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.     

Diving into the Depth-Scape: Exuberance and Personalities

Exuberance is about more than appearance. Yael Reisner argues that it engenders an emotional response. It provides a whole ‘depth-scape’ of expression by offering extensive qualities that go beyond the merely practical or the required. Exuberance proffers a full emotional range from the horrific to the sublime, which requires complexity but also the presence of creative personalities who lend personal interpretation to the design process. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Standardising Heterogeneity: Public Housing and the Absent(ed) Architect

Does the decentralisation of housing provision by government necessarily lead to a less standardised and more diverse approach to design and planning? Can targeted financial programmes effectively trigger the forces of the free market to deliver more innovative and varied solutions to housing? Michael Bell , Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in New York, reviews the impact of the introduction of tax credits and other initiatives, brought in to encourage public/private partnerships and the involvement of speculative developers in the 1980s and 1990s, on the quality of public housing in the US. In doing so, he puts out a call to architects to acquaint and engage themselves with the complexities of the financial markets.     

The Visceral City and the Theatre of Fear

Over the last decade in India, intensive urbanisation, with the aid of the mass media, has unleashed a new culture of fear. Widespread access to TV, text messaging and the Internet have heightened and played upon individuals' anxieties. Ravi Sundaram describes how in Delhi, in particular, the media provided the catalyst for ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘psychosis’ during the summer of 2002. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public Lifestyle in the Low-Density City

Much maligned, shopping centres have come to represent many of the negative aspects of low-density areas. They are all too often associated with high car dependency and a paucity of cultural and public amenities. Alex Wall questions this preconception. Could the well-conceived and designed shopping centre actually prove to be urban sprawl's redemption?. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Trauma Within the Walls: Notes Towards a Philosophy of the City

Renowned philosopher and critical theorist Andrew Benjamin provides a framework for thinking about trauma and the city. He returns to Sigmund Freud's definition of trauma as repressed memory and to Aeschylus' formulation of the unmasterable as portrayed in mythical Athens in the Oresteia trilogy. This view of unaccustomed or unpredictable forces, such as civic strife, as ever present and integral to democracy, enables the maintenance of the urban project avoiding repression. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Condensation: Regionalism and the Room in John Yeon's Watzek House

Mary Anne Beecher's discussion of Aubrey Watzek's house extends traditional notions of regionalism to the domain of the interior. She outlines numerous ways that the local landscape and history figure as condensed renditions within rooms, surfaces and details. It is here that we find evidence of interior atmosphere developed as identity within a specific cultural and geographical context. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The City as a Project: Types,Typical Objects and Typologies

Marina Lathouri provides a critical overview of the historiography of typology, tracing the word ‘type’ back to its 18th-century origins and through to its re-emergence as a standardised objet-type in the Modernist era. She closes by questioning the pertinence of type and typology today.     

Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture

Interactive design has come about as a result of the intermingling of disciplines. As a consequence, the language it uses has become blurred - borrowed or stolen with little restraint from elsewhere. Though particular terms have become ubiquitous, the original concepts that lie behind them have been lost. This means that all too frequently they are no longer knowingly used. Usman Haque sorts the wheat from the chaff and brings clarity to bear on the vocabulary and thinking behind interactivity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Vitality of Matter and the Instrumentalisation of Life

Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, based at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, are internationally renowned as pioneers in the field of biological arts, challenging audiences with their tissue engineering projects. Catts and Zurr discuss how synthetic biology has increasingly become ‘the new frontier for exploitation’ and why there is currently ‘a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the fields of the life sciences’ in which life itself becomes a raw material.     

Transgression in and of the City

For Turkish artist and educator Can Altay ‘today's cities are full of limits’. This unevenness can be regarded as the manifestation of current investment patterns and political and cultural conflicts. Does, however, transgression offer opportunities to subvert this? Is it possible for a city's inhabitants, artists and architects to open up boundaries and through the power of presence to intervene in the status quo?     

Recombinant Landscapes in the American City

How are urban actors, such as landscape designers, community groups, developers and local politicians, actively restructuring their environments to meet the challenges of the American city in the new global context? Grahame Shane outlines the approaches to landscape that have been emerging since the mid-20th century and are set to recombine urban assemblages whether they are located in historic city centres, postindustrial waterfronts or suburban sprawl. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structuring Materiality: Design Fabrication of Heterogeneous Materials

What happens when we invert the usual sequence of the design process - form-structure-material - so materiality becomes the generative driver? Taking nature as her model, Neri Oxman advocates a new material method, Variable Property Design (VPD), in which material assemblies are modelled, simulated and fabricated with varying properties in order to correspond with multiple and continuously shifting functional constraints. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Collision of Scarcity and Expendability in Architectural Culture of the 1960s and 1970s

Architecture as a practice assimilates contradictions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approaches to materials and sustainability. New finishes, details and products are continually specified and often fetishised, while architects are at pains to show their minimal impact on the environment. Steve Parnell highlights an era in the pages of Architectural Design in the late 1960s and early 1970s that congregated these incongruities by simultaneously advocating low-energy solutions and expendability, most notably the inflatable.     

Cross the River by Touching the Stones: Chinese Architecture and Political Economy in the Reform Era: 1978-2008

China's Open Door Policy and economic development set in motion in 1978 can be regarded as the triumph of pragmatism over theory - specifically Chairman Mao's brand of Marxist theory. Tao Zhu traces the progress of reform over the last 30 years, and its impact on Chinese architectural culture. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Outside the Terrestrial Sphere Greg Lynn FORM: N.O.A.H. (New Outer Atmospheric Habitat) and New City

Renowned architect and educator Greg Lynn describes two projects - N.O.A.H, a science-fiction film, and New City, a design exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York - that directly ‘engage the theme of Space Architecture as the new frontier for design research in terms of the spatial character and navigation of environments with alternative gravities’.