archilab 2002-10

	propeller z (AU) Korkut Akkalay, Kriso Leinfellner, Philipp Tschofen, Carmen Wiederin

Propeller z was founded in Vienna in 1994 as a young Austrian agency operating in the overlapping fields of architecture, furniture design, graphic design, set design and fashion. With their experimental but determinedly experimental approach, very much to do with the real, this collective strives, by means of non-linear analytical procedures, to develop effective and heterodox solutions for the many issues and problems in which they are interested. As the authors of installations (Fast Forward, 1999, Superheated Ice, 1997), shop design and development (Gil Fashion Area 1 and 2, 2000), furniture (Bucky Ball, 2001), and residential projects, currently under construction (House dbl, 2001, House sgl, 2001), they also built an exhibition pavilion in Essen (Meteorit, 1998) and won the competition for the construction of a funicular railway serving the mediaeval Riegersburg castle (Knight Rider, 2000). This project--a precise straight line forming the shortest route between two points--the castle and the carpark--plays with the curved topography of the rock, and very clearly illustrates the unusual approach of the Propeller z team, between precision and radicalness, pertinence and impertinence.

	LWPAC (CA) (Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture) Oliver Lang (1964), Cynthia Wilson (1962)

Hamburg-born Oliver Lang has studied, practised, and taught architecture in the United States, Germany, Spain and Canada. With a master's degree from Columbia University, New York, he worked with several New York architects between 1995 and 1998 (Greg Lynn, Peter Eisenman and most notably Smith-Miller & Hawkinson). In 1996 he joined forces with the Canadian architect Cynthia Wilson, also boasting a very cosmopolitan career, and set up "Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture". New York-based at the outset, the agency has been working out of Vancouver, Canada, since 1999. By making the most of all the various tools offered by digital technologies, it is the intent of LWPAC to be a "platform of interdisciplinary collaboration around the conception of architectures, urban projects, and design objects." In the LWPAC book, architecture is considered not as an isolated work but as a fact of culture, and must be reinstated at the heart of the current processes producing the real, on all its scales, and offer more intelligent, flexible and evolutive objects to a perpetually altering complex world.

	OMA Asia Ltd. (CHINA) Aaron TAN Hee Hung (1963)

Singapore-born Aaron Tan went into exile in the 1990s in the United States, where he attended Rem Koolhaas's classes at the Harvard GSD. He then took part in his research projects involving the Pearl River Delta region, and wrote a thesis on the city of Kowloon, a fortified Chinese enclave in Hong Kong--akin to an Asian West Berlin (cf. Cities on the Move, Bordeaux, 1998). In Hong Kong, in 1994, together with Rem Koolhaas, he founded O.M.A. Asia, an Asian branch of the Rotterdam agency, in an attempt to become involved in the extraordinary urban vitality of that region. And it is indeed this vitalist concept that informs O.M.A. Asia projects. In order to plan and act both openly and dynamically in relation to these fast-moving and anarchic urban phenomena, O.M.A. Asia takes its concepts and model from bio-technology and recent theories to do with artificial intelligence. To develop the industrial wasteland of the Jurong Town Corporation in Singapore (JTC/Vista, 2000), for example, their strategy is based on an analysis and "cellular", monadic organization of space, helping to link complexity, flexibility and evolutiveness.

	Team Minus (CHINA) Brian Chang (1970), Brenda Yao (1970), FuXun Lu (1964), Rong Zhou (1968)

In the mid-1990s, Team Minus brought together four young Chinese architects, all teaching at the Tsinghua University School of Architecture. Team Minus praxis cannot be understood without being referred back to the context of present-day China: incredible economic development, and wholesale but anarchic urban growth, leaving whole tracts of land in a state of under-development. The Team Minus group is persuaded that architecture must play a major part in the sustainable development of China, and accordingly explores two parallel tracks in its projects: the use of state-of-the-art and so-called "clean" technologies, at the service of alternative forms of architecture for the most depressed regions; and use of the built environment as an educational medium. This constructive ethic crops up in their project for a Moveable School of Hope (Brian Chang and Brenda Yao, 2000). As part and parcel of a Unesco-backed programme aimed at improving school conditions in poor areas, this project proposes a twofold system of folding metal structures and modulable constructive elements to house temporary, travelling schools.

