Factors influencing form

Abstract

straightforward, rational consequence of design decisions taken in relation to programme, site, and environmental and social conditions. There has been plenty of research – in relation to particular designers, design practices, building types, and numerous thematics – illustrating how modern architects’ judgements of what might be considered straightforward or rational played out. There is also much contemporary scholarship surrounding how other human and non-human factors produce form, such as: environmental agents (at a variety of scales); the multiple infrastructures into which buildings are connected; cultural and political ideas including those of gender, ethnicity, class, and power; the cultures of design in which architecture gets produced; the influence of regulations, contract, and specification types; and of digital and analogue representation practices. In this context, our current issue of arq addresses various factors influencing form, examining historical and contemporary examples. Matthew Mindrup examines how certain postwar modern architects and engineers imagined architecture as the clear expression of structure via the medium of models (pp. 4–16), considering how ‘clarity of form and function’ emerged through modelmaking practices. Anna Myjak-Pycia recounts how home economists of the 1950s and ‘60s ‘dismantled the traditional notion of architectural authorship’, analysing the function of spaces in direct participation with users, bypassing architects’ form-making ego (pp. 17–30). In contrast, Simon Richards shows how cultural forces play out in form-making by interpreting demolition traditions, relating together the works of architect Arata Isozaki and writer Ango Sakaguchi (pp. 31–42); and Stephen Parnell and Mark Sawyer document how architectural magazines, powerful influencers of architectural culture and therefore architectural form, can themselves be imagined as sites of architectural production or as architectural projects. Meanwhile, Mark David Major examines the multiple interconnected factors at play in the failure of the Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme in St Louis, Missouri, famously demolished in 1972 (pp. 55–68); and Aleksandar Kŭsić and Vladan Djokić examine Belgrade’s late 1960s Julino Brdo housing estate as a consequence of the wider dynamics of the city’s socialist urbanisation. Lastly, Jing Yang, Jonathan Hale, and Toby Blackman appreciate light, movement, and the effects of film editing techniques on designers’ and inhabitants’ imaginations, as factors influencing the experience of form, in relation to the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne designed by SANAA in 2010.