Impact

This issue of AD explores the working discipline of architecture as it impacts the material culture within which it is always embedded. An architecture of impact uses advanced digital techniques in such a way that its material assembly supersedes its use of the digital.

Until now, this type of architecture has been formally and materially bound by restrictive conventional methodologies, which the digital project has moved from the scale of installations to three-dimensional building-sized fabrications. Unless architects turn to a new culture of making, architecture shaped by even innovative digital technology will become irrelevant. Architectural projects that are more subversive in how they are created and that lose their digital signature have greater potential to be at the forefront of the discipline's new materialisations. This issue illustrates these ideas and their architectural impact.

Contributors: Kutan Ayata, Ben van Berkel, Hernan Diaz Alonso, David Goldblatt, Thomas Heatherwick, Ferda Kolatan, Ascan Mergenthaler, Antoine Picon, Casey Rehm, Patrik Schumacher, and Philip F Yuan.

Featured architects: Archi-Union, Contemporary Architecture Practice, HDA-X, Heatherwick Studio, Herzog & de Meuron, Ishida Rehm Studio, Pininfarina, SHoP Architects, SU-11, UNStudio, and Young & Ayata, and Zaha Hadid Architects.

Professor Ali Rahim directs the Advanced Architectural Design Program in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Director of Contemporary Architecture Practice in TriBeCa, New York City. Mr. Rahim has served as the Studio Zaha Hadid Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale University, and as a Visiting Architecture Professor at Harvard University and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC).

Professor Hina Jamelle directs the Housing Programme at the in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also Director of Contemporary Architecture Practice in TriBeCa, New York City. Ms. Jamelle has served as Visiting Schaeffer Chair at the University of Michigan.