The Unified Project

Albert Pope argues that a unified architectural and urban project is not possible without addressing the conceptual divide that exists between building and infrastructure. It is a split that was first set in motion by the breakdown of Modernism in the 1960s and was reaffirmed by the rise of Postmodernism. Since then, architectural form and urban infrastructure have not only remained disjointed, but have been overtly celebrated by the collages and juxtapositions of the contemporary and the historic in our cities.     

Too Good to Be True: The Survival of English Everyday PoMo

‘Intelligent, eclectic, witty, profoundly humanistic, and keen to debunk an inflexible, elitist and dangerously authoritarian Modernism’: Kester Rattenbury evokes the spirit of early British Post-Modernism. She reminds us of how in the early 1980s it spearheaded a spirited community architecture that played a strategic role in protest against wholesale, motorway-led redevelopments and the survival of Convent Garden. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recent Developments at Foster + Partners' Specialist Modelling Group

Established 15 years ago under the leadership of Hugh Whitehead, the Specialist Modelling Group (SMG) at Foster + Partners has an unrivalled reputation internationally as an in-house research group. It provides Fosters with expertise in computation, geometry and fabrication, as well as in environmental analysis and simulation. Xavier De Kestelier, co-head of SMG and partner at Foster + Partners, describes how the group has developed and expanded over the last few years, growing the range of its specialist knowledge that informs projects as diverse as the YachtPlus Boat Fleet (2009), Kuwait International Airport (2009-) and Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (2010).     

Maggie's Architecture: The Deep Affinities Between Architecture and Health

The event that sparked off the UK programme of Maggie's Centres for cancer care was one woman's diagnosis with terminal cancer. That woman was Maggie Keswick Jencks. With her husband, the American cultural theorist, landscape architect and architectural historian Charles Jencks, she set about co-founding the pioneering project that has seen an array of high-profile international architects design acclaimed buildings where patients can face their diagnoses and undergo treatment in the most comforting and uplifting of environments. Here, Charles Jencks gives his account of the story so far and explains what it is that makes these centres so special.     

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’.     

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.     

That Old Thing Called Flexibility: An Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown hold an unrivalled position within architecture. Now written several decades ago, their classic books Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction remain unsurpassed for their ability to shock and overturn current architectural thought. Francesco Proto talks to Venturi and Scott Brown on their present thinking about iconography, transparency, spectacularisation, architectural pornography and the contemporary architectural avant-garde. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developing a Sensitivity to Locale and ‘Human Experience’

Most of the architects featured in this issue, who are known for their sensitivity to place, studied abroad and continue to practise and teach internationally. Jayne Merkel explores how a broadening of personal experience through travel has helped hone their affinity to the particular and the local over the standard and the global.