Computatonal Intelligence: The Grid as a Post-Human Network

Research and design collaborative EZCT Architecture & Design Research has adopted grid computing to produce a series of furniture systems and other small-scale prototypes using genetic algorithms in combination with automated fabrication technologies. Here, cofounder Philippe Morel relates this design practice to the broader technical and social implications of various grid-computing projects, such as the online organisation Folding@Home, which utilises grid computing and distributed communities for the production and exchange of postindustrial knowledge. He argues that these ‘knowledge farms’ which create an ‘ambient factory’, are perhaps the ultimate form of social-economic production, transforming not only the evolution of design but of the communities that produce and eventually consume its products. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The AADRL: Design,Collaboration and Convergence

Brett Steele, former director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and now director of the Architectural Association, reflects upon the DRL as a laboratory for the production of a different kind of student and teacher, and ultimately as a new model for architectural education. His ‘screenshots’ offer an informal image/text-based window through which to browse the general atmosphere of that research endeavour. The DRL was also very active in employing outside specialists from a variety of disciplines including computer programming and robotics. These interests were situated within the DRL's much larger ambition of rethinking the very definition of research itself, not isolated in the purely reflective interests of history and criticism but based on the projective desires of innovation. Moreover, the organisation of these new laboratories of design life begin to resemble their objects of study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Treatment 1: Notes from an Informal Discussion on Interinstitutional Design Research and Image Production

Since 2003, Benjamin Bratton and Hernan Diaz-Alonso have conducted a series of parallel theory seminars and design studios at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture). These collaborations have addressed questions of collectivity at varying scales: personal (between two individuals, each with separate professional practices), institutional (between two disciplinary positions, one analytical and the other creative) and cultural (between what is inside and outside the architectural imaginary). The work featured in the article represents another primary mandate of their interinstitutional project: the transdisciplinary implications of design as a general form of practice as opposed to the historical definitions of ‘architecture’ or the architect. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A History of Territories,Movements and Borders: Politics of Inhabitation

If the city is as much about culture as nature, then a cultural understanding of the shaping of the urban is as essential as a scientific one. Here, architect and critic Marina Lathouri , who directs the graduate programme in History and Critical Thinking at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, describes how the concept of planning in the 19th century became intrinsically linked to notions of territory, borders and spatial organisation. She questions whether this might now be tested, and new design technologies used, to expose underlying emerging patterns of disruptive flows beckoning the possibility of the logic of a new social disposition.     

Design Signals: The Role of Software Architecture and Paradigms in Design Thinking and Practice

Does the ontology of design software influence built form? Panagiotis Michalatos , lecturer in architectural technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design and a principal research engineer at Autodesk, Inc, here looks at how the move from drawing typologies to digital modelling since the mid-1990s has affected architectural aesthetics. He goes on to examine two more recent developments that may announce a further paradigm shift: granular tracking of design input, and data organisation practices in biomedics which, transferred to architecture, could allow for a more spatio-temporal approach.     

The New Materiality

In the last few decades an entirely new conception of the material world has emerged. Here, philosopher Manuel DeLanda , whose work has become synonymous with this ‘new materialism’, introduces this novel understanding of materiality. Like any other conceptual framework, it has precedents in the history of philosophy - the work of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is a good example - but only recently has it become coherently articulated with science and technology. Gone is the Aristotelian view that matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside (transcendent essences), as well as the Newtonian view in which an obedient materiality simply follows general laws and owes all its powers to those transcendent laws. In place of this, we can now conceptualise an active matter endowed with its own tendencies and capacities, engaged in its own divergent, open-ended evolution, animated from within by immanent patterns of being and becoming.     

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.     

