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What are the defining qualities of China's current homegrown architectural pioneers, and how might they next evolve? Murray Fraser, Professor of Architecture and Global Culture and Vice‐Dean of Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, charts the background of design research from its Western roots, and investigates how recent generations of Chinese architects have been taking it in a new direction – from Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu's Amateur Architecture Studio to Atelier Deshaus, Atelier Archmixing and TAO (Trace Architecture Office).

If we take the most plausible definition of “globalisation”, then it is a broad-brush term that becomes useful when describing the new geopolitical, social and cultural realities that have emerged since the ending of the Cold War in the late-1980s and early-1990s. With no longer a simplistic polarisation of the world into US-dominated capitalist nations opposed to USSR-dominated communist states (with other countries such as Maoist China or non-aligned nations in the Global South squeezed awk...

Is architecture no more than a mere handmaid to global capitalism and the international property market? Murray Fraser, Professor of Architecture and Global Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, asserts that the true picture is both much more complex and less homogeneous than it might appear. While acknowledging that economic conditions are significant drivers in architecture, he argues that it is still possible for designers to respond creatively with suppleness and foresight in their exploration of paths for a better future.

Ever since Vasari, if not before, there has been a yearning to tell some kind of story around art and architecture. All those different (indeed often contradictory) cultural conditions, intellectual ideas, craft traditions and building forms surely had to mean something. It couldn’t just be confusion, could it? Even if one wasn’t seeking a teleological explanation, there was a need to show a direction in the architectural changes that were plain to observers. Various architects and writers fr...

London today has become ‘a laboratory and testing ground’ for neoliberal capitalism, attracting investment from the Middle East, Russia, India, the Far East and Australasia as well as the US. Murray Fraser describes the urban impact of economic globalisation in the capital, while exploring ways that it might potentially be countered. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 Edited by David Crowley and Jane Pavitt V&A Publishing, London, 2008 ISBN 978-1-851-77543-9 £35 GBP, Hardback, pp. 319, with illustrations Cold War Kitchen: Americ...

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. All rights reserved. This chapter greatly admires Reyner Banham's energetic and vivid style. The author recalls him entering the rather drab seminar room in University College London to look like a cowboy. Adrian Forty greatly admired Banham, but was also far too aware of the latter's blind spots and weaknesses. He took so much from Banham, possibly in part subconsciously, something that was to become more evident over the years. The author contends that there are two main infusions from the Banham influence that shaped Adrian's writings. Taking the first point, in this sense Banham's cowboy hat is an obvious contender as an 'Object of Desire'. It serves as a material witness in itself, in having been bought in the USA, and by possessing a functional basis for its existence, keeping off the sun and flies in dusty western plains, while also being clearly styled as a design artefact. The hat also tells us about the social relations of its wearer and his attempt to escape what Banham regarded as the third-rate environment of British architecture and culture, along with his pressing desire to become an actor in his own tales - or what Robert Maxwell memorably described as 'the plenitude of presence' in Banham's writings.

In shaping the conference themes, we were aware of two underlying requirements for critical architecture: the desire to be openly critical of the society in which it finds itself, and the need to c...

Real-time modelling represents the first thoroughgoing application of the digital realm to architecture and urban design, and as such marks a clear advance on the partial applications that were previously the norm. The authors have pooled their combined expertise in architecture and computer games to adapt the principles and techniques of real-time environments from computer games to designing buildings. The outcome is proprietary software called Cadai, which allows architectural and urban design proposals to be modelled in realistic detail, both externally and internally, and then be ‘walked’ around in their entirety by viewers. This paper argues that real-time modelling offers three advances on previous forms of 3D digital modelling: it enables digital modelling to be used from the earliest sketch stages of a design project; it allows collective online meetings of the project team inside the evolving design scheme, wherever the participants are in the world; and it enables greater user-participation in decisions about planning schemes, given that anyone familiar with computer game environments can now properly understand and experience architectural and urban design proposals. The paper explains the properties of Cadai and showcases some real-time models built by students at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Westminster, along with the first major commercial real-time model produced in Cadai for a brownfield development proposal in Northern England. Our contention is that real-time modelling will soon become the dominant way that computers operate in architectural and urban design, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.