Interchange Now

Not for them was the Modernism of neat, smooth, regular solids, notes Banham. ‘The younger megastructuralists clearly saw technology as a visually wild rich mess of piping and wiring and struts and catwalks and bristling radar antennae and supplementary fuel tanks and landing-pads all carried in exposed lattice frames, NASA-style. Much of this intellectual underpinning for this picturesque view of advanced technology came, directly or otherwise, from the writings and projects of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, in spite of the fact that he had been dead since 1916.’ Appreciating Futurism, Robert Stewart of YRM looks at prospects for the modularisation of megastructural transport projects, having been engaged in the vast and largely subterranean development of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport, London. He argues for a flexible architecture in the service of mobility.     

Urban American Landscape

Landscape architecture has emerged from the deep sleep it entered during the Modernist period and remained in for most of the 20th century. Now, valued because of the environmental movement, stimulated by collaborations with architects and artists, and presented with opportunities to transform abandoned industrial sites, landscape architects are enthusiastically producing new kinds of parks on brownfields, along waterfronts, even on rooftops and in garbage dumps. Jayne Merkel here looks at ways the designed landscape is creating outdoor public space in a country where it has not always been valued. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Complexity and Contradiction’:The Italian Architectural Landscape

Italy is renowned the world over for its vibrant design culture. Yet for decades its architectural heritage has held contemporary architecture in a stranglehold, stifling the real possibility of realising innovative schemes in historic cities. In recent years, there has been every outward sign that this situation has abated: a growing number of municipalities are actively setting out to attract signature architecture, and a new generation of architects has emerged - largely educated abroad - who are unhindered by the strictures of historicism. Though, as guest-editor Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi explains, there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful, the situation is far more complex and contradictory than it first appears, as the passage of architectural advancement in Italy constantly stop-starts and is beset by some major roadblocks. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Italian Architecture from the Inside

Fulvio Irace focuses on the internal tendencies of Italian contemporary architecture. In his identification of national characteristics, he recognises the part that a consolidated approach to Modernism has played. Looking backwards as well as forwards, Modernism in Italy, in all its manifestations, has been simultaneously concerned with ‘the exaltation of the new’ and ‘the obsession with memory’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The business of being an editor: Norman Lockyer,Macmillan and Company,and the editorship of Nature, 1869–1919

Broadly speaking, Victorian scientific periodicals fell into one of two categories: specialist periodicals aimed at publishing original research for an audience of scientific researchers, or popularizing periodicals meant to share news about science with a broader readership. When astronomer Norman Lockyer founded Nature in 1869, he envisioned his new weekly as a member of the latter group. That vision resulted partly from his own wish to raise science's profile in Great Britain and partly from the interests of his publisher Macmillan and Company, which bankrolled Nature with its eye on eventual profit. This paper shows that the pressure for Nature to be a financial success shaped Lockyer's approach to editing and thus shaped Nature's content, leading the magazine to occupy an unusual space in the landscape of Victorian science publishing and placing unique burdens on its editor. Nature quickly moved away from Lockyer's initial vision of a popularizing magazine and became known as a periodical by and for researchers. The magazine's popularity among scientific researchers set it apart from its closest inspiration, the commercial weekly Chemical News. But in contrast to contemporary editors at learned society journals, such as George Gabriel Stokes at the Philosophical Transactions, Lockyer did not linger over the scientific details of Nature's papers. Instead, articles for Nature were usually either accepted or rejected immediately, with little editorial involvement shaping their scientific content. The difference between editing Nature and editing other research periodicals is clearly visible in the selection of Richard Gregory as Lockyer's successor in 1919. Most research periodicals selected eminent men of science as their editors-in-chief. Gregory, a science writer and long-time subeditor at Nature, did not lend scientific prestige to the masthead, but was eminently qualified to maintain Nature's distinctive content and its profitability for Macmillan and Company.     

“结构”与“解构”的时空共生演绎：迈耶作品的“建构句法”分析

对后工业时代现代主义建筑作简要分析,选择美国建筑师迈耶进行介绍,引入建构句法概念分析他作品中的建构哲学,进而发现结构和解构思想共生的哲学思维形态,构成了其建筑风格的内在生成逻辑。     

消解·重构——浅析迈耶作品中的形式句法规则

理查德·迈耶,新现代主义流派的代表人物,坚持现代主义的美学观,其作品具有简洁、朴素,生动活泼的特点。该文试把语言学的概念运用到建筑学领域,从建筑语言学中的句法学角度,来分析迈耶在建筑创作过程中所运用的一些形式句法规则。     

The Decisive Network: Producing Henri Cartier-Bresson at Mid-Century

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photobook The Decisive Moment (1952) popularised the notion that the best photographs are made by the patient and gifted photographer who captures a fleeting moment with just one click of the shutter, creating an image with internal geometry and balance. The book solidified Cartier-Bresson’s reputation as an artist working with a camera and it encouraged scholars, curators, and hobbyists to understand photography as the product of trained individual vision and talent. Yet the book’s emphasis on personal vision also deflected attention away from the collective efforts and infrastructure necessary to promote Cartier-Bresson’s practice as art. By shifting our attention to the decisive network of magazine editors, book publishers, printers, and curators who helped Cartier-Bresson onto a highly orchestrated road to fame at mid-century, this article considers the ways in which collective work is central to the material and social history of photography, and how these realities challenge the decisive moment’s paradigm of individual and inspired creation.     

A Century of Ecological Innovation

As humanity faces its greatest disruption to date – climate change – placing the planet and its long-term survival in jeopardy, visionary designer Mitchell Joachim of Terreform ONE incites optimism. Rather than being defined by disruption, he predicts that the 21st century with be characterised by innovation, which ‘promises to solve the global challenges we face’.     

Computational Design and Automotive Material Gestalt: Cross-disciplinary Design Research by the Mercedes-Benz Center of Advanced Design and the Institute for Computational Design (ICD), University of Stuttgart

Architecture and automotive design have developed as creative domains that are similar yet at the same time profoundly different - a condition from which a long lineage of mutual stimulation has originated. Through one of their collaborative projects, Bastian Baudy and Steffen Koehl , designer and Director, respectively, of the Mercedes-Benz Center of Advanced Design, Guest-Editor Achim Menges and Steffen Reichert , research associate at the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) at the University of Stuttgart, explain how material-oriented, evolutionary computation could bring a new perspective to automotive design.