The Art of Prediction

Charles Jencks has form. One of the most influential architectural authors and thinkers of our time, he has been forecasting futures and anticipating trends for half a century. His 1971 book Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods gazed into the crystal ball 29 years ahead of the millennium. Here he provides a comprehensive overview of the art of prediction and its widely divergent styles and approaches.     

Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice.

Presents a citation, biography, and selected paper of the 2002 recipient of APA's Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice (William R. Safarjan). This category recognizes outstanding service delivery by recognizing the psychologist who has provided leadership in changing the profession, its public image, and its public acceptance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

W. Grant Dahlstrom (1922-2006).

Presents an obituary for William Grant Dahlstrom, who died at the age of 83. After teaching at the University of Minnesota, Ohio Wesleyan University, and the University of Iowa, Dahlstrom joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953, initially in the Psychiatry Department. In 1957, he moved to the Psychology Department, where he remained active until his retirement in 1993. Dahlstrom's professional work focused on the assessment of personality, and he was acknowledged as the world's leading authority on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). With his emphasis on individual differences and respect for all persons, Dahlstrom devoted significant energy to trying to understand the role of ethnicity in individual functioning and personality assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Final Draft: Designing Architecture's Endgame

‘Completion is both essential for, and antithetical to, innovation.’ Here, Gretchen Wilkins and Guest-Editor Andrew Burrow attempt to resolve this generative paradox by going in search of ‘open-to-ending strategies in architectural practice’. They advocate the model of the ‘final draft’ in the design process as a means to bringing a project to a close while anticipating or encouraging future work.     

The Evolutionary Dynamics of Sentience in Cities

Cities, and their component buildings and infrastructural systems, have developed rapidly in responsive and adaptive capacities. Ubiquitous computation and new informational technologies are increasingly embedded in the physical and social processes of the city. Here, Michael Weinstock identifies ‘sentience’, or the ability to be aware, as the primary driver of innovation in the urban environment; as the extended ‘nervous system’ of a city develops the potential to sense changes in the city's flows, and in its internal and external environments.     

Exist-Stencil

Architect and interior designer Jeffrey James admits an ambivalent attitude towards nature. Here he turns that ambivalence to positive effect through a series of poetic digital collages that provide a mediation between ‘our incomprehension of the vast magnificence and complexity of the natural world and the actual spaces that we can physically touch and inhabit’.     

论中国园林对英国18世纪如画园林的影响

英国18世纪如画园林中对不规则式自然风景的追求以及园内中国建筑的出现,均体现出与中国艺术之间千丝万缕的联系,因而,中国艺术对英国园林的影响一直以来都是众多学者研究和争辩的中心.结合史料文献和园林实例,对中国艺术与如画园林理论和实践之间的关系进行剖析,进而得出中国园林思想并没有对英国园林艺术产生实质性的影响,而是在错综复杂的境遇中,激发了人们的如画想象的结论.     

Information,Complexity and the Detail

The proliferation of affordable computing has transformed the capability of architecture to deal with complex forms and details. As Dennis R Shelden , Chief Technology Officer of Gehry Technologies, explains, this has resulted in the production of an abundance of digital information or data. The intersection of two curved surfaces, for instance, is now much more complex than the surfaces themselves. Complexity requires more information and thus more processing, making details like this ultimately more expensive to produce. The jury is still out on what the future might hold, as architecture undergoes a period of fundamental transition in which, for the time being at least, there remains an essential mismatch between the surfeit of digital information and the tight economic limits on physical production.     

Space perception and William James's metaphysical presuppositions.

William James's overtly philosophical work may be more continuous with his psychological work than is sometimes thought. His Essays in Radical Empiricism can be understood as an explicit statement of the absolute presupposition that formed the basis of Jamesian psychology: that direct experience is primary and has to be taken at face value. An examination of James's theory of space perception suggests that, even in his early work, he presupposed the primacy of direct experience, and that later changes in his account of space perception can be understood as making his view more consistent with this presupposition. In his earlier view of space perception, James argued that sensations were directly experienced as spatial, though he accepted that spatial relations between sensations may be constructed by higher order thought. In his later view, however, James argued that spatial relations were just as directly experienced as sensations. The work of T. H. Green may have prompted James to recognize the full consequence of his ideas and to realize that taking experience at face value required that spatial relations be thought of as intrinsic to experience rather than the result of intellectual construction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Life of Space

The digital has revolutionised the notion of space that was formulated on the two-dimensional page in the Renaissance with the discovery of perspective and the printing press. Derrick de Kerckhove and Antonio Tursi explore how our ideas about space have been overturned since the onset of the computer and the many different ways that architects are reinterpreting them. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.