William James and "Vicious Intellectualism" in psychology.

Linguistic concepts allow us to break our world into intelligible parts. William James warns, however, that conceptualizing can easily turn into "vicious intellectualism." This happens when words (concepts) subsume unique particulars under one name, a quality is abstracted from the many particulars, the two are contrasted vis-á-vis, and then the abstraction is declared independent of, temporally prior to, and causally related to the events or processes from which it was derived. Psychology has committed this logical fallacy with concepts such as emotions, personality, and mental illness. To mistake these concepts for "thing like" entities that produce behavior is intellectually forgetful given their linguistic origin. The work of Emmanuel Levinas, Charles Taylor, and C. Terry Warner, among others, will be used to provide an alternative theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relentless Patterns: The Immersive Interior

What happens when patterns become all pervasive? When pattern contagiously corrupts and saturates adjacent objects, artefacts and surfaces; blurring internal and external environment and dissolving any single point of perspective or static conception of space. Mark Taylor ruminates on the possibilities of relentless patterning in interior space in both a historic and a contemporary context. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Architecture in China and the Meaning of Modern

What is generally understood by Modern architecture in China is set to be re-evaluated across the world with a major exhibition this summer at the RIBA in London and a significant new book by Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren. Here co-author and co-curator of Modernism in China, Edward Denison , outlines why we need to look back to China's Modernist roots in the early 20th century if we are to understand the intense modernisation of the present. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collective Cognition: Neural Fabrics and Social Software

For decades, the MIT Media Lab has been a centre of innovative and highly influential research on emerging technologies, including responsive and interactive sensing systems, software programming and forms of artificial intelligence, and robotic design and communication systems for new forms of knowledge production and distribution. Therese Tierney writes about several aspects of the Media Lab's research, including the current work of John Maeda, as well as the work of collaborators such as CEB Reas and Ben Fry, who she argues are developing work in new and sophisticated directions. She positions this work within the larger thematic of collective intelligence by addressing the particularly social forms of practice and the necessary connection to intelligent software and sensing technologies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

20 years of scripted space

Malcolm McCullough is an advocate of the importance of play and manipulation within the parameters of established software. As he asserts, ‘Once the design world has been set up, it still needs to be explored, played and mastered with finesse’. A veteran of architectural programming (he was the first architecture product manager for Autodesk, from 1985 to 1986), he reflects on the last two decades of development. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Towards a programming culture in the design arts

In his introduction to this issue of AD, guest-editor Mike Silver celebrates ‘the flexible language of commands and logical procedures’ of computers whose creative potential has until now been undervalued in architecture. He explains how the ‘happy accident’ of late 1990s blob architecture is now giving way to a focus on programming and composing new code, which promises ‘to generate new and unprecedented modes of expression’. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

William O. Krohn: early psychological practitioner.

According to information recently revealed (Mensh, 1960) the name of Krohn should be added to the present author's early survey of pioneering psychological practitioners (Wallin, 1911, 1914). He explains that at the time of his original explorations the work of Krohn at the Eastern Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee, Illinois, had not come to his attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Likeness of Fugitivity: William Notman's Carte-de-visite Portrait of John Anderson

In 1861, in his Montreal studio, the Canadian photographer William Notman (1826–1891) took a carte-de-visite portrait of the fugitive African-American John Anderson, who had fled to Canada to escape slavery in the US. Subsequently, examples of this portrait had been sold at abolitionist events. This essay explores visual strategies underlying the production of this image, at a time when Anderson had become the focus of a transatlantic extradition case that received extensive international media attention. The paper argues that the carte-de-visite functioned strategically to situate Anderson among free subjects by using a visual language of composure and stability, while relying also on a certain societal distance between Anderson and his many advocates. It shows too how Anderson, when posing for the carte-de-visite, negotiated the tensions between ‘objecthood’ and ‘subjecthood’ within a transatlantic context. Finally, it compares Notman's carte-de-visite with other examples of antislavery visual culture, such as the Wedgwood slave medallion, a daguerreotype abolitionist button and other depictions of Anderson.     

Drawing on Sand: Cities in the Making

Steven Velegrinis , Director of Urban Design for Perkins+Will in Dubai, and Guest-Editor George Katodrytis liken Gulf cities to the shifting sands that they sit upon. Showing urban development to be in a constant state of flux in the region, they highlight four key eras in the unprecedented rapid development of these cities.