	Agence Manuelle Gautrand Architectes (F) Manuelle Gautrand (1961)

Manuelle Gautrand first established her agency in Lyons, in 1991, and then moved to Paris in 1993. She has written and exhibited a great deal, and won several prizes (A.M.O., 2000; Jeune Architecture, 1992). She has already completed a very large number of works, be they industrial, university or cultural buildings. Some architects might deem it necessary to look elsewhere for tomorrow's architectural solutions (biotechnology, fractal geometry, chaos theories, computer technology etc.), but, quite to the contrary, Manuelle Gautrand is keen to make architecture evolve from within. This is where she takes the most complex of issues and problems (technological, programmatic, ecological, etc) in order to respond to them with her architect's methods: by way of a bold choice of materials, daring application and implementation, and through an at once pragmatic and experimental relation to technology. It is in this spirit involving a technical and constructive mastery of innovation that Manuelle Gautrand seeks a realistic articulation between environmental and architectural issues, and between ecology and poiesis.

	Agence Francis Soler (F) Francis Soler (1949)

Francis Soler is a prolific architect, bubbling over with ideas, and member of the generation that emerged amid the euphoria of those spectacular competitions of the 1980s. As winner of the Quai Branly International Conference Centre in 1990, he then embarked on a more mature and complex phase of his work, based on that emblematic but never completed project. His recent projects, such as the Millau viaduct, the multipurpose high school (Lycée polyvalent) in Noumea (New Caledonia), and the Kéroman Base conversion at Lorient (Brittany) are aimed at exploring a poetic dimension of architecture, somewhere beyond its contemporary contradictions. Most of all, Soler is keen to sidestep the twofold temptation of style and foundation. In his book, architecture must remain fictional, not to say dreamlike; it must be "as light as imagery". This lightness doesn't merely refer to an aesthetic but also to architecture's ability to be available to human vagaries, urban changes, the complexity of the landscape, and the moveable rules and regulations of the environment. To borrow his own words: "And if there are no more real rules, there must nevertheless be a minimum of signs to follow, those marks of an original geography."

	HOST (F) Alain Renk (1962)

In 1985, while still a student, Alain Renk founded the "Naço" studio with the Argentine Marcelo Joulia. The frequently published and exhibited work of this young Parisian agency (Albums de la jeune architecture, 1991) explored the intersecting paths of architecture, design, set design, and graphic design. In the autumn of 2001, Alain Renk created a new organization called HOST/R+P, as a new step in a radical questioning of the architectural profession. Within this new structure it is his intent to redefine the place and role of architecture in a general ecology of the contemporary world. Regarding this latter as a kind of complex and vaguely defined ecosystem, whose invisible topography must be grasped, he uses his projects to explore three lines of research, three specific and interdependent factors of territorial transformation: commerce (Karma-space), politics (Stealth-space) and work. In this context, architecture must come up, not with forms imitating the world's complexity, but with hybrid processes and transversal strategies which reveal its intelligibility.

	JOURDA Architectes (F) Françoise-Hélène Jourda (1955)

Françoise-Hélène Jourda has been a leading light of French architecture since the 1980s, dividing her career as architect-cum-teacher between France, Germany (where she has completed many projects) and Austria (where she has been teaching at the T.U. in Vienna since 1999). She was associated with the architect Gilles Perraudin from 1980 until 1988, when she founded Jourda Architectes in Paris and Lyons. As a major representative of the high-tech movement in France, she is nowadays directing her concern for technological innovation and precision at a form of architecture that relates in a smart way with its environment. Within Emscher Park, a huge project of the second I.B.A. for the conversion and regeneration of the industrial basin of the Ruhr, her project for the Akademie Mont-Cenis Herne (1991-1999, completed) wound up a lone of thinking about micro-climatic envelopes. The building resembles a controlled micro-environment, whose actual skin--a smart glass envelope, fitted with photovoltaic cells--generates its own energy, and whose construction is planned so as to be both ecologically and economically viable.

