Instrumental geometry

For two decades, the individual members of the SmartGeometry Group have pioneered innovative computer-aided design (cad) techniques and technologies. Now that they are situated in key positions in internationally renowned companies, the group is involved in developing a new generation of parametric design software. Here, Robert Aish (Director of Research at Bentley Systems), Lars Hesselgren (Director of Research and Development, kpf London), J Parrish (Director of ArupSport) and Hugh Whitehead (Project Director of the Specialist Modelling Group, Foster and Partners, London) discuss with Achim Menges the group's instrumental approach to geometry and their unique collaboration spanning the world of practice and software development. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distinguished scientific award for the applications of psychology.

The Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology is presented to a person who has made distinguished theoretical or empirical advances leading to the understanding or amelioration of important practical problems. This year's winner is Joseph V. Brady. Brady is recognized for sustained innovative and insightful contributions to behavioral pharmacology, behavioral physiology, and behavioral medicine. In addition, his work has encompassed basic neuroanatomy and endocrinology, as well as the integrative activity of behavior in simulated space environments. A citation, biography, and selected bibliography of Brady's works are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Towards Robotic Swarm Printing

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Mediated Matter Group is honing its research into robotic swarm printing by focusing its efforts on material sophistication, or ‘tunability’, and communication or coordination between fabrication units. Here, the group's Neri Oxman, Jorge Duro-Royo, Steven Keating, Ben Peters and Elizabeth Tsai illustrate this by describing three case studies that investigate robotically controlled additive fabrication at architectural scales.     

My photographic career in Shanghai

Abstract

For more than ten years there has been an ever increasing demand for photos that I took showing scenes of Jewish refugees during their years of exile in Shanghai (figure 1). But it had never been my intention, or within my resources, to create a photographic record of the Jewish refugee community which had lived in Shanghai during the Second World War. All this came about rather incidentally. Like most young children, I was fascinated by photography, but the purchase of what I would call a ‘real’ camera was always beyond my financial resources. When I arrived in Shanghai in 1938 I did not even own a camera, but my brother had an Agfa box camera. Such a camera had a fixed-focus lens, and only a single shutter speed, but in good light, on any sunny day, it produced perfectly acceptable pictures. This most basic camera became available to me because my brother had different interests.     

The Sign of Stieglitz,the Art of Evans

This essay examines how Walker Evans evolved his documentary style in response to what he saw as Alfred Stieglitz's overbearing aestheticism. It begins with their first meeting and Evans's ‘rejection’ of this father‐figure, a rejection which became generalised in the history of photography on the grounds of a dichotomy between photographic art and social documentary. Evans came to represent this latter tendency despite his own wishes. With the help of friends like Lincoln Kirstein and Bernice Abbott, Evans claimed a different artistic genealogy, via the Civil War work of Mathew Brady and his teams and Eugène Atget, neither of whom were working in the same vein of documentary as Evans might have imagined. He attempted to remain the independent artist, all the while taking advantage of his various photographic employments and the directions in which they pushed him. In the end, history made him famous and influential as the champion of social documentary, a genre which coincided neatly with his own desire for a ‘lyric documentary’ for only a few years. In his desire to be an artist free from a social agenda, in his resistance to branding, he is a maverick bohemian much closer to Stieglitz than has been supposed, and he seemed to recognise the fact in his last comments on his predecessor.