Actualising (Overlooked) Material Capacities

An emphasis on material synthesis is not without its pitfalls and challenges. Here Branko Kolarevic , Professor and Chair in Integrated Design at the University of Calgary Faculty of Environmental Design, alerts us to the dangers of overlooking materials' shifting capacities, which are so often scale dependent, while also disregarding existing materials in favour of the new or novel. As the potential grows for material systems in buildings to become more adaptive and to harness automation, Kolarevic describes some exciting developments that are taking place in dynamic facade design, providing the much-heralded promise of an efficient use of ambient energy.     

(Science) Fiction,Ecophysical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines: Animism,Vitalism and Machinism as a Way to Rearticulate the Need to Confront the Unknown in a Contradictory Manner

François Roche of R&Sie(n) ruminates on the contradictory nature of the present: a time that is ‘vibrating’ while ultimately ‘lacking momentum’. Reclaiming ‘the scenarios and substances that condition architecture’, he rejects the large-scale flights of fancy of international signature architects and argues for the reactivation of ‘a throbbing, complex and unfinished “localism”’. In so doing, he advocates a machinism that enables fictionalisation and speculation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mapping urban assemblages: the production of spatial knowledge

This paper engages with the ontology and epistemology of urban mapping. While geographical information system (GIS) and other digital technologies have long transformed the capacities for representation of urban data, this paper explores the capacity of mapping to produce new ways of seeing, understanding, planning and designing the city. With a primary focus on urban morphology, distinctions and overlaps between mapping, diagramming, planning and designing are articulated within a framework of assemblage thinking. Through cases drawn from urban design research, we analyse the mapping of political conflict, transport flows, functional mix and informal settlement. It is argued that urban mapping is a form of spatial knowledge production that is often diagrammatic, embodying a spatial logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived; and it can reveal capacities for urban transformation – the city as a space of possibility.     

Un détail de ce qui change: Function of a Function

Why should computation be leading to a bifurcation in architectural detailing, resulting in a simultaneous, and opposing, tendency towards either greater precision in fabrication or increasing plasticity? Architectural designer and theorist Peter Macapia asks what is driving these propensities in computation, and what in turn historically might be the relation between the detail and force. What comes into play now, though, when architectural style is no longer identified by a taxonomy of parts, or a vocabulary of orders, but rather by a network of forces and functions correlating actions? How might economic and political power be interacting with force, the diagram and function in contemporary design?     

Collective Intelligence in Design

In their introduction to this issue, Christopher Hight and Chris Perry define the idea of collective intelligence in its relationship to design practice and to broader technological and social formations. First they suggest a reformulation of practices around networked communication infrastructures as conduits for the new orchestrations of power that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt detailed in their books Empire and Multitude. They then describe how such practices are often involved in the development of responsive sensing environments as new sites for manifesting the social organisations and communities made possible via telecommunications and the Internet. Lastly, they address how traditional boundaries of design disciplines and knowledge, from architecture to programming, are opening into complex co-minglings of their respective isolated ‘intelligences’ into collectives capable of engaging these new sites, new briefs and new sorts of projects. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Building as a Deleuzoguattarian Strata/Machinic Assemblage

Abstract

What do we mean when we say that a building is an assemblage? To answer this question, we must first decide what we mean by ‘the assemblage’ and which areas of Deleuze and Guattari’s corpus we will use. In this paper I focus on one of two kinds of assemblage from A Thousand Plateaus: the machinic assemblage. Drawing on the third chapter of this core text, I show how and why this concept should be understood as complementary yet distinct from the often-neglected concept of the strata. I then illustrate these concepts through the architectural design process by discussing the creation of a physical and functional building, acts of (architectural) expression and as a contribution to one or more architectural languages. Using this insight, I argue that architecture provides us with a way to usefully illustrate and explore some of the complex and abstract concepts within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy.     

The Awesome and Capricious Language of Past,Present and Future Digital Moods

Can cultural progress be held back by linguistic limitations? Architect and educator Marjan Colletti , cofounder of London practice MAM-arch, examines the nouns, adjectives and adjectival compounds used by the architectural profession during the first and second digital turns. He reflects on how restricted vocabularies can cause initially forward-looking concepts to descend into the realm of doctrine and ‘-isms’, and argues that true advancement requires constant evolution of the language employed to describe it.     

Designing Commonspaces: Riffing with Michael Hardt on the Multitude and Collective Intelligence

Michael Hardt has made an indispensable contribution to current understanding of the impact of globalisation on social, economic and political practice, especially in his two books, Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. In order to engage Hardt with many of the projects and ideas raised in this issue, guest-editors Christopher Hight and Chris Perry invited him to participate in a blog. The blog format enabled the resulting exchange between Christopher Hight and Hardt to be an open platform relating concepts like ‘empire’ and ‘multitude’ to contemporary design practice, and even raised challenges implicit in Hardt's own work. It also provided a productive alternative to the expropriation of a theorist's writings to legitimatise a particular design approach or methodology. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.