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Director of Artificial‐Architecture at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Hokkien Foundation Career Professorship recipient Immanuel Koh enlightens us on the wonderful world of deep neural networks, formal plasticity and what they could mean for architectural form‐finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analogue differentiation between figure and ground has long been a given in architectural design. Challenging this, Immanuel Koh's doctoral research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland involves digitally decomposing existing designs into discrete figure‐and‐ground cells. These can then generate new configurations with similar spatial features to the iconic structures they derive from: Walter Gropius's 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau, Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, and Andrea Branzi's 1969 No‐Stop City. He reflects on precursors to his work and on its relevance to architecture's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has the dominant influence of classical science on architectural aesthetics had its day? Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, comments on the evolution of a new science that has shifted away from continuous towards discrete models. As he observes, this is not limited to the most digitally minded: there are surprising parallels between the work of an architect such as Kengo Kuma, with all his anti‐computational zeal, and the young protagonists of the second digital turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the biases, constraints and opportunities inherent within contemporary models of intelligence lead to new aesthetics? Artificial intelligence has been central to the work of designer and algorithmic consultant M Casey Rehm for over a decade. Here he presents recent results of his efforts, produced within his Los Angeles multidisciplinary practice Kinch – from speculative cityscapes to a single‐family house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid 1990s, Ben van Berkel of UNStudio brought the world's attention to the plight of the architectural detail, calling for it to be redefined. Some 20 years later, guest-editor Mark Garcia caught up with van Berkel in London and at his studio in Amsterdam, in order to explore with him fully his interest in the detail over time in both his built work and design research. As Van Berkel seeks out the production of 'a more intense architecture' through the development of advanced computational and organisational techniques, where does it leave the detail and non-detail? Can a good detail still save a building? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mark Burry holds a unique position in architecture, straddling the worlds of practice and academia as Senior Architect to the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona and as Professor at RMIT in Melbourne, where he is Founding Director of the RMIT Design Research Institute. In his Counterpoint to this issue of AD, he puts the spotlight back on construction, asking whether the detail could be in danger of falling victim to an inadvertent and 'massive separation of design from making'. As he states: 'to detail effectively is to understand not only what the building 'is', but how it will be made'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A practising architect and Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Edward Ford is the leading expert on the architectural detail and the author of three seminal books on the subject. Here Ford explains that, though the decision 'to abstract or to articulate' architecture 'may be largely subconscious', it is never 'arbitrary'. For 'in the well-designed building, it is done in the service of the creation of a larger narrative, a unity of vision'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From his Paris base, Philippe Rahm has gained an international reputation for uncharted explorations into the physical environment; his preoccupation with the meteorological has opened up wholly new possibilities for sustainable design. In this interview with Guest-Editor Mark Garcia, Rahm highlights how his practice has developed an alternative approach, or third way, for the detail, which is neither the highly worked-up tectonic detail nor the non-detail, but instead has grown out of a focus on climate and the application of new and often modest techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why should computation be leading to a bifurcation in architectural detailing, resulting in a simultaneous, and opposing, tendency towards either greater precision in fabrication or increasing plasticity? Architectural designer and theorist Peter Macapia asks what is driving these propensities in computation, and what in turn historically might be the relation between the detail and force. What comes into play now, though, when architectural style is no longer identified by a taxonomy of parts, or a vocabulary of orders, but rather by a network of forces and functions correlating actions? How might economic and political power be interacting with force, the diagram and function in contemporary design? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ideas and events related to architecture in Europe. The Smart Park is a drive-through park along the Westway in central London where motorists can enjoy the scenic landscapes and tropical climate. The Ballyliffin Residents' Association (BRA) erect signs for the maintenance of the environmental responsibility. The emergence of the interactive architecture which are conceptually realistic, technically possible and economically feasible.

The article reports on the adaptation of the design process from the Chinese garden design by Tan Kok Meng, an architect from HAM Architects in Singapore. He adopted the design because it incorporates the past and the present, the distant and the near, and the internal sentimental and external scene which one may experience concretely rather than to understand it conceptually. It is easier to emphasize the essence of aesthetic appreciation by the use of these designs.

The article describes how American individualist Richard Buckminster Fuller designs for the Dymaxion House in 1927. The house is a neologism that signifies "dynamism plus efficiency" which is based on techniques drawn from the aircraft and vehicle industries. Furthermore, it became a universal prototype for low-cost mass production.