	Chora (GB/NL) Raoul Bunschoten (1955)

Architect Eduard Bru has a Ph.D. in architecture, and lives, works and reaches in Barcelona. He is in charge of the "Large Scale" city-planning postgraduate course at the ETSAB, and was appointed head of this school in 1997, following in the footsteps of Manuel Solà-Morales. He has written several books--in particular, Three on the Site (1997), New Territories/New Landscapes (1998), Coming from the South (co-author, 2002)--and his work focuses mainly on contemporary urban and territorial phenomena. He is more specifically involved in the "sustainable" development of Greater Barcelona, and in this capacity was the author of the Hebron Valley urban plan (1988), in preparation for the 1992 Olympic Games. Given the various territorial, ecological and environmental issues which architects have to deal with on an urgent basis, they must, in Eduard Bru's opinion, refuse the easy solutions of "green architecture", which disguises its existence beneath vegetation, and opt for a "precise architecture", where ecology rhymes with economy. In speaking out against the inflationary danger of forever building new things, he proposes an architecture and city-planning based on the on-going metamorphosis and recycling of materials, forms, and uses.

	IaN+ (I) Carmelo Baglivo (1964), Luca Galofaro (1965), Stefania Manna (1969)

Created in Rome in 1997, IaN+ is a multidisciplinary platform focusing at once on design, teaching, architectural publications and exhibitions, all in search of an articulation between theory and practice. For IaN+, architecture is not a fixed object, but rather a system of on-going relations and exchanges. The space in which the IaN+ members are keen to operate is not a simple landscape, but a "living system": they intentionally use the term "territory", seen as the middle term, the intermediate relation between a landscape and the human beings living in it. In this "territory", in this human space, architecture represents a sort of interference which has to respond to the issues raised by a reformulated kind of ecology. It is in the vein of this "New Ecology", which is more time- than space-related, and more relational than natural, that they have prepared their recent projects: an urban scheme in Rome, connecting two small islands, two buildings and a park; a carpark building, again in Rome, whose façade enhances and informs the public place; and a museum in Japan, where the architecture has the effect of a prism in the way the surrounding landscape can be read and interpreted.

	Kengo Kuma & Associates (J) Kengo Kuma (1954)

After studying at Tokyo University, and spending a year doing research at Columbia University (1985-86), Kengo Kuma set up his own agency in 1990. His work, which might be described as radical, not to say negative, comes across above all as a critique of academic and formal architecture, and of any manner of indulgence with regard to both style and fashion. By taking an in-between track--between east and west, invention and tradition, and presence and deletion--, his architecture is intended not as object production but rather as an upsurge of meaning. In his quest for a highly worked and sophisticated relationship between nature and construct, yet without any harking back to the past, Kengo Kuma updates many traditional techniques, in a way that is more attuned to the environment and surroundings. For his Daibutsu project--an exhibition pavilion for an ancient statue of the Buddha, he borrows the local process of Hanchiku (a kind of adobe or rammed clay), and makes use of its technical properties (humidity control, natural ventilation). For his project involving a bath-house at Gizan Onsen, he resorts to an ancestral technique of wooden open-work lattice-like partitions. As for the Great (Bamboo) Wall, a housing scheme set in a small valley, he reverts to a basic construction using bamboo culms and their poetics.

	Tezuka Architects (J) Takaharu Tezuka (1964), Yui Tezuka (1969)

Although of Japanese origin, and based in Tokyo since 1994, this young team also boasts a wealth of lengthy experience in the West. Yui Tezuka studied at the Bartlett School in London. Takahura Tezuka, with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania, spent four years working as Richard Rogers' associate. The Tezuka Architects agency won the 2000 competition for the Museum of Natural Science in Matsunoyama, and already has to its credit a dozen or so completed private houses, which come across like so many unusual variations on the same theme. Each one develops to the utmost a special connection between the domestic and the natural: living in light, with wind, looking at the sea, in the landscape, etc. In seemingly linking up with a form of constructive rationalism, the architectonic features of these houses actually contribute to constructing this domestication of nature (or this "naturalization" of the domestic): here a huge cantilever helps to totally open up the house onto a garden, there a glass façade slopes to fit beneath a tree many hundreds of years old, and here again an extensive, gently sloping roof duplicates the house's layout and uses, but from without.

