User-Focused Public Space(M)UTOPIA in Denmark

The Danish practice MUTOPIA brings to public space a strong sense of delight and playfulness, while demonstrating an overriding concern with the end user. As Serban Cornea of MUTOPIA explains, a temporary plaza for the extensive development of Orestad Nord in Copenhagen aims ‘to speed up the process of creating the area's own identity’, while the practice's housing for Lyngby-Taarb'k, Hovedstaden, audaciously puts the ‘garden’ back into the ‘garden suburb’ by relocating the transport infrastructure to the rooftops. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ‘Background’ in Bangalore; Architecture and Critical Resistance in a New Modernity

As the centre of India's new information and biotechnology industries, Bangalore has been at the forefront of the country's globalisation. As Prem Chandavarkar explains, the city's architectural culture continues at the leading edge to be one of ‘intellectualism’, valuing ‘the background’, a sense of place and contextualism over the more brash facadism of other cities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Chandavarkar and Thacker

The first architectural firm in Bangalore, founded in 1947 by Narayan Chandavarkar, Chandavarkar and Thacker is currently under the directorship of Prem Chandavarkar and Sai Shankar Bharatan. Continuing the collaborative nature of the practice during its many reorganisations over the years, Prem Chandavarkar has also given the firm a new intellectual edge by confronting Bangalore's new urbanity, and as such is a role model for many younger-generation architects. The practice's current work represents thoughtful and reflective responses as architecture finds itself at a critical juncture in this city of a euphoric present.With the practice's 60-year history, Chandavarkar is particularly aware of the humility and ‘backgroundness’ that once characterised the culture of the city in contrast to the present voluble environment. He has written (including in his essay in this issue) about the nature of practice and production, and has argued why a critical and self-reflexive practice needs to be the order of the day. Chandavarkar and Thacker speak of an ‘aesthetics of absorption’ and a ‘negotiated practice’, both of which should inform a much needed criticality of the exuberant conditions today. ‘A building does not convey meaning as much as it slowly absorbs it,’ declares the practice, and so the test of a building is not the initial impression of its spectacular presentation, but the accrued experiences and memories of its everyday inhabitation. In their understanding of culture as an active and ongoing phenomenon, and hence one not yet susceptible to definition, the architects bring an open-endedness to their own practice. The result is an avoidance of a predetermined language of expression, and thus the variety of spatial, volumetric, site and technofunctional responses, in their array of works. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Becoming Architectural: Affirmative Critique,Creative Incompletion

When Greg Lynn embraced digital animation software in the 1990s, he not only redefined architectural production, but also the designer's relationship to the generative process. In this extract from an unpublished essay written in 2000, the philosopher Brian Massumi describes Lynn's ‘in-folding’ open-ended approach, which renders the design process ‘less an external conduit for the artist's creativity’ than the artist ‘a conduit for creativity of the design process’.     

Collaborative Intelligence = Respect

Cultural projects today are often unprecedented in their complexity, scale and collaborative effort. Keith Kaseman, partner of Kaseman Beckman Advanced Strategies (KBAS), describes how building information modelling (BIM) enabled the realisation of the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Twenty-eight contractors and consultants were brought on board in the design and delivery of the monument's 184 ‘memorial units’, which collectively commemorate the individual lives lost at the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.     

Skin/Weave/Pattern

‘Fabric is the perfect mediator between the firm and the flowing.’ Nigel Coates celebrates the textile's rediscovery as a metaphor for the architectural envelope, liberating it from its reputation as having only a supporting, ‘comfort role’ in the interior. He describes his own experiments with textiles at Branson Coates Architecture and the Royal College of Art (RCA), in which they alternately become skin, weave and pattern operating at every scale from the individual body to the urban plan. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prosthetic Mythologies

The forest wilderness of Kielder in Northumbria is one ofEngland's remotest areas. Sharing an ecology similar to much of northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, it shares none of its native culture or folklore. Only planted in the 1920s, the conifer forests are relatively recent - a graft on the natural landscape. Kate Davies and Emmanuel Vercruysse of LIQUID FACTORY describe how their site-specific performance piece sought out the psychological power of the forest, embuing it with ‘Prosthetic Mythologies’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computational Fluid Dynamics for Architectural Design

There are many ‘compelling possibilities’ for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in architecture, as demonstrated by its successful adoption in the aerospace, automotive and product manufacturing industries. Sawako Kaijima, Roland Bouffanais, Karen Willcox and Suresh Naidu of ARCH-CFD, a research initiative at the International Design Centre established by the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), explore CFD's potential.     

Responsive Systems|Appliance Architectures

Branden Hookway and Chris Perry introduce the Responsive Systems Group (RSG), a newly formed design research collective at Cornell University's School of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, the work here addresses questions of collective intelligence at a number of scales. In terms of practice, collaborative, group-based work is emphasised, with both the students as well as the instructors working in teams of three (Perry and Hookway are co-directors of the Responsive Systems Group along with Ezra Ardolino). The second scale addresses the technologies and methodologies of design itself, exploring problems of ‘responsivity’ in the context of artificial intelligence and the emerging fields of robotic and sensory interaction design. Finally, and by extension, the issue of scale itself becomes a site of inquiry as the RSG's work focuses less on ‘architecture’ and more on ‘design’, implicitly if not explicitly loosening general notions of disciplinarity as a means of revealing new sites for mixture and innovation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Rahul Mehrotra Associates

