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.     

Urban Wash

Sean Lally of WEATHERS urges designers to realise the performative capabilities of the ambient effects of the urban wash – the artificial light given off by cities at night. Taking up this principle of a wash within his designs for the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, he demonstrates how a ‘climatic wash’ could create an artificial microclimate that extends the seasonal activities of the museum's programmes.     

Watford Music Centre

David Littlefield describes how Tim Ronalds – the architect of the much-loved, restored Hackney Empire in London and the Landmark theatre in Ilfracombe, Devon – has, on a very tight budget, satisfied the ambitions of both the Watford Grammar School for Boys and the county council for a regional music centre. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Animating Architecture: Coupling High-Definition Sensing with High-Definition Actuation

Ruairi Glynn , lecturer on interactive architecture at the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, University College London (UCL), puts the pressing question: ‘What does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?’ Despite the pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing – the Internet of Things (IoT) – and students' ability to speculate, build and test responsive lifesize installations, could practice itself be in danger of getting left behind?     

‘Activating Nature’: The Magic Realism of Contemporary Landscape Architecture in Europe

The redefinition of European cities has created new opportunities for the greening of public urban spaces. Lucy Bullivant describes how three young practices in particular – West 8, Gross.Max and Mosbach Paysagistes – are leading the way with their highly dynamic and inventive narrative approaches to history, culture and the emergent city. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intimacy: Eragatory's Experiments in Materiality,Deep Texture and Mood

Because of their textural and sensory qualities – even or uneven, smooth or rough, cold or warm, reflective or matt – particular materials tend to evoke particular moods. But this does not mean that their nature and structure cannot be played with in order to create surprising atmospheres. London-based design practice Eragatory's ‘Intimacy’ series of interiors does just that, producing visual anomalies that distort the viewer's material understanding of space. Isaie Bloch , the firm's founder, describes how.     

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian practises from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also teaches at MIT. This combination of teaching and practice allows her to consider the vital exchange between ideas and architecture that is evident in both her commissioned work and her theoretical projects. Her work has been cited for the manner in which it poeticises the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ‘ambitions of the imagination’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medium-Scale Anatolian Cities: Conceptual and Physical Routes of Urban Transformation

Banu Tomruk investigates the post-1980s transformation of the built environment of medium-scale Anatolian cities. She examines the subject through a conceptual and physical framework that places as much emphasis on populist rhetoric – ‘identity crisis’, ‘historicisation’, ‘the making of a tourist city’ – as on the built structures themselves and their realisation as standardised apartment blocks and gated communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP Architects

By focusing on a ‘scientific approach’ that emphasises the importance of cause and effect, Josep Lluís Mateo/MAP has developed a design for the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona that is less about spectacle and more about the people it accommodates. Croatian critic and architect Krunoslav Ivanisin admires the structure for the ‘inherent logic of its parts’, but also for its prioritisation of communal life. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Architecture of Exception: Transgressing the Everyday – Superflex's Flooded McDonald's

In Flooded McDonald's, a film by Danish artists' collective Superflex, the familiar sight of the fast-food restaurant is replaced by ‘a slowly emerging apocalyptical composition’, as the interior floods, objects are displaced and the retail space fills with water. Jonathan Mosley describes how this destabilised and other disaster-invoked visions of architecture – structures and spaces breaking down – enable us to use our imagination to test the parameters of the everyday.     

Old Dispersions and Scenes for the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity

The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Protocells Can Make ‘Stuff’ Much More Interesting

Rachel Armstrong explains why living systems with their own metabolisms provide more exciting and far-reaching solutions than conventional building materials. She also explicitly explains why the pursuit of protocell technology, which enables us to artificially design living systems, is so much more promising than established methods, such as incorporating high-maintenance biological features – green walls or roofs – into existing urban context or applying biomimicry to traditional materials. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Happy Meals’: Finding Happiness with Hans Becker and the Humanitas Care Model

Hans Becker , originally a professor at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam, is a seemingly unlikely guru for elderly care. In 1992 he was appointed Chair of the Rotterdam-based housing association Humanitas with the task of overturning the outmoded and failing commercial model of its nursing homes. He set about replacing them with ‘apartments for life’ that promoted independent living. In order to understand more about the successful Humanitas model, David Birkbeck , Chief Executive of Design for Homes in the UK, interviewed Becker and found out how the move to a new housing type was enabled by a philosophical shift that placed an emphasis on the engendering of happiness among its residents – with food and the creation of convivial on-site restaurant facilities proving a critical tool.     

The Affects of Realism: Or the Estrangement of the Background

Affect is not just about mood and fantasy; at its best, it is an aesthetic provocation that can generate a profound questioning of the nature of reality. The 19th-century Realist writers and artists understood this – and its political implications – well. After examining the theme with reference to the writings of an international array of cultural critics, architect Michael Young – cofounder with Kutan Ayata of the New York-based studio Young & Ayata – presents a project by his firm that is subtly designed to trigger affective sensations of defamiliarisation.     

Wearable Technologies,Portable Architectures and the Vicissitudes of the Space Between

The omnipresence of the iPod and mobile phone has ensured portable and wearable technologies' highly privileged position in contemporary society. They are at the top of the pile where conspicuous consumption is concerned - you only have to visit an Apple store on a Saturday afternoon to witness the degree to which this highly sought-after gadgetry has become subject to consumer frenzy and speculation. Here, Despina Papadopoulos reviews the particular social and cultural impact of wearable devices. She also welcomes in a new generation of interactive designers who are investigating the human and emotional potential of emergent technologies. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cultivating the Field in the Global Hinterland: Community Building for Mass Housing in the Amazon Region

The large-scale residential settlements that have sprung up over the last decade to house migrants flocking to join Brazil's burgeoning rural industries are in urgent need of retrofitting with infrastructure and community facilities if they are to become sustainable. To this end, international urban design practice the BAÚ Collaborative has initiated the ‘Eden’ project – a participatory design process that involves state authorities, local NGOs, residents and social workers. Rainer Hehl , a cofounder of BAÚ, outlines the problem, the project, and its test-site: the mining town of Parauapebas.     

In Conversation: Peter Zumthor and Juhani Pallasmaa

The ‘New Nordic – Architecture & Identity’ exhibition (July–September 2012) at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark is significant for the way that it has defined architectural identity in a Northern European context. Here its co-curator, Michael Asgaard Andersen , provides an edited version of a conversation between Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor that was featured on a large screen at the show and included at full length in the museum catalogue.     

The New Delfina

Peter Cook eulogises the exuberant: he urges us to recognise its potential for release, as a true opportunity to let go creatively – and, in fact, to let it all ‘rush out in a torrent’. In tandem, he redraws the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica from his hotel window, as an exuberant pile or liveable conglomeration of grotto-like spaces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Biodiversity Targets as the Basis for Green Design

Mike Wells , the Director of Biodiversity by Design, and Ken Yeang outline the need for biodiversity targets in architecture to provide a more far-reaching basis for green design. Rather than just literally ‘greening’ a building by covering it with foliage, they seek to encourage designers to engage with wider ecological processes and in more specific detail. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shape and the City

At a time when architecture's historical relationship to the city -founded on various formal and, more recently, informal homologies – has been rendered inoperative, how might a renewed architecture constructively inform the megalopolis? RE Somol flings all the formal and informal protocols offered to the city by architecture out of the pram and calls for a politics of shape, a potential trajectory tested with two projects by Zago Architecture.