	T.R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd. (MAL) Ken Yeang (1948), Tengku Dato Robert Hamzah (1939)

Malaysia-born Ken Yeang trained at the Architectural Association in London (1966-1971) and at Cambridge University (1971-75), where he obtained his Ph.D. with the thesis A Theoretical Framework for the Incorporation of Ecological Considerations in the Design Environment in 1981, and was one of the major forerunners of bio-climatic architecture. For the past 25 years, from a standpoint that is at once theoretical and practical, he has been developing a thoroughly ecological specialization involving the architecture of very large buildings (usually regarded as those most harmful to the environment). Within T.R. Hamzah & Yeang, set up in Kuala Lumpur in 1976, he and his colleague Hamzah of the A.A., have designed and built a large number of mega-architectural projects, including the famous "green skyscrapers". These giants, with their low emphasis on materials and energy, are incorporated within the dynamics of nature (sun, wind, climate etc.); they have proved to be both economically and ecologically viable, and are winning over more than a few developers. In Hong Kong they are in the process of developing a whole neighbourhood--West Kowloon Vertical Park & Waterfront Cultural Center--in the form of a vast man-made environment that is in harmony with nature.

	Nox (NL) Lars Spuybroek (1959)

At his Nox agency, set up in Rotterdam in 1991, architect, city-planner, producer, and publisher Lars Spuybroek develops many different processes for adapting architecture to the present-day world, a world of real time and ceaseless change. By making use of the calculating power of computers, he interweaves active and interactive relationships between the restrictions, uses and "liquid" forms of his projects, aiming at an ideal based on continuity--continuity between architectonic elements (floor, walls, ceilings), between spatial scales (design, architecture, city, territory), but above all between the two arms of a dialectic which he deems to be obsolete: between artefact and nature, between human and urban, between the spatiality of life, which is forever changing, and the spatiality of the construct, hitherto seen as inert. Ten years after Koolhaas' Tabula Rasa Revisited (2001) for La Défense in Paris, his experimental urban project ParisBRAIN (2001), on the same site, and in keeping with his Soft Site (1997) and Off the Road (2000) projects, thus proposes an organized "liquidation" of the city--its dilution in experiment.

	Offshore Architects (NL) Peter Trummer (1964), Hannes Pfau, Astrid Piber, Penelope Dean (1969)

A student of Günther Domenig at the T.U. in Graz and Bart Lootsma at the Berlage Institute, and a former associate of UN Studio, the Austrian architect Peter Trummer now divides his time between Graz and Amsterdam. As co-founder of Offshore Architects in 2001 with Hannes Pfau and Astrid Piber, he also finds time to pursue his own theoretical research projects. With the Australian Penelope Dean he has been developing Time Sharing Urbanism since 1998, a social ecology research programme focusing on the urban and territorial consequences of telecommunications systems and infrastructures. Through a hundred or so graphic works, they show how the Australian outback, covering more than 2,700,000 sq.mi./7,000,000 sq.km. with a density of 0.07/0.02 inhabitants per sq.mi./km respectively, can be likened, in the way it functions, to a large city, and its inhabitants to a networked society. Based on the model of the Royal Flying Doctors Service (a medical grid based on the range of a radio transmitter, the range of a light aircraft, etc.), they suggest the topology of this new urban territory which is neither city nor region, but imbued with a complex network, where interactions have no need of any unity of place, and occur within the unity of a "shared time".

	Actar Arquitectura (SP) Manuel Gausa (1959), Oleguer Gelpi (1964), Ignasi Pérez Arnal (1965) Florence Raveau (1965), Marc Aureli Santos (1960)

Actar Arquitectura, which was founded in Barcelona in 1994, interweaves its areas of activity: publishing and exhibitions, urban and archietctural production, critical and forward-looking research. This swathe of interconnected activities, which are deliberately hybrid and transversal, is intended to closely encompass contemporary complexity, on many different levels of analysis and intervention: the scale of territory with the project for the "corridor" between Graz and Maribor (2001), which gives rise to an interplay of "landlinks" between the vibrating nodes of a territorial "web", concentrating and redistributing a sort of programmatic "energy", and adjoining pockets, which take on not a form but a function (Teleworking Areas, Auto Tech Centre, Agro Landscapes,...); the scale of a set of housing units, then, with the Castellon project (2001), which imbues the landscape with "topographies of substitution"; and the scale of the edifice, last of all, with the Tornado Tower (2001), which expresses the idea of a nature that is folded, expanded and shrunk under the effect of informational and infrastructural flows, those new telluric currents with run beneath the landscape.