Rahul Mehrotra maintains a diverse and active role as an architect, urban activist, writer and teacher. His book Bombay: The Cities Within (1995), with Sharada Dwivedi, is a major enquiry into the history and sociology of India's vivacious and contentious urbanism. He finds his city of practice - Mumbai - a mine for quarrying architectural ideations and languages. Unlike most regions in India that may have to adhere to a conformist cultural agenda, Mumbai offers a conceptual freedom in traversing the traditional and contemporary as the city has its particular plurality in the intertwining epochs, attitudes and ‘coming together and moving apart of the past and present’. Multiplicity is thus axiomatic in Mehrotra's interpretation of the city, although this is transferred in his architecture as a dialogical juxtaposition of public and private, exteriority and interiority, natural and industrial materials, and the traditional and contemporary. Interiority, arising both from reasons of climate and urban conditions, is an abiding theme in Mehrotra's work and is articulated through reified courtyards and walls that also retain an intimate conversation with the larger landscape. From residences to large complexes, he uses these elements with great craft and finesse to create dramatic spaces with changing palettes of materials, colours and phenomenally modulated differences between the exterior and interior.‘In our projects, the approach has been to abstract and interpret spatial arrangements as well as building vocabulary,’ he says. ‘The idea is to combine materials, to juxtapose conventional craftsmanship with industrial materials and traditional spatial arrangements with contemporary space organisation. In short, to give expression to the multiple worlds, pluralism and dualities that so vividly characterise the Asian landscape.’ Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

It's in Your Nature: I'm Lost in Paris

R&Sie(n)'s installation I'm Lost in Paris (2008), a disturbing take on the ecological house, epitomises the preoccupation of the French architect François Roche with the contradictions of modern nature. Javier Arbona tracks how Roche's notion of nature as ‘a partly human artifice’ which is both alien and personalised play out in his various projects, capitulating between attempts at overcoming alienation and heightening it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Navigating the Computational Turn

UNStudio has developed its own practice model for connecting colleagues and collaborators and sharing accumulated knowledge and techniques: the ‘Knowledge Platform’. Ben van Berkel with members from the UNStudio Smart Parameter Platform describe three projects at very different scales - the Burnham Pavilion in Chicago (2009), Raffles City in Hangzhou, China (2011) and Arnhem Central (2012) - that encapsulate UNStudio's working methods and approach to computational processes.     

Radical Italian Architecture Yesterday and Today

In Italy there is a revival of the spirit of 1960s Radicalism. Fresh from university, young architects ‘pick up a rock band name, enrol in an architectural competition or just invent their own research and project installations’. William Menking, who co-curated the 2003 exhibition at London's Design Museum on Superstudio - the supergroup of Italian radicali - and Olympia Kazi bring the new generation of young protagonists under scrutiny. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Wandel durch (Industrie) Kultur [Change through (industrial) culture]: conservation and renewal in the Ruhrgebiet

The Ruhrgebiet, the engine of Western Germany, constitutes a unique social, political and architectural landscape shaped by industry. In the 1950s, during Germany’s post‐war ‘economic miracle’, few people imagined that within 50 years, the region’s heavy industry would virtually shut down. Fewer still would have predicted that many of industry’s remaining structures would become monuments of the German nation. Effecting the transformation from industrial wasteland to European ‘Cultural Capital’ has required courage and creativity. This paper demonstrates that conservation of industry’s remains has been a creative tool for democratic and social progress, shaped as much by ‘bottom‐up’ initiatives as by ‘top‐down’ directives. Workers who took action to save their neighbourhoods and citizens who united to rescue factories sparked the democratization of conservation. In the ensuing decades, conservation created new philosophies for re‐imagining a landscape permeated with traces of industry. Ultimately, conservation became a key participant in regional planning through IBA (Internationale Bauausstellung) Emscher Park, which responded to industry’s decline with a comprehensive approach to attracting investment, providing better prospects for workers and solving social problems. In the Ruhrgebiet, conservation has not simply memorialized the past – by creating real social progress and democratizing the planning process, it has meaningfully shaped the region’s future.     

A City for Education

Ameena Ahmadi is Architecture Manager at the Qatar Foundation, overseeing the development of the masterplan and facilities of Education City in Doha, a multi-institution educational campus, incorporating schools and universities. Ahmadi describes how education is a significant cornerstone for Qatar's national transition ‘to a knowledge-based’ economy from a ‘hydrocarbon-based’ one. This is symbolised by substantial investment in the flagship Education City with its Arata Isozaki masterplan and its individual schools and universities designed by premier international architects.     

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.     

Elemental: A Do Tank

Alejandro Aravena has gained international honours and awards for his pioneering work at Elemental. An independent practice with a ‘social conscience’, Elemental seeks to deliver greater equality for urban dwellers and improve the quality of people's lives. It has formed key partnerships with Universidad Catolica de Chile (Chile's Catholic University) and the Chilean oil company, COPEC. Here Aravena describes some of the works that have informed Elemental's strategy: from its first housing project in Iquique in northern Chile to a sustainable masterplan with Arup for the coastal town of Constitución in the wake of the Chilean earthquake. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Drawing into the Cloud

Architectural designer, maker and researcher Birgir Örn Jónsson describes Islands of Vision, a speculative design project that he developed while in Unit 23 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). Acknowledging the predominance of the image and the underutilisation of the full range of visual experience in contemporary life, Jónsson set out to explore the entire field of vision, reasserting the periphery ‘as a rich and dynamic mode of sensation’. With the aid of ScanLAB Projects and their 3D point cloud scanner, Jónsson scanned the project's site at Lee Valley Park, East London.