Excerpts from an interview conducted in March 2010. Neil Spiller's work — which spans his theoretical ventures and architectural practice, and was shaped by his training with both Cedric Price and Gordon Pask — explores the friction between media and reality, interrogating the oxymoron inherent in the notion of 'virtual reality' and how this divergent term informs the built environment. Here, he sits down with Volume to reveal the Surrealist methods latent in the dream state of the architect. When I first started writing, the big buzz was full body immersion in cyberspace and Mondo2000. Since then, a lot of us have realized that our intelligence is literally embodied. Our intelligence is made out of virtual and real things, and the synthesis of the virtual and the real is where my explorations lie. Certainly the idea of living in a pod with my bodily functions wired up to the sink is not a good thing. For me, architecture is embodied in a series of reflexive objects or narratives. I often say that architecture can exist from the microcosmic and the nanoscopic to the cosmographic. I'm interested in the blurred boundary as a place from which to speculate, in both architecture and drawings. I'm always kind of sniffing and licking them a bit, not sure if they're any good yet. I spend a lot of time talking about, perhaps reassessing, the spatial protocols of Surrealism as a way of finding methods to expand aspirations and knowledge of the digital world. Specifically, the Paranoiac-critical method, as Salvador Dalí's psycho-sexual approach, is how I re-interpret the world. People have described my drawings as a kind of myth-making, and certainly my work over the last ten years has become very mythic. So I try to link to his body of work, which I think was brave for its time, and uses it to question some of the assumptions we (architects) have about our role in the contemporary world ... Soon we'll be able to start to make spaces that aren't dictated by the tyranny of the planner or the aesthetic tyranny of the architect. What has disappointed me is the way the architecture profession has taken to virtuality by one particular route, which has now been exploited to the point of ubiquity. There is a lot more of the virtual world that rubs up against architecture that needs exploring. I am interested in what I call architecture of the second aesthetic, which is essentially algorithmic. I think there is a place for algorithmic architecture, but to explore it properly we might have to leave the computer behind. I think I'm an 'optimistic Futurist'; I'm much more interested in what's going to happen a year or five years hence as opposed to thirty or fifty years from now. Scientists call that 'deep future' and it's actually almost entirely unpredictable. When you're a student, you're like a heavy metal guitarist: you want to rush up the fret board as fast as possible. And when you're my age, you want to play the blues, because it's about the emotional content of the work. So blues is the thing. [Laughs]

A seminal proponent of sustainable architecture and green design, Sim Van der Ryn approaches architecture as an ecosystem, an ever-evolving, responsive organism. An unruly civil servant – both as Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and as the official State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown – Van der Ryn has published his visions of collaborative design and ecological principles in, among others, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City (The Sierra Club, 1974) with Bill and Helga Olkowski; The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1986) and Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs and Towns (New Catalyst Books, 1986), both with Peter Calthorpe; Ecological Design (Island Press, 1996) with Stuart Cowan; and most recently in Design For Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn (Gibbs Smith, 2005). Here, Van der Ryn discusses his radical seminars at Berkeley in which he developed a classroom-as-commune approach, eventually leading to the founding of the Farallone Institute and the ‘birth of green’. Jeffrey Inaba: How do you think that the prevailing ideas about modern architecture played out at Berkeley in relation to the idea of alternative modes of design? Was it a response to various institutions or was it not really conscious? Sim Van der Ryn: The problem with architectural ideology was that it was ideology [laughs]. But I wanted to know how architecture really related to human beings, and I didn’t see any answers in the ideology. I wrote an article in Landscape Magazine called ‘Architecture: Art or Science?’ in which I interrogated the existing knowledge about how buildings address people. Most people think buildings are sculptural objects or works of art, but my view has always been that buildings are organisms and ecosystems, and humans make up an important part of those systems. Architecture critics never review buildings in terms of humans. JI: Can you talk a little bit about the type of work you were doing in the 60s and to what it was responding? SVDR: In 1961, Berkeley's new hi-rise dormitories received great reviews from architecture critics. They were great and were modern, but I was really interested in the human response to them. I wanted to create some kind of science, so my research seminar and I implemented simple techniques to get a handle on this very question. We observed and interviewed students over one year and immediately found problems: they had big lounges that were never used, and the double-loaded straight corridor was noisy as hell. We then wrote a monograph of our findings in simple, non-scientific language. I wanted to call it The Ecology of Student Housing, but the head of the Facilities Lab suggested that no one knew what 'ecology' was yet – it was too arcane. So we called it Dorms at Berkeley. It was really the beginning of post-occupancy evaluation.

