Putting the ‘I’ back into Architecture

Neil Spiller gets personal in a bid to put the ‘I’ back into architecture. He celebrates the spatial experimentation of the work of Charlotte Erckrath. Creating a space of desire, she produces a subjective ‘synthesis of architect, body, space and view’. 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.     

Parallel Biological Futures

Neil Spiller looks beyond the digital and envisions a surreal future of ‘biological parallelism’ that pushes the boundary of architecture deep into the natural sciences, potentially creating ‘huge rafts of new architectural flora and fauna’. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It's All Inside My Head

The physical manifestations of built architecture are often discussed in terms of a single architect's inspiration, overemphasising and romanticising the intellectual contribution of the signature architect. Here Neil Spiller describes the extraordinary departure that Marcos Novak is undertaking at the University of California's Santa Barbara campus, where Novak's own scanned brain becomes a literal, reflexive generating force in the formation of a spatial environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Getting Wet About Urban Design

Neil Spiller is thrilled by IwamotoScott's Hydro-Net - a futuristic design proposal for San Francisco that thinks about water in an entirely new way. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In Praise of the Blur

Neil Spiller produces a paean to the instinctive sketch, yearning back to a time that the advantages of being ‘vague, noncommittal and ill defined’ were well understood. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detailing the Walled Garden for Lebbeus

Neil Spiller , the Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London, has an unrivalled international reputation for the virtuosity of his visionary graphic work. Here, in a highly personal and poetic eulogy to Lebbeus Woods, Spiller pays tribute to his master through the lens of his own work, where detail becomes an important element in an imagined, augmented world in which the concrete or the specific lends credence to the fictional.     

Basking in a World of Your Own Making

As the credit crunch bites in, are pockets of young architects reviving a battle against commodified materialism? Neil Spiller describes how he has experienced this close to home with his own class of 2009 at the Bartlett which has reactivated its own brand of Surrealist cybernetic research, inspired by Dalí. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Magical Transubstantiations: A Voyage to Italy

Visiting Italy in 1978 as part of his own Grand Tour, Lebbeus Woods was able to see some of the treasures of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The ensuing mix of reality and imagination prompted the Editors of this 2, Aleksandra Wagner and Neil Spiller , to consider the visual travelogue –Cityscapes – in a similar manner, combining speculation and truth.     

Fiddling While the World Burns

Neil Spiller sharpens his claws and puts some bite into his final ‘Bits' in this closing edition of AD+. He addresses the pressing question of climate change and politicians’, architects' and the construction industry's general proclivity to bury their heads in the sand or to ‘fiddle’ tangentially in another direction. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Surrealistic Exuberance – Dark Matters

For Neil Spiller, there is a current vacuum in much of contemporary parametric design. It is devoid of embodied cultural experience and character. Much can be learnt by rediscovering the dark matter of Baroque and Surrealistic art and architecture, which through repressed eroticism optimised on the simultaneous presence of the secular and the profane - the heaving physicality of the everyday world and the repressed strictures of the Catholic church. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Protocells: The Universal Solvent

Protocell architecture inverts the current economic and procurement processes of construction with their emphasis on cost, speed and quantifiable outcomes. Wet, semi-living and symbiotic with ecological systems and materials, protocell systems promise a pargadigm that is the very antithesis of existing practice and will require the employment of very different skills sets and approaches. To ease the intellectual transition from hard engineering to chemical solutions, Neil Spiller investigates the enduring notion of alchemy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture of Disbelief: Is Architectural Speciation a Good Thing?

Can visionary architects have their cake and eat it, luxuriating in pecuniary success while also continuing to assert their avant-gardism? Neil Spiller attended a conference in Cornell that brought the role of the architectural visionary under the spotlight and gave him much food for thought. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Poetics of the Island of Vessels

Since 2000, Neil Spiller has been engaged on a ‘long project’: a series of hundreds of drawings that through a potent mix of cyborgian fantasy and Surrealism, imbued with poetry and biotechnology, evoke a psycho-geographical island inhabited by an irascible alter ego, ‘The Professor’. Spiller seeks out in this work ‘an unusual and startling architecture’ that reveals a ‘loving, enigmatic and ragged beauty’.     

What Are You Looking At?

There is a rebirth of interest in anamorphic perspective - that erudite artistic trick that allows one to represent different points of view in a single plane or view. Neil Spiller sees a new future for this arcane spatial practice that enables objects to dissolve their muteness. Copyright © 2009 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?     

Bricked House: How Code and Law Can Lock You Out

Could we be unwittingly divesting too much control in technology? In so doing, could we be sleepwalking into a future in which our personal assets are no longer ours, but all too easily relinquished by the bank or mortgage company? Molly Wright Steenson , an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks so. She evokes an arresting vision of a close future in which our smartphones and the operating systems integrated within our cars and homes become our friend-enemy, immediately locking us out when they are no longer programmed to respond directly to our touch.     

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Telling Stories …

Neil Spiller celebrates ‘the messier sides to architectural discourse’, which take in myth-making, collaged semiotics and moreover the untidy art of narrative. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Penang Tropical City,Penang, Malaysia OMA

A mixed-use programme for Penang in Malaysia with the potential to accommodate a resident population of 27,000 required OMA to operate at a planning level, while providing architectural definition. João Bravo da Costa describes how this led to a strategy that focused on types rather than objects, and specifically a typological distribution of programme across the site.