Programming Cultures explores the relationship between software engineering and the various disciplines that benefit from new codes and programming tools. The title focuses on a range of practices including: aviation design, urban infrastructure simulation, Hollywood special effects, nanotechnology, mathematics and architecture. In terms of building design, Programming Cultures specifically examine's the potential of new software designed to solve specific visualization and data processing problems from within the profession. The book allows architects to become more familiar with programming rather than basing their work on appropriated systems designed for non-architectural applications (Maya, 3D Studio MAX etc.) and will become a primer for an emerging culture of students; academics and young professionals that are starting to outgrow the predetermined structure of today’s most popular modeling and animation packages.
This issue of AD introduces a new approach to architectural practice based on the interrelationship of emergence and self-organisation concepts. A sequence to the successful Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies title by the same guest-editors, it advances on the previous publication by taking on board the latest developments for fully integrated design evolution, manufacturing and construction.
Emergence requires the recognition of architectural structures not as singular and fixed bodies, but as complex energy and material systems that have a lifespan, exist as part of the environment of other active systems, and as an iteration of a series that proceeds by evolutionary development. Thus the focal point of this issue will be the exploration of techniques and technologies that enable the implementation of such morphogenetic strategies, requiring a new set of intellectual and practical skills. Though the publication stands alone as an investigation and presentation of cutting-edge techniques and technologies within the design and construction field supported by examples from adjacent industries, it also introduces a new springboard for understanding and rethinking the radical changes in which architecture is now being conceived, designed and produced. While representing a timely exploration of the embedding of techniques and technology in an alternative design approach, it also presents wholly new strategies for tackling issues of sustainability.
In May 2004, Europe was redefined. Ten countries -- Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia -- joined the European Union (EU). Two years on, the full impact of the forces this historical event has unleashed has yet to be understood. For not only is the expansion having an unequivocal bearing on 'old' Europe, it is also helping to change the countries of 'new Europe'. As the economic and the political balance of the enlarged EU is being redrawn, the identities of the newly joined countries is in flux - the majority of the joining states being under Communist rule less than two decades ago.
Contemporary architecture in these 10 countries necessarily presents itself as a process that is anything but linear. It must deal with hybridisation, with new global trends, as well as with the permanence of structures and national heritage. Architects, mostly practising in the private rather than public sphere, are contending with the various political inconsistencies of administrations undergoing change.
The very different panorama in each new member state avoids generalisation. As a broken mirror, this issue of AD does not pretend to provide anything but a partial - though authentic -- view of the very crucial issues that contemporary architecture has to cope with. Local contributors look at the transformation of the city and national heritage, while also spotting a new generational fringe of local architects. The ethnic diversity drawn by this publication excites with its cultural richness, but also raises the looming question of what the identity of the new Europe might constitute in the future