Forthcoming Titles 2005/06 The New Mix: Culturally Dynamic Architecture Guest-edited by Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson
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September-October 2005, Profile No 177
We are at a new moment in architecture, when many cultures are contributing to the unfolding of Modernism. This enriching influence is broadening the mix, extending the range available to architecture, of materials and colours, evocative forms, cultural references and social thinking. In an era of boredom with monocultures and orthodoxies, there is the almost universal expectation that the metroculture, whether in London or Beijing, will provide broadened cultural experiences in food, performance, dress and sound. The new ethnically diverse city is a place of zesty daily encounters/collisions/cohabitation between cultures, a place of mixed signals, contradictions, delightful confusions: Franco-Japanese cuisine, elite schoolchildren wearing doo-rags, jazz performed on gamelans – whatever one's mother culture, we're all getting addicted to varied rhythms, different emotional emphases, ‘other’ ideas of beauty. This change is visible in schools of architecture, at least in the range of students, typically from many ethnicities, none of them constituting a majority. No wonder, then, that there is increased interest in ways that architecture can incorporate a larger compass of riches. A rising group of practitioners is meeting the challenge of this broadening cultural landscape in pursuing strategies of quick switching, layering, reframing that ultimately might help create a more robust Modernism, helping to rescue it from a ‘potato blight’ of too much sameness. This issue presents a dynamic cultural mix: Teddy Cruz in Tijuana; Steven Holl in Beijing; Iain Low in South Africa; Jayne Merkel in Queens, New York; Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi in Bangalore; and Leon van Schaik in Australia.
Sensing the 21st-Century City: Close-up and Remote Guest-edited by Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane
The New Mix:
Culturally Dynamic Architecture
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November/December 2005, Profile No 178
The 21st-century city – defined by the duality of mass migrations to cities and continued sprawl – provides innumerable challenges and opportunities for architects, designers and planners today. Rapid environmental changes require scientific monitoring as forests and farmlands depopulate further; vast informal, selforganised urban settlements develop in the absence of master planning; and hyper-nodes monitor and influence everything through networked communications, media images, foreign aid and military might. Remote sensing and hand-held devices combine to create just-in-time delivery of design and planning services. These have the potential to shape and manage, as never before, vast interconnected ecosystems at local, regional and global scales. Close collaborations with scientists, decision makers and communities incite architects to realise new communication and networking skills. As the role of architects is transformed into that of designers of the form of information, flows and processes, rather than master planners, they will become the critical actors in shaping the cities of this millennium. Presenting specially commissioned features on Dubai, Cochin, New York, London, Washington DC and Barcelona, this issue also encompasses articles by specialists such as geophysicist Christopher Small and US Forest Service social ecologist Erika Svendsen, as well as urban designers and architects.
Man-Made Modular Megastructures Guest-edited by Ian Abley and Jonathan Schwinge
Sensing
the 21st-Century City:
Close-up and Remote
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January-February 2006, Profile No 179
By 2030 there will be 8.3 billion people on earth. This presents a unique challenge in terms of provision. Such a massive, largely urban population can only be accommodated in expansive megacities. And such a development needs to be supported by advances in the art, science and processes of manufacturing. Deploying these abilities will also require us to shrug off the dogma of sustainability that insists that only small can be beautiful. Humanity has come a long way since the first modular megastructure was built at Ur, in what is now Iraq. There, four millennia ago, and by hand, the Sumerians built a mud-brick ziggurat to their gods. Today, the green deities of nature, which we have invented for ourselves, are worshipped with humility. Eco-zealots argue against the mechanised megaforming of landscape and the modularised production of megastructures. Does this very caution and sense of tact, however, risk denying a portion of the world’s population much-needed housing? Guest-editors Ian Abley and Jonathan Schwinge, of research organisation audacity, call for development on a bold scale. They argue that by rapidly super-sizing the built environment, society is not made vulnerable to natural or man-made hazards, and design innovation surpasses biomimicry. Designers can learn from materials scientists working at the smallest of scales, and from systems manufacturers with ambitions at the largest. This issue calls for creative thinking about typologies and topologies, and considers what that might mean for Africa, China, India, Russia and South America. Megacities everywhere demand integration of global systems of transport and IT in gigantic or spreading structures, constantly upgraded, scraping both the sky and the ground, outwards and into the sea. It is time that man made modular megastructures with some self-confidence.
Manmade Modular Megastructures