	Eduard Bru, arquitectos (SP) Eduard Bru i Bistuer (1950)

Architect Eduard Bru has a Ph.D. in architecture, and lives, works and reaches in Barcelona. He is in charge of the "Large Scale" city-planning postgraduate course at the ETSAB, and was appointed head of this school in 1997, following in the footsteps of Manuel Solà-Morales. He has written several books--in particular, Three on the Site (1997), New Territories/New Landscapes (1998), Coming from the South (co-author, 2002)--and his work focuses mainly on contemporary urban and territorial phenomena. He is more specifically involved in the "sustainable" development of Greater Barcelona, and in this capacity was the author of the Hebron Valley urban plan (1988), in preparation for the 1992 Olympic Games. Given the various territorial, ecological and environmental issues which architects have to deal with on an urgent basis, they must, in Eduard Bru's opinion, refuse the easy solutions of "green architecture", which disguises its existence beneath vegetation, and opt for a "precise architecture", where ecology rhymes with economy. In speaking out against the inflationary danger of forever building new things, he proposes an architecture and city-planning based on the on-going metamorphosis and recycling of materials, forms, and uses.

	Cloud 9 (SP) Enric Ruiz-Geli

DipWith a degree from the ETSAB in Barcelona, Enric Ruiz-Geli completed his training abroad (Mississippi State University, USA; Urbino, Italy; Tel Aviv, Israel) and specialized in set design (Institute of Theatre, Barcelona; La Villette, Paris). He was assistant to the "Master of Ephemeral Architecture" (Elisava School and ETSAB), but also worked as an associate with Bob Wilson, and was co-author of Spek, a "macroplaystation" game creating new territories. And it's probably in the virtual--place of movement, interactivity and the ephemeral--that his architecture of the natural finds its bases. His proposals for the Berlin Zoo thus grapple with essential issues of ecological architecture: re-creation, imitation and presentation, somewhere between immersion in "nature" and constructed, educational, managed place. The biodiversity home extends the idea of Darwinian evolution in its structure, stringing porticos together like so many significant "events". The huge aviary puts across a line of thinking about interaction between people and their environment, observer and observed, inside and out--at once a huge artificial tree and a new "natural" topography of seaside dunes.

	Vicente Guallart (SP) Vicente Guallart (1963)

The architect Vicente Guallart, who opened his agency in Barcelona in 1992, divides his time between teaching and research (Polytechnic Foundation of Catalonia), multimedia production (NEWMedia Productions), and organizing exhibitions (Metapolis). His architectural projects involve a twofold extrapolation: on the one hand, towards geography, which is called upon as a new urban scale and as a possible architectural form; on the other, towards the digital world, understood as a new "nature", leading to an artificial ecology but one which, in return, acts on physical space. For the Castellon exhibition, "Otras naturalezas urbanas", he thus proposes a Mountain City (2001), a new low speed city for a form of "digito-agro-tourism"; likewise, at Denia (Alicante, Spain), he is designing a 750,000 sq.ft. complex--shopping mall, hotels, carparks, etc--in the form of a "man-made mountain" reconstructed in an old quarry. Going well beyond the real/virtual and site/edifice (style/content) divides, what Guallart is exploring here is a wide range of potential solutions lying between the natural and the artificial, by way of an architecture that adopts the geography of the place amd transforms it, in an on-going dialogue.

	Field operations (USA) Stanley T. Allen (1956), James Corner (1961)

The architect Stan Allen and the landscape artist-cum-town-planner James Corner set up Field Operations in New York and Philadelphia in 1999. In violating the theoretical divisions which carve up urban thinking, they formulate and experiment with complex, dynamic and evolutive strategies which organize, in both space and time, the many contemporary territorial issues (city- and town-planning, landscape gardening and design, ecology, sociology, geography, etc.). Their project to convert the banks of the North Delaware River, in Philadelphia, proposes a flexible and adaptive grid which connects what is built and what is not built, as well as the private and the public, and city and river. Their Downsview Park proposition, involving an area of military wasteland in northeastern Toronto, weaves together two primary systems, circuits and flux, and over and beyond two visions of the city, as striated and programmed territory and as new "nature". Their award-winning project for the competition for converting the Fresh Kills Landfill, the New York garbage dump on Staten Island, was based on the formulation of a busy matrix of lines ("Threads"), surfaces ("Mats") and "Clusters", capable of organizing an alternative landscape on this repressed territory.

