All Night Long: The Architectural Jazz of the Texas Rangers

In the mid-1950s, a group of young faculty at the University of Texas School of Architecture in Austin - aka the Texas Rangers - entertained themselves with weekly sessions of a sophisticated, collective drawing game, ‘Dot-the-Dot’, in which there was an emphasis on inventive fluency in hand drawing as well as an innate knowledge of historic European city plans. What happened when Mark Morris , Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University, decided in a design studio to ask present-day students to revive the game?     

罗素案件与美国公立院校学术自由的危机与困境

1940年初,纽约市立学院决定聘请著名哲学家罗素来校任教,教授数学和逻辑哲学.但罗素却因宗教和性道德方面的学说而遭到纽约市大批宗教界、政界和普通民众的抵制.反对者以纳税者的身份要求纽约高等教育董事会解除对罗素的聘用,最终纽约法院判决高等教育董事会对罗素的聘用违法,制造了轰动一时的“罗素案件”.以杜威为首的一批知识界人士积极以学术自由的名义为罗素辩护.整个事件集中体现了在“纳税者逻辑”和美国公立高等院校学术自由所面临的激烈冲突.     

REMARKS ON JOHN DISKS

Let D■R2 be a Jordan domain,D*=R2\D,the exterior of D.In this article,the authors obtained the following results:(1)If D is a John disk,then D is an outer linearly locally connected domain;(2)If D* is a John disk,then D is an inner linearly locally connected domain;(3)A homeomorphism f:R 2 →R 2 is a quasiconformal mapping if and only if f(D)is a John disk for any John disk D■R 2 ;and(4)If D is a bounded quasidisk,then D is a John disk,and there exists an unbounded quasidisk which is not a John disk.     

Carlos Zapata and Antonio Citterio's Cooper Square Hotel,New York

Unlike most glamorous new high-rise apartment buildings in downtown Manhattan, this thin, tilted white glass tower provides homes away from home for chic out-of-towners. And what ‘homes’ they are. Upstairs are astounding long-range views; on the lower floors, a series of glass-walled lounges, restaurants, balconies, a garden and even a library with a wood-burning fireplace. And, as Jayne Merkel explains, these sensual pleasures are mixed with intellectual ones. There are art and travel books in every room and guests can enjoy ‘movie nights’ in the screening room.     

Evolving Patterns: Correlated Systems of Interaction

Over the last four decades, the onset of computation has enabled architects and designers to employ generative patterns in their exploration of emergent social, material and spatial systems. Theodore Spyropoulos provides an overview of the field and discusses how it has been developed by the Design Research Lab (DRL) at the Architectural Association into an ‘Adaptive Ecologies’ agenda. In the context of parametric urbanism, the DRL has explored models of living through behavioural patterns found in nature, examining the role of the singular and the collective. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Employment of Reason

Rationalism in the Netherlands is characterised by pragmatism. As Charles Rattray explains it is a practical bent that was driven in the 20th century by the exigencies of building cheaply and quickly a large amount of social housing on a relatively small amount of land. It is a strand that has been underscored by a belief in reason across time and a confidence in an analytical approach. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PREVI-Lima’s Time: Positioning Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda in Peru’s Modern Project

Launched in 1968, the PREVI-Lima housing competition brought informal urbanisation to the attention of architects worldwide. The competition brief required the design of low-rise, high-density expandable homes, grouped in neighbourhoods. Here Sharif S Kahatt puts PREVI’s experimental project within the social, political and theoretical context of the time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Auroville: An Architectural Laboratory

Architect Anupama Kundoo describes how ‘the dream of building a new city’ from scratch for an international spiritual community in southern India has created a magnet for architects around the world. As the city now approaches its 50th anniversary, she asks whether Auroville can keep its architectural culture of innovation and experimentation alight. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

The Fetish of Flexibility: Farrell/Grimshaw Partnership, 125 Park Road,London

Completed in 1970, this residential building on a prime London site is recognised as a pioneering example of the British High Tech style. More importantly for this issue of AD, it was designed so that leaseholders could devise their apartments' layouts themselves, with maximum allowance for future adaptation – in contrast with the high-spec, investor-driven typology that is prevalent for such sites today. Writer and architect Edwin Heathcote describes the building's structure, the co-ownership housing society model that made it possible, and how it has fared over time.