The Innovation Imperative: Architectures of Vitality

What is innovation in architecture beyond the next trendy thing? What is important about innovative architecture, and how do we even recognize it? How might architects strive to make their practices more innovative amidst the challenges of contemporary conditions? The Innovation Imperative addresses these questions through an emphasis on how approaches to practice become a key site of innovative action. Rather than simply seeking newness in the architectural object per se, innovative architecture can be understood in terms of initiating unrealized potential. Innovative action becomes vitalizing: triggering new life and invigorating the architectural pulse. Architectural innovation operates in the often wildly oscillating balance between individual and collective action, opening up new and relevant discursive spaces, material assemblages, and ways of doing architecture.

This edition of AD is an outcome of a research project supported by the Australian Research Council (2009-2011). This project sought to re-theorise innovation for contemporary design practices in terms of coupled ethical and aesthetic concerns therein, focusing on case studies from digital architecture, the biological arts and their intersections. Chief Investigators were Pia Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry, Andrew Burrow and Oron Catts, of SymbioticA.

Contributors to the issue were: Mario Carpo, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Jondi Keane, Brian Massumi, Veronika Valk, Michael Weinstock, Gretchen Wilkins. Features architects: Arakawa and Gins, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Greg Lynn, MOS (Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample), Francois Roche, VergeLabs/BioMason (Ginger Krieg-Dosier and Michael Dosier).