Contemporary architecture in China compiled

Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, authors of Building Shanghai (Wiley-Academy 2006), a narrative history of Shanghai's architectural development, review two new books on China that focus solely on its 21st-century resurgence. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

China's Macro-Planning Policies: Architectural Catalyst or Constraint?

China is undergoing one of the most intense and rapid processes of urbanisation in the world today. It also has one of the most centralised planning systems, which is driven by a Soviet-style, five-year plan. Edward Denison looks at the relationship between China's highly systematised planning process and the high-density, standardised form that urban development typically takes. Amidst this formal context, he locates a ‘whisper’ of change afoot for architects.     

Transgression and Progress in China: Wang Shu and the Literati Mindset

The 2012 Pritzker Prize winner, Wang Shu, often builds in stone with a sensitivity to site and context – characteristics that are not often associated with the marginal or cutting edge. Architectural authors and researchers Edward Denison and Guangyu Ren explain how in China, where ‘mainstream mediocrity’ has become the norm, Wang Shu has set himself apart as an advocate for meaningful innovation and originality.     

Terence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research

In 2006, the spotlight has very much been on the Modern Movement, with the major exhibition at the V&A in London - ‘Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1936’. Here, Edward Denison describes how Giuseppe Pettazzi's Fiat Tagliero service station in Asmara in Eritrea, East Africa, epitomised Italy's futuristic ambitions for a new colony. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Reluctant Architect: An Interview with Wang Shu of Amateur Architects Studio

On the announcement of the awarding of the Pritzker Prize to the first Chinese architect, Wang Shu, in May 2012, jury chair Lord Palumbo commended him for an architecture that is ‘timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal’. Visiting Wang and his work in the ancient city of Hangzhou in Eastern China, shortly afterwards Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren sought to understand why Wang might have succeeded where other architects have failed in a Chinese and international context, forging an innovative approach to architecture, which is in tune with tradition while being of a ‘genuine and often sublime originality’.     

China's Concealed Crisis

Architectural historian and author Edward Denison and architect and researcher Guang Yu Ren lift the lid on the complex and urgent matter of China's ageing population. The impending crisis is not only a matter of numbers – a third of China's population are projected to be over 60 by 2050 – but also one of shifting social responsibility. Whereas the care of ageing relatives has traditionally been the individual family's responsibility – filial obligation being written into the constitution – urban migration and economic development and the legacy of the One Child Policy are disrupting this, creating a greater need for state and private housing provision for the elderly.     

The Peace Hotel

Edward Denison recounts the story of one of Shanghai's modern landmarks, the Sassoon House, now known as the Peace Hotel, which has come to represent the city's early 20th-century heyday. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fiat Tagliero Service Station

In 2006, the spotlight has very much been on the Modern Movement, with the major exhibition at the V&A in London - ‘Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1936’. Here, Edward Denison describes how Giuseppe Pettazzi's Fiat Tagliero service station in Asmara in Eritrea, East Africa, epitomised Italy's futuristic ambitions for a new colony. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ‘People’s City’

The mid-20th-century communist ideal was for cities that were ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Wang Jun , an editor at Outlook Weekly magazine and author of a best-selling book on the planning of Beijing, describes how the ambition to accommodate public life in urban space is a relatively modern phenomenon that goes against the grain of a long tradition of landownership in China. Given this background, can the original notion of the ‘People's City’ ultimately survive the current wave of property privatisation? Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The importance of specification uncertainty and intolerance to measurement error in a study of the impact of dentine lead on childrens’ IQs

Needleman et al. concluded that, on average, an increase in the dentine lead of children from <6 ppm to >24 ppm was associated with a 4‐point IQ decrement. Recently, a spate of papers has conjectured that the reports of Needleman et al. and others could be spurious because of measurement error and omitted variable bias. In this Bayesian analysis of the reconstituted Needleman et al. data set, we replace such conjectures by empirical tests. Even though we structure the tests to provide very favourable opportunities for the conjectures to acquire support, the possibility is seen to be remote that omitted variable bias significantly alters the estimated influence of lead exposures upon childrens’ psychometric intelligence. Similarly, the Bayesian analysis demonstrates that other included covariates are likely to affect the estimated influence of lead exposures only if they are quite poorly measured.     

