The ‘Place’ of Cosmopolitan Architecture

The paper takes as its point of departure the necessity to open a space between the international and the national. That space will be as much political as will be one that allows for a certain architecture. For the sake of argumentation that space has been identified as the cosmopolitan. What characterises the cosmopolitan is the possibility that it is the form of modernity once the modem has been freed from the oscillation between the national and the international. Once modernity is introduced then the question to be addressed is not what is modern architecture but what is the architecture of modernity. Part of the argument developed here is that a beginning can be made once it is understood that modernity has to eschew the symbol. And yet, the symbols that proliferate are either national or international. Consequently, this gives rise to a complex interplay between the cosmopolitan, modernity and the possibility of an architecture that is non-symbolic. The question of how to think this complex set of relations is the project undertaken by the paper.     

‘Complexity and Contradiction’:The Italian Architectural Landscape

Italy is renowned the world over for its vibrant design culture. Yet for decades its architectural heritage has held contemporary architecture in a stranglehold, stifling the real possibility of realising innovative schemes in historic cities. In recent years, there has been every outward sign that this situation has abated: a growing number of municipalities are actively setting out to attract signature architecture, and a new generation of architects has emerged - largely educated abroad - who are unhindered by the strictures of historicism. Though, as guest-editor Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi explains, there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful, the situation is far more complex and contradictory than it first appears, as the passage of architectural advancement in Italy constantly stop-starts and is beset by some major roadblocks. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Research Development of Landscape Architecture in Main Colleges in China Based on Theses Statistics——A Review of Master Degree Theses on Landscape Architecture in China in Recent 10 Years and Prospect

1 Introduction In late 1990s,with the all-round development of society and economy,a rush of landscape construction took place in China and thousands of professionals entered into the field of landscape planning and design.Landscape design has become the hottest profession in China since 2004.In order to meet the social demands,many colleges and universities started to establish the landscape architecture major one after another,and several hundreds of degree theses especially     

The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth

Fire and elephants are the main influences on woody vegetation cover in the Kruger National Park (KNP). This study assessed the change in woody cover using geometrically registered Landsat TM images (1989, 1995 and 2007), their dry season period selected so as to exclude herbaceous vegetation. Using spectral mixture analysis (SMA), the images were classified in four woody fractions of cover classes (0.20–0.39, 0.40–0.59, 0.60–0.79 and 0.80–1.00). Field site-derived woody vegetation end member locations were used in the process. The southern-central section of KNP showed losses in woody vegetation of about 33% in the high fertility (basalt) areas compared to about 11% for the low fertility zone. Within classification errors introduced by the presence of cloud and herbaceous vegetation, a spatial indicator of susceptibility of the woody vegetation to change was developed for the 0.80–1.00 fraction, which indicated higher cover stability in the less frequently burnt areas of the park.     

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.     

‘Sur’ Realism: After Surrealism Comes Hyperrealism

If Surrealism was originally about freeing the subconscious, what is its relevance in our now-liberated era? Despite avowed sympathies with the Surrealist movement, Hernan Diaz Alonso – Principal of Los Angeles-based architectural practice Xefirotarch and Director and CEO of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) – argues that the way forward for visionary architecture in the digital age lies instead in the creation of new coherencies: a hyperrealism of the present that exploits and transforms clichés.     

The difference of ‘being diverse’: City branding and multiculturalism in the ‘Leicester Model’

This city profile on Leicester focuses on the representation of ethnical diversity in city branding. Through a historical approach, the paper discusses how the local authorities have taken advantage of the arrival of different migration flows into the city, in order to redefine its post-industrial identity in terms of multiculturalism, tolerance and inclusivity. In so doing, the paper emphasises the combination of deliberate marketing communicative activities, the provision of services for attracting and retaining foreign businesses and the creation of an open urban milieu where various ethnic groups are free to express and celebrate their own cultures through festivals and events. The paper identifies the alignment between place communication and place ‘offerings’ development as the crucial element underpinning Leicester's model for multicultural cooperation and critically assesses the recent challenges that are being posed to the sustainment of a multicultural city image.     

