Site/Non-Site: Extending the Parameters in Contemporary Landscape

As the world teeters on the verge of environmental collapse, landscape architecture has taken on a new significance offering a longed-for sanctuary for our increasingly urbanised lives. Here, in his introduction to the issue, guest-editor Michael Spens explains how by taking its impetus from land art, landscape architecture, as an expanded field, transcends the conventional confines of site. This renders it possible to read architecture ‘as landscape, or as non-landscape, as building becomes non-site’ and the ‘site indeed materialises as the work per se’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New River Village

Social affordable housing is so often the poor relation of any private development, allocated the poorest plot with the least attractive aspect. Bruce Stewart describes how at Hornsey in north London, Stock Woolstencroft has transcended these problems with considerate spatial organisation and security management. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Otherwise Engaged: New Projects in Interactive Design

What are the possibilities of interactive technologies delivering a new level of social engagement in architecture? Taking 2002, with the ETH Ada project and Diller & Scofidio's Braincoat project, as an important watershed, Mark Garcia reviews the advances that have been made per se, and with four projects in particular, in socially interactive spatial design. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

3+1 architects

Without the predominance of a single presiding tradition of modern architecture in Estonia, the way has been clear for a younger generation of architects to make their mark. Andres Kurg describes the work of 3+1 architects, who launched their career in the mid-1990s with an Estonian Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania. Through their trend-setting domestic work, they have proved able to appeal to a new wealthy client base, while also developing their own interests in programme and architecture's relationship to the physical landscape. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Illuminating Embodiment: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Relational Architectures

Art and architecture have a strong tradition of humanism in which man and the human body are the centre and measure of all things. Maria Fernández describes the work of artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer whose work transgresses and challenges these preconceptions through performance, seeking to expose the body and society's receptivity to instability, fluctuation and re-imagining. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Radical Italian Architecture Yesterday and Today

In Italy there is a revival of the spirit of 1960s Radicalism. Fresh from university, young architects ‘pick up a rock band name, enrol in an architectural competition or just invent their own research and project installations’. William Menking, who co-curated the 2003 exhibition at London's Design Museum on Superstudio - the supergroup of Italian radicali - and Olympia Kazi bring the new generation of young protagonists under scrutiny. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Home Body

Leon van Schaik reviews Households, a compelling photographic documentary project by artist and architect Mark Robbins, which portrays actual people in their own homes. Eschewing the ‘somnolent’ mode of styled interior photography, which is more about what people wish for rather than where they actually live, Robbins captures the intimacy of everyday domestic settings and relationships and in so doing engages ‘architecture with the full panoply of human emotions’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.