Eat Me… Drink Me…

Sean Lally of WEATHERS lets out a rallying cry to all architects. He calls on them to make environmental conditions the subject of design rather than regarding them as a standardised part of a building's services. Here he highlights the potential of material systems, which are usually applied to conditioning the interiors of buildings, in the generation of new forms and activities; whether it is in the honing of the performance aspect of a building's function, as in the Water Cube at Beijing (2008), or in the seasonal planning that underpins the concept behind WEATHERS' Wanderings project (2008-9). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Urban Complex: Scalar Probabilities and Urban Computation

Guest-editor Anthony Burke redefines complexity in relation to the city as ‘a dynamic and luminal organisational condition “growing at the edge of chaos”’ and in so doing shifts our understanding of urban trauma as an event intrinsic to the contribution of the metropolis rather than external to it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于IFC标准的建筑结构模型的自动生成

当前,在各种商业软件盛行的环境下,设计单位最紧迫的问题是要解决本单位各专业之间的信息交互,而在这些信息交互中,建筑与结构专业的信息交互最为急需。针对这一需要,本文介绍了现今国际上建筑信息模型的数据共享与交换的IFC标准,分析了建筑模型与结构模型信息的组成与特点,研究了通用建筑结构有限元模型的表达方法,建立以IFC标准为基础,通过建筑模型自动生成符合多种结构分析与设计软件的结构模型的基本方法。通过实例验证本研究方法的实用性与可行性,结果表明本方法为各种设计软件间信息的共享与交换提供了一种通用解决方案,为企业内部实现建筑设计集成化提供了技术保障。最后,文章讨论了该研究方向中基于IFC标准的建筑模型的结构构件偏心、节点连接、荷载处理等方面的问题和后续研究方向。     

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.     

Intelligent Cities and the Taxonomy of Cognitive Scales

Here, Guest-Editor Michael Weinstock with Mehran Gharleghi of the EmTech programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London shift the definition of the intelligent city away from one that is predicated on information and communication technologies towards a deeper and more profound characterisation. They explore the possibilities of cognitive complexity in urbanism emerging out of the interaction of sensory processing and behavioural responses to the world. Within the context of large infrastructural systems, what might, for instance, rapidly developing machine consciousness have in common with collective intelligence? What could the preliminary conceptual schema be for an intelligent city that is sufficiently self-aware to synchronise its systems with climatic and ecological phenomena at regional and local scales?     

Materialising Complexity

The specialist practice designtoproduction consults on the digital production of complex architectural designs. Here, co-founder Fabian Scheurer charts the relatively recent journey that architecture has taken from the regular to the irregular. He provides a comprehensive account of how this shift to curvilinear and complex forms has impacted on design and production methods, and the strengths and pitfalls of parametric design and CNC fabrication. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign

Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang call for architects to play a more proactive role in building performance modelling. They look at how this is all made possible with the emergence of accessible, cost-effective web-based systems for practices and the way that this can further be enhanced by integrated performance-based design approaches. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parallel Processing: Design /Practice

In the late 1990s servo emerged as a young design collaborative embracing new forms of distributed practice as enabled by the advent of telecommunications technologies. In this section, David Erdman, Marcelyn Gow, Ulrika Karlsson and Chris Perry write about how these organisational principles are at work not only in the context of their practice, but in the design work itself, which stretches across a variety of design disciplines to incorporate areas of expertise particular to information and interaction design, as well as a number of manufacturing and fabrication technologies. Many of servo's projects have focused on small-scale interior infrastructures, typically in the form of gallery installations, furniture systems and exhibition designs. This particular scale has allowed the group to focus on the development of full-scale prototypes, exploring a wide range of potential innovations at the point of integration between various technological and material systems. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

To a Curator of Beautiful and Healthy Lives: A Note to Myself

How might architectural thinking and processes shift over the next 35 years? How might the architect's role be redefined with shifting ethical values? Could the architect be viewed as less of a design professional and more of a curator engaged in the development of healthy holistic environments, catering for all of society's needs? DaeWha Kang , an architect from 2050, writes to his earlier self, critiquing the work that he undertook in independent practice and as a design director at Zaha Hadid Architects in the mid-2010s. He describes how his design methodologies have evolved in the intervening years.     

Localising the Global

The received view of China and much of Southeast Asia is that it is uncritically importing Western architecture and urban design. In reality, though, urbanisation is far more complex than this. Is there more to an English-style town in China or a Chinatown district in a US city than straight pastiche? Kyong Park looks at the level of local translation involved with appropriation in a Chinese and South Korean context.     

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.     

New River Village

Social affordable housing is so often the poor relation of any private development, allocated the poorest plot with the least attractive aspect. Bruce Stewart describes how at Hornsey in north London, Stock Woolstencroft has transcended these problems with considerate spatial organisation and security management. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.