Inhabiting Time

In recent architecture, design has prioritised an engagement with time through its creation of temporary and highly flexible structures. There has, however, been less focus on how the design of buildings might impact the experience of time of the people who inhabit them. Here the distinguished author and emeritus professor Juhani Pallasmaa , who is renowned for his writings on the phenomenology of architecture, provides a reminder of the importance of what it means to ‘dwell in time’.     

Networks and the City

‘Cities need to change to survive. As living beings that are constantly replacing their cells, rebuilding their veins and arteries, and pumping energy and matter or producing waste, cities are also growing and evolving as they age.’ Just how complex, though, are cities? Sergi Valverde and Ricard V Solé of the ICREA-Complex Systems Lab at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona look at how network theory and emergent dynamics might be bringing us closer to an overarching theory of urban organisation.     

Newness,Tradition and Identity: Existential Content and Meaning in Architecture

At a time when novelty and aesthetic invention have become the established norm for contemporary architecture, the esteemed Finnish author and architect Juhani Pallasmaa speaks out in defence of tradition. He explains how nuance, expressive subtlety and an ambition for an experiential and existential quality in a work require a sense of historical continuum: ‘An embodiment of the essence of tradition’ as a precursor for ‘meaningful creativity’.     

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’.     

Light, Six-Sided, Paradoxical Fight

Built structures and their architectural representations are places where geometry, mathematics and construction discover their common nature, that is, the capability of human imagination to merge architectural objects with the telling of enjoyable tales. In this paper Marco Frascari takes aim at the forces that have shaped a system of critical thoughts on how to fight gravity with a happy architecture based on light structures combined with the dilettante’s approaches to hexagonal design, interweaving the thoughts of Alberti, Kahn and Le Ricolais with those of master storytellers Calvino and Rebelais.     

The Reflection of Medusa: A Review of The City of Imagination

The lately published The City of Imagination by Valerio Morabito challenges the pictorial idea of landscape interpretation and explores the possibilities of storytelling to read and represent the landscape that focuses on the literary and communicative aptitudes of Landscape Architecture. The article reviews the book from the perspective of history, epistemology, method, and reception regarding its literary root, which is notably inspired by Italo Calvino. The review consists of four sections: First, word and image: the historical exemplars of landscape representation between pictorial and verbal tradition. Second, memory and foresight: the authenticity of travelogue and Morabito’s method of working with his travel memories. Third, truth and myth: how Morabito applies the cognitive imperfection in storytelling to his empirical approach that counterbalances the positivist reading of the landscape. And fourth, form and language: the tension between the formal autonomy and the bardic tradition in the visual language of Morabito. The article approaches and further opens the essential dialogues between the palpable existence and fictive landscape, the interpretation and consumption of the thick meanings in human inhabitation, and the cognitive antinomy and reconciliation of positivist and humanistic stances in the discipline.     

London Short Stories: Drawing Narratives

Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and a successful practitioner, CJ Lim has won international awards for his exquisite drawings, including the esteemed Royal Academy of Arts Grand Architecture Prize. Here CJ extols the virtue of narrative and signified meaning in buildings and describes his project London Short Stories that employs ‘real and imaginary sites as springboards for the imagination’. Often ‘immoral, licentious, anarchical and unscientific’, the short stories, which are three-dimensional creations constructed out of paper, are from ‘an aesthetic point of view, glorious, ravishing and a pleasure to behold’.     

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.     

‘Shared Play’: Italo Rota

An enthusiastic collector of plastic toys and the kitsch, Italo Rota approaches architecture with a joyous sense of play. As Luca Molinari explains, for Rota architecture is a ‘game for adults’, offering opportunities for a colourful inclusion of elements yet also an essential joie de vivre. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.