Contemporary tendencies in Colombian urban planning: the case of the ‘Planes Parciales’ in Medellín

After decades of internal conflict, Colombia is experiencing economic growth and urbanization. It remains, however, one of the most socially unequal countries in Latin America. Medellín, acclaimed the most innovative city, implemented large-scale transport infrastructures to link socially excluded areas to the city; new educational and cultural facilities; new public spaces and housing projects, rooted in the Barcelona model. This so-called ‘social urbanism’ has shifted local perceptions, though its socio-economic impact has been questioned. This paper focuses on the less analysed transformations in planning policy and management through two instruments: the Land Use Plan (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial – POT) and the ‘Plan Parcial’. The research, based on a desktop review, interviews and site visits, examines the application of these instruments in Medellín, reflecting on how they contribute to achieving the aims of ‘social urbanism’. The paper explores the differences between ‘rhetoric’ and practice that are reflected in those between the city’s overarching plan (POT) and the implementation of ‘planes parciales’, focusing on redevelopment, urban renewal and urban expansion. Such differences mirror the deficiencies in the adaptation of the ‘urban project’ Barcelona model in Medellín, and provide the basis for a call to develop ‘social urbanism’ that is genuinely more socially, territorially comprehensive and inclusive.     

The ‘distinctiveness of cities’ and distinctions in cities: boundaries of belonging in comparative perspective

It is in cities where people are most strongly confronted with diversity in an ‘age of migration’. However, comparisons of local integration contexts usually take ethnic boundaries as given or assume that they are constituted by the nation state. Our analysis of local discourses challenges this methodological nationalism. Departing from the ‘distinctiveness of cities’ approach, we scrutinise how Frankfurt, Dortmund, Birmingham and Glasgow differ in how diversity is discursively constructed. We maintain that the discourses not only reflect different frames in dealing with diversity but also serve as a proxy for debating the self-image of the city.     

‘New Aging’: Designing Architecture for All Ages

The US is on the brink of demographic transformation, with the bulging generation of baby boomers about to reach retirement. In 2008, New York-based architects Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) anticipated this shift by instigating a ‘New Aging’ initiative that set out to explore imaginative solutions in architecture and urbanism to age-related challenges. Here Matthias Hollwich with Matthew Hoffman of HWKN explain why attitudes and approaches to ageing have to change; and why old age needs to be ‘acknowledged as a state of human existence’ that fully ‘deserves preparation, anticipation and excitement’.     

Architecture before architecture: Frei Otto's ‘Deep History’

The German architect Frei Otto was deeply concerned with the environmental crisis caused by the presence of humans on earth. Otto responded to this by investigating the origins, and potential futures, of architecture through the lens of natural history. This paper will focus on the significant collaboration between Frei Otto and the German biologist and anthropologist Johann-Gerhard Helmcke (1908–1993). Their collaboration began in the early 1960s, and can be largely credited for Otto's interest in biology and his appropriation of scientific methodology. Helmcke's anthropological work also influenced Otto's understanding of the role of humans in creating architecture and the environment. Otto and Helmcke developed a theory of bio-technics based on measuring and calculating the structural properties of plants, animals and even human bodies. Eventually, they invented a cosmology of objects that extended to all forms, whether living or non-living, natural or technological—including architecture.

Helmcke argued that ‘if we want to comprehend the concept “nature” in as pure a way as possible, we must refer back to that prehistoric period when there were as yet no people to intervene in the natural equilibrium’. By directly testing materials that included hair, bones, spider webs and seashells, Otto looked for structures that corresponded to what can be described as ‘an architecture before humans’. At an historical moment in which modernist narratives of progress and the domination of nature came increasingly under question, Otto sought alternative means to construct the development and history of form. What are the problems raised in this renewed search for the origins of architecture? Did Otto's quest for structural optimisation in nature simply introduce another anthropocentric narrative? This paper will examine these and other contradictions in Frei Otto's relationship to the architecture of the pre- and un-human.     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