	Jones, Partners : Architecture (USA) Wesley Jones (1958)

Since the mid-1980s, Wes Jones has been exploring avenues of "machine-architecture", looking for an organization between the body and its technological world, in quest of a vernacular way of expressing mechanical and industrial forms. After working for many years in partnership with Holt, Hinshaw & Pfau, he founded Jones, Partners: Architecture, in 1993, first in San Francisco, then in Los Angeles. Wes Jones's projects are exaggerated extrapolations of Le Corbusier's "machines à habiter" (machines for living in), often suburban homes in California. Above all, they assert the need to situate architecture at the heart of the relationship between people and their environment, with this latter conceived as a sort of mechanical ecumene or inhabited area, somewhere between nature and artefact. His Silverlake PRO/Con project is a minor one involving collective housing units, presented like a stacking/appropriation of industrial containers linked together by a Piranesi-like distribution area on three levels. In his Moving Architectures, a set of houses made up of modules sliding on tracks, he is keen to contradict the at once spatial and temporal fixedness of architecture, and introduce a real flexibility into the household space.

	Tom Leader Studio (USA) Tom Leader (1956), Philippe Coignet (1973)

In 2001, after spending some 20 years as a practising landscape gardener (16 of them as an associate with Peter Walker & Partners), Tom Leader set up his own agency in his Californian birthplace, Berkeley. The self-appointed programme of the Tom Leader Studio is made up of two interdependent areas of activity: "Landscape Architecture", referring to operational activities, and "Site Work", which points to a more experimental aim involving investigation and research into the at once spatial and time-related processes which are forever deconstructing and reconstructing territories. In contemporary digital tools, Tom Leader sees a fruitful analogy of these processes, and a way of approaching an understanding of them. Every site, which is invariably one-off and specific, must be very closely analysed with regard to the particular forces fashioning it: the dialectic between natural elements (wind, sun, etc) and urban public place in Demonstration Forest (1996); the morpho-geology of Californian "space" in Coastlines (2001); the accumulation of waste as potential landscape-in-motion in Fresh Kills Landfill (2001), etc.

	nARCHITECTS (USA) Eric Bunge (1967), Mimi Hoang (1971)

Montreal-born Eric Bunge studied architecture at McGill University and then worked with several architects in North America and Europe (Kennedy & Violich, Diller + Scofidio, Paul Andreu, Franck Hammoutène). While preparing his master's degree at Harvard GSD in 1995, he met Mimi Hoang, from Vietnam, who had trained at MIT in Cambridge and been associated with Steven Holl. Together they founded the nARCHITECTS agency in New York, in 1999. Their experimental and innovative architecture is based on a broad concept of "the environment"--not just natural, social or urban, but also never detached from its cultural, infrastructural and technological conditions. In their book, architecture must make things explicit and reconsider the relations, dynamics and possibilities which underpin this environment, pushed to its limits. In the project for Aomori (Japan, 2001), they attempted to weave together the urban and the suburban, and the natural and the artificial. Their "e-Central Park" project (New York, 2001) involved challenging the influence of information technologies on our physical perception of the park, and the project for the Pro Forma Hotel (Copenhagen, 2000) involved adapting the hotel space to new forms of nomadism.

	Dagmar Richter Studio (USA) Dagmar Richter (1955)

After studying at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen and the Frankfurt Städeschule, where she was taught by Peter Cook, Dagmar Richter divides her time, and work, between Europe and the United States, and more specifically Berlin and Los Angeles, where she set up his agency in 1987, and where she has also been teaching at UCLA since 1998. Dagmar Richter's architecture is intended to be radically critical and analytical, no more inscription, but description, as a temporary way of understanding and representing this world, whose instability and liquidness it is acutely aware of. Her Wave project (a sports and water complex at Aarhus) mingles landscape and architecture in an artificial topography, a complex and fluctuating medium embracing many sporting disciplines (inside and out, in water, on ice, on the floor, alone or in groups, etc.). Meshworks, which she has been working on since 2000, is an urban project for a problematic neighbourhood on the outskirts of Wolfen Nord (in former East Germany). Basing her idea on statistical data (pollen, movement of people, deterioration, etc), she proposes an active diagram and an operational modelling capable of introducing alternative strategies for recycling and retrieving this abandoned landscape.