The article examines the practicality of the Schröder House, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1924 at Biltstraat in Utrecht, Netherlands. According to the author, iconic building that bears the symbol of both of modernist living and a pioneering art movement. The innovation of its interiors that features pioneering flexible sliding screens and partitions is matched by its bold aesthetic which adopts the strong colors and geometry of the De Stijl movement.

The article discusses key issues concerning visuality and architecture and the general model of visuality that dominates theoretical and critical discourse in architecture. It includes an in-depth analysis of various subject matter relevant to the visuality inscribed within architectural discourse, as well as a discussion of the issues' implications for architectural design and architecture.

The article explains the evolution the Schroder House, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1924 into a museum in Utrecht, Netherlands. Rietveld presented his transformable proposals that offers both openness and protection in a wide scale of variations and develops a system of movable partitions, which gives the interior its great sense of dynamism. According to the author, the house is one of the Centraal Museum's top exhibits, even though it is a half-hour walk from the museum.

The Bittertang Farm is a New York'based experimental design firm that strives to bring happiness into the built environment by exploring the pleasurable, frothy features of the world around us. Michael Loverich, who cofounded the practice together with Antonio Torres, here describes two of its interventions. Taking the form of fantastical narrative ecosystems, they inspire new experiential moods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operating between the obscene and methods of estrangement and displacement, parrhesia-stases interrogates the agendas of aesthetics present in repulsiveness, condemnation and punishment. François Roche and Camille LacadÉe here present a body of work by their Bangkok-based practice New-Territories/M4, which speculates on the ramifications of architecture as a paradigm of disobedience. Deeply rooted in Michel Foucault's proposal for a re-evaluation of an ethico-political approach, the work investigates an alternative architectural position that utilises strategies of transfiguration to provoke pathological behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the term 'ornament' set to become redundant in architecture? With the sinuous lines produced by CNC milling machines giving way to the ever more weirdly figural products of algorithmically controlled 3D printing, decoration is increasingly an integral part of form, rather than supplementary to it. Mario Carpo - Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London - investigates this voxellisation, and how it drives architecture beyond human comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of iterative multi-agent algorithms to produce an accretion of intricate mass, rather than predefined form, is a key focus of current research at Roland Snooks's Melbourne studio. Here the architect and senior lecturer presents two projects, on very different scales, which his practice has developed using this 'behavioural formation' process, in collaboration with RMIT University. Defined by complex fibrous assemblages rather than surface or volume, they offer weird and wonderful atmospheric affects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London-based architect Gilles Retsin is seeking out a new spatial experience. Enough of refined and carefully articulated surfaces and volumes. As demonstrated by these projects from his own practice and from the Softkill Design team - of which he is also a member - new digital techniques make it possible to devise environments that are infused with raw atmosphere. Here, the boundaries between interior and exterior, or between classic elements such as wall, floor and ceiling, are blurred to the point of nonexistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forces that were previously invisible to the human eye are now being materialised in new aesthetics made possible by algorithmic design. The aptly named Wonderlab studio at University College London's Bartlett School of Architecture is running an ongoing research programme on these awe-inspiring possibilities. Its XenoCells project uses a cell division algorithm that can be applied in varying resolutions, to vastly different effect - achieving 3D-printed forms that range from sharp crystalline structures to organic folds reminiscent of internal organs. Alisa Andrasek, director of Wonderlab, explains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architects are sometimes criticised for prioritising aesthetics over functionality; but attempts to involve end users in building design all too often encounter apathy. Is a successful participatory design process possible? Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of MIT's Senseable City Lab have been researching ways to make it so. Their solutions include an adaptation of the A/B testing method used in software development, together with means from questionnaires to immersive virtual systems that can draw both conscious and unconscious public feedback while maintaining architects' central role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses key issues concerning the hypertextual picturesque concept in modern architecture, which involves the logic of the garden and gendered games that are exercised within electronic space. It includes an analysis of the elements of gameplay that are integrated into the hypertextual picturesque concept in modern architectural design, as well as the issues' implications for architects and architecture.

The author stressed on the significance on the publication "Poetics in Architecture." She said that this issue is an extremely liberating one because it dwells on the inner rather than exterior functions of architecture. It also embraces a rare grouping of architects, philosophers and artists that range from the digital output of the highly talented artists including Winka Dubbeldam, Mark Goulthorpe and Tom Kovac.

The author reflects on the definition of conventional transformation in the modern domestic architecture. He expresses that it is an experimentation with anything from standard floor plans, partitioning and walls to the perception of home itself. He also cites several wide-ranging scope of the issue in the architectural designs.