The role of ‘early-phase mining’ in reframing net-positive development

The term ‘net-positive development’ has gained significant recognition by both academics and professionals, especially in architecture. A net-positive development increases or creates economic, social and ecological capital(s) and makes a positive contribution to ecosystem services. Designing how excess resources may be used beyond a site's boundary is a very appealing notion, but difficult to put into practice without the tools and methods to support net-positive development. The effectiveness and potential impact on community design of ‘net-positive development’ is questioned when its evaluation is limited to a quantitative analysis only. A broader definition of net positive is offered that equally places social dimensions alongside ecological health through ‘mining’ for synergies and leverage points in the early stages of a design project. An emphasis is placed on the undervalued first step in the design process of ‘mining: evaluating the dormant, inherent potential’. This can be done through a process of questioning the conventional parameters of a context's predefined limits. A framework is also provided that can prove beneficial at this phase. It is posited that strong mining can provide full-spectrum change where true positive benefits, on multiple scales and for multiple stakeholder interests, are achieved.     

The discourse of ‘Respect for People’ in UK construction

A competency‐based review of professional quantity surveying is important for service excellence and has continuing relevance in the built environment of the 21^st century. A survey of quantity surveyors in professional practice in South Africa has provided a new perspective on the relative importance of competencies required for current and future quantity surveying services, and revealed notable gaps between the important competencies and current proficiency levels among practitioners. The survey was based on a structured questionnaire reflecting 23 defined competencies, which were derived from the literature and from in‐depth interviews with selected practitioners. The results indicated that technically orientated competencies were rated of highest importance for current services, while management orientated competencies were rated of higher importance for future services. The profession was rated as deploying below average proficiency levels in marketing, advanced financial management, leadership and general management, and project management, although these received high current and future importance ratings. The findings suggest that initial and continuing education and training of professional quantity surveyors should emphasize the development of management‐orientated competencies.     

The birth of ‘land use planning’ in American urban planning

Although the concept of ‘land use planning’ is now firmly enmeshed in American urban planning, its meaning still remains vague. This paper aims to clarify the meaning by examining the historical development of land use planning in the USA. At the beginning of the twentieth century, city planners viewed a city as an organic unit of public facilities. While city planning thereafter provided potential elements of land use planning, such as zoning, zoning surveys and land use classification systems, the idea of land use planning itself was actually derived from rural county planning and was initially utilized in urban county planning as a guide for zoning in the 1930s. After bringing about a change in the way cities were viewed, that is, as a pattern of land use and population density, land use planning was further employed as a guide for urban redevelopment policies in the 1940s, and finally reaching full integration into city planning in the 1950s and 1960s.     

The Rise of the ‘Invisible Detail’: Ubiquitous Computing and the ‘Minimum Meaningful’

The architectural detail has provided the essential material building block for conveying an idea. Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ask how this, though, is all set to change in a digital context. As technologies shrink and vanish from sight, what might become the new minimum meaningful unit for architecture? How might a new relational scale establish itself, at the level of the ‘invisible detail’ or the microchip? How might this, in turn, change the very nature of buildings as they become highly responsive, human-occupied transmitters?     

The ‘Silent’ Closure of Urban Public Space in Cape Town: 1975 to 2004

This study seeks to show that the closure of urban public space by residents in a South African context is not a recent phenomenon and that successful citizen-driven urban public space closures have been a feature of the urban landscape before the rise of gated communities and monitored urban public space. The primary objective of the study was to analyse and investigate spatio-temporal tendencies relating to the citizen-driven privatisation of urban public space in Cape Town. This objective would be driven by the creation of a comprehensive database of provincially gazetted urban land closures dating from 7 February 1975 to 17 December 2004 within one of the six municipal substructure regions of Cape Town. The secondary objective, but by no means less important, is an identification and analysis of the reasons forwarded, practices employed and techniques utilised by individual citizen-driven applications in two distinctly diverse residential suburbs within the study area.

‘The second industrial revolution’: cultural reconstructions of industrial regions

Cartographic representations of landscape beauty face many pitfalls. Historically, significant problems have been associated with the use of surrogate variables to represent overall quality, as well as the general difficulties of two‐dimensional representation of views seen in elevation. Although current methods of landscape mapping appear to remain neutral on matters of qualitative judgement, and purport only to classify landscape types, these may be associated with problems of consistency and meaning. Future efforts might profitably be directed to analysing landscapes in terms of their probability of providing particular experiences and opportunities, and developing rules about people's appreciation of different landscape types