After China: The World? Three Perspectives on a Critical Question

Are China’s cities now poised for global influence? This challenging question initiates a tripartite response from three authors: Kyong Park , Laurence Liauw and Doreen Heng Liu . In order to fully speculate on the potential of Chinese urbanism and architecture beyond its own borders: Park looks at whether China is a fully replicable capitalist model; Liauw outlines recent indicators of urban Sinofication around the world, whether it is the exporting of high-end designer furniture to the West or the injection of Chinese capital into Africa; and Heng Liu examines the dissemination of the Pearl River Delta both as an idea - first proliferated by Rem Koolhaas in the mid-1990s - and in its physical manifestations. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Planning Experience and Planners’ Ethics

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Ethical considerations are integral to most aspects of planning, but the bases of planners’ ethical decisions are not well understood. In fact, there has been no follow-up to Elizabeth Howe and Jerome Kaufman’s original 1979 survey of the ethics of American planners in this journal (45(3), 243–255). Our research evaluates the differences in planning roles and planners’ ethical perspectives since then. In their study, Howe and Kaufman use hypothetical scenarios to determine which of three roles planners play: technician, politician, or a hybrid. They also evaluate how the role that planners assume affects their ethical views. Our research uses similar scenarios to evaluate these relationships in contemporary planning practice while simultaneously evaluating the influence of professional experience on the ethical bases of those choices. We confirm many of Howe and Kaufman’s findings, but first we find that today’s planners assume different roles than they did in the mid-1970s, conforming more often to a technical role and less to a political or hybrid role. Second, today’s planners tend to make virtue-based choices when concerned with ideological and legal issues, but revert to rule-based or utilitarian choices when faced with the dissemination and quality of information and segments of the population receiving special advantages. Finally, we find that planners, at all stages in their careers, maintain a mixture of virtue- and rule-based ethical choices while affirming the profession’s core values (as represented in the 2009 AICP Code).

Takeaway for practice: The vast majority of practicing planners in our sample (80%) use the AICP Code of Ethics in response to our hypothetical scenarios. At the same time, self-interested responses were rarely made. These findings reaffirm the code’s value to the profession.     

Review Comments

Urban Transportation Innovation Daniel Brand (editor) American Society of Civil Engineers, New York, New York, 1970. 435 pp. $8.00

Personal Rapid Transit II J. Edward Anderson University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1974. 645 pp.

Evolution of the House-From Caves to Coops by Stephen Gardiner MacMillan Publishing Company, Inc., New York, New York, 1974. 319 pp. $10.95 (Cloth)

Grundzuge Einer Methodik Der Raumplanung I (Principles of a Methodology of Spatial Planning, Volume I) by Jakob Maurer Institute for Local and Regional Planning at the Technical University, Zurich, Switzerland, 1973. 150 pp. (PB)     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Anthony Orum, City–Building in America Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States Charles Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators James C. Clingermayer and Richard C. Feiock, Institutional Constraints and Policy Choice: An Exploration of Local Governance Richard E. Foglesong, Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando     

Remote work in the ecotronic society

Hamnett, C., L. McDowell and P. Sarre (eds), Restructuring Britain. The Changing Social Structure. London: Sage Publications, 1989.

Champion, A.G. (ed.), Counterurbanisation: The Changing Pace and Nature of Population Deconcen‐tration. London: Edward Arnold, 1989.     

Classifying Specimens of Gothic Fenestration: Edmund Sharpe’s New Taxonomy of English Medieval Architecture

This essay investigates the pictorial practices used by Edmund Sharpe (1809–77) to visualize the evolution of English Gothic architecture. Examining his 1849 Treatise on the Rise and Progress of the Decorated Window Tracery in England, this essay emphasizes Sharpe’s singular approach to classifying architecture within the framework of debates about evolutionary descent in studies of natural and architectural history. This essay positions Sharpe’s Treatise in relation to works by naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and alongside histories of medieval architecture by Thomas Rickman, Robert Willis, and Edward Augustus Freeman, to name a few. These examples help contextualize Sharpe’s new classification of English Gothic architecture within the context of images showing evolutionary descent and the typical in species.     

The Grand Work of Fiction: The Detail as Narrative

A practising architect and Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Edward Ford is the leading expert on the architectural detail and the author of three seminal books on the subject. Here Ford explains that, though the decision ‘to abstract or to articulate’ architecture ‘may be largely subconscious’, it is never ‘arbitrary’. For ‘in the well-designed building, it is done in the service of the creation of a larger narrative, a unity of vision’.     

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.     

Norway Was Never So Poor!

Provision of public services is generally associated with a prosperous society. Norway is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, renowned for its social provision. Paradoxically, though, as Edward Robbins, Christian Hermansen Cordua and Barbara E Ascher highlight in this article, the general perception that Norway has never been so poor is misguided, as is the government's current justification for withdrawing investment due to a lack of funds. For the period of greatest support for social housing corresponded to a period of austerity and slow recovery, immediately after the war, rather than that of greatest prosperity after the discovery of North Sea oil in Norwegian waters in the late 1960s.     

Animating Architecture: Coupling High-Definition Sensing with High-Definition Actuation

Ruairi Glynn , lecturer on interactive architecture at the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, University College London (UCL), puts the pressing question: ‘What does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?’ Despite the pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing – the Internet of Things (IoT) – and students' ability to speculate, build and test responsive lifesize installations, could practice itself be in danger of getting left behind?