from London. Here he describes how through a highly customised approach, ‘catalytic urbanism’, Arup is working internationally in cities undergoing rapid change in a manner that is tailored to both global and local forces – accounting for climate change, macroeconomics and mobility. This bespoke method is illustrated in three diverse contexts: in North London, Pretoria in South Africa and Wanzhuang in China.     

Comings and Goings

As a throwback to the idealism of the 1970s, with its contemporary layering of ‘obscure language, extreme ideas and incomprehensible rhetoric’, is EcoRedux helpful to architects? Brian Carter , Professor and Dean at the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo, thinks so. A licensed architect in the UK, who most recently worked in practice with Arup Associates in London before taking up an academic position in North America, Carter regards environmental issues as a single but important aspect of design. He urges architects and architectural educators to make the direct engagement with the difficulties of designing and constructing buildings their priority. Copyright © 2010 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.     

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.     

The New Science of Form-Searching

New technologies, by definition, change fast, as does our cultural awareness of our use of them. Mario Carpo , Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), explains how in the course of the last few years much of our discourse on new technologies has been driven by an unexpected and, in many ways, inexplicable development: the availability of almost unlimited data storage and data-processing capabilities at ever-decreasing - and often almost negligible - costs. As digitally intelligent designers and structural engineers have not failed to notice, this simple, almost banal technical development has the potential to disrupt the way we design and calculate almost everything.     

Urban Villages

Is the Village in the City (ViC) potentially an urban scar or a vibrant community? Meng Yan , principal of urban design think tank and architectural firm URBANUS, advocates a design approach to the urban village phenomena that recognises the vitality of the social conditions they provide and how they might, with some intervention from designers, prove a ready-made solution to China's housing problem. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Towards a New Relationship with Nature: Research and Regenerative Design in Architecture

Here Peter Busby, Michael Driedger and Max Richter of Perkins+Will Canada (P+W) describe the office's core focus on ‘regenerative design’: an approach where each operation in a building's construction is measured by its positive impact on human and natural systems. This is supported by an in-house research team of architects, engineers and sustainability strategists that concentrates on the advancement of sustainable building practices. They describe how this is played out in projects such as the Living with Lakes Centre at Laurentian University in Sudbury and the VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre, Vancouver. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Snøhetta

It is not unusual for a practice to take off after winning a major competition. But Snøhetta was founded to enter one. Jayne Merkel explains that the Oslo-based firm flourished almost immediately after winning the international competition to design the Alexandria Library in Egypt in 1989. Ten years later, a victory in a blind international competition for the New National Opera in their home city paved the way for Snøhetta's practice today, which is largely devoted to cultural centres. And although the democratic lifestyle of the office is distinctly Scandinavian, the architects and designers who work there and the projects they work on now span the globe. There is even a New York office in the heart of Wall Street. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion is a unique programme that commissions architecture for art's sake. It provides innovative architects, who have not previously built in the UK, with the opportunity to design a cutting-edge structure for a summer show. Jeremy Melvin describes how Portuguese masters Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, in collaboration with Cecil Balmond of Arup, have produced ‘an urban design’ that is perfectly calibrated to respond to its Hyde Park setting. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.