	Servo (USA/CH/S) David Erdman (1970), Marcelyn Gow (1966), Ulrika Karlsson (1966), Chris Perry (1969)

Even though the four Servo associates all attended Columbia University in New York, they are now living, working and teaching in four different cities--and continents: D. Erdman at UCLA, M. Gow at the ETH in Zurich, C. Perry at the Pratt Institute and at Columbia in New York, and U. Karlsson in Stockholm. The name, Servo, and the principles underpinning it derive from this specific structural dynamic of interactions and decentralized exchanges. By "gleaning", mixing and filtering a wide-ranging sampling of materials, techniques and information, be it at local or worldwide level, their praxis is organized around several "lines" of research--Nurbline, Speeline, etc.--each one of which ushers in a broad field of applications and scales. The Cloudline axis, in particular, which consists in imbuing architecture with a certain degree of ambiguity and randomness, takes the form both of a multi-functional "cloudcurtain", sensitive to variations in luminosity, and of a "cloudbox", a household device for lighting, storage and displaying things. By combining standardization and customization--two contradictory trends in contemporary production--they thus create a catalogue of systems which can be "sampled" and recycled on an on-going, reciprocal basis.

les informations pratiques

éditorial

Selected teams ArchiLab 2002

propeller z (Korkut Akkalay, kabru, Kriso Leinfellner, Philipp Tschofen, Carmen Wiederin)	Austria
L W P A C - Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture (Oliver Lang, Cynthia Wilson)	Canada
OMA Asia Ltd. (Aaron TAN Hee Hung)	China
teamMINUS (Brian Chang, Brenda Yao, FuXun Lu, Rong Zhou)	China
Agence Manuelle Gautrand Architectes (Manuelle Gautrand)	France
Agence Francis Soler (Francis Soler)	France
block (Denis Brillet, Benoît Fillon, Pascal Riffaud)	France
HOST (Alain Renk)	France
JOURDA Architectes (Françoise-Hélène Jourda)	France
Arno Brandlhuber (b&k+) / Bernd Kniess (b&k+)	Germany
Stefan Tischer Landschaftsarchitekt (Stefan Tischer)	Germany
Chora (Raoul Bunschoten)	Great Britain
IaN+ (Carmelo Baglivo, Luca Galofaro, Stefania Manna)	Italy
Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Momoyo Kaijima)	Japan
Kengo Kuma & Associates (Kengo Kuma)	Japan
TEZUKA ARCHITECTS (Takaharu Tezuka, Yui Tezuka)	Japan
T.R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd. (Ken Yeang, Tengku Dato Robert Hamzah)	Malaysia
Berlage Institute, postgraduate laboratory of architecture (Sous la direction de Winy Maas et Wiel Arets)	Netherlands
NOX (Lars Spuybroek)	Netherlands
offshore architects (Peter Trummer, Hannes Pfau, Astrid Piber)	Netherlands
Actar Arquitectura (Manuel Gausa, Florence Raveau, Oleguer Gelpi, Ignasi Pérez Arnal, Marc Aureli Santos)	Spain
Eduard Bru, arquitectos (Eduard Bru i Bistuer)	Spain
cloud 9 (Enric Ruiz-Geli)	Spain
Vicente Guallart	Spain
Field Operations (Stanley T. Allen, James Corner)	USA
Jones, Partners : Architecture (Wesley Jones)	USA
Tom Leader Studio (Tom Leader, Philippe Coignet)	USA
nARCHITECTS (Eric Bunge, Mimi Hoang)	USA /Canada
Dagmar Richter Studio (Dagmar Richter)	USA
Servo (David Erdman, Marcelyn Gow, Ulrika Karlsson, Chris Perry)	USA /Switzerland /Sweden