Alex Steffen Interviewed by Yukiko Bowman and Julianne Gola. In the late 60s, the Whole Earth Catalog popularized an understanding of ecology as a continuum between the self, technology, and the environment. Forty years later, Alex Steffen, editor of the website Worldchanging and the recent compendium Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, 2006), is approaching sustainable living from the micro (the design of refugee shelters) to the macro (climate change). A global advocate for a social, high-tech approach to environmental and community sustainability through innovation, Steffen is also the editor of the last (unpublished) issue of Whole Earth, the magazine that grew out of the Whole Earth Catalog. Here, he assesses the legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog in contemporary discussions of environmentalism and how counterculture compares with his notion of ‘bright green’. Yukiko Bowman: In many ways, today’s mainstream environmentalism comes directly out of 60s counterculture and the Whole Earth approach. These days, 'green' is used as a selling point for everything from gasoline to t-shirts. How do you position Worldchanging – as an extension of countercultural ideals or as an example of environmentalism's increasing popularity? Alex Steffen: In order to keep fulfilling our function, we need to be on the edge. It is a real challenge for us that our content has moved into the mainstream. As the sea of innovation grows, it becomes harder to cover its surface. You know, I grew up on a commune where Whole Earth Catalogs were bouncing around. That countercultural filter was a big part of how the people who raised me saw the world. Today, the Whole Earth Catalog has become the placeholder in our cultural notation for ‘all that innovative hippie crap’.

George Elvin interviewed by Julianne Gola and Cameron Robertson. Advocating the dynamism of nanotechnology and architecture, George Elvin contends that with the embrace of nanotechnologies, the field of architecture will no longer be based on static objects; rather, it will react or mutate according to environmental variables. The author of Integrated Practice in Architecture: Mastering Design-Build, Fast-Track, and Building Information Modeling (Wiley, 2007), Elvin speaks with Volume about the ethical and social implications of a spatial reality dictated by sensorial information. Julianne Gola: Can you briefly describe nanotechnology and what you see as its consequences for architecture? George Elvin: Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at the molecular scale. The field is introducing a new breed of materials that are designed from the bottom up. Material engineers can start by asking, ‘what kind of material do we want? What do we want it to do?’ And then they are actually able to fabricate those new materials. So, for example, people can ask, 'wouldn’t it be great to have a material that was many times stronger than steel but lighter and transparent?' An architect could make a building supported by something that looks like glass with nano-composite plastics, for example. Eventually, in the long run, you could have materials that would seem to disappear. Cameron Robertson: How pervasive are nanotechnologies in architecture today? GE: There are already over 200 building products that incorporate nano-particles or nanotechnology. The two largest solar cell producers in the world print their cells using nanotechnology. There is a long list of nanotechnologies with considerable green or ‘de-polluting’ potential. For example, the precast panels in the façade of Richard Meier’s church in Rome are coated in nano-materials that, through photocatalysis, break down large amounts of atmospheric pollutants into benign elements on contact. JG: In other words, nano-materials are responsive. Can you elaborate on their dynamic properties? GE: We think of architects as makers of static objects – sculptural things that you create and then walk away from. When you start designing with the nano-materials that we will have available in, say, ten or twenty years, architects will be initiators of a dynamic process. You’ve even got things that show the changing state of what we typically consider static materials. In fact, to so they incorporate organic substances – literally living materials. There are bio-hybrid products such as protein-based biosensors that luminesce when stressed. Already, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco uses sensors to detect movement as an early warning system for earthquakes. You could have concrete beams in a building that glow when stressed. JG: So nanotechnology offers functionality that exceeds what the public currently expects of architecture. What do you believe are ways to represent this? GE: We’ve got to make 4D modeling – 3D plus time – really pervasive, because, frankly, nanotech demands it. We're talking about a technology that allows whole interior and exterior environments to be programmable and continuously variable. We will have to express buildings as networks of intercommunicating intelligent materials, objects and systems. To talk about adequately representing that kind of thing with static media is just crazy. CR: In addition to the representation of this emerging technology, there are questions of public reception and acceptance. How do you think it will change our daily experience of the built environment as its deployed? GE: With the properties of carbon nano-tubes, for example, you could make a chair supported by legs almost the diameter of a needle. But would people really be comfortable sitting in it? In the same way, on the architectural scale, it will be possible to do away with the distinction between structure and skin, a standby not only of construction, but also perception. Would people be perceptually comfortable in that space? There is going to be a lag between material developments and people’s comfort level. The same thing happened when steel columns first came out. In Maison Domino, for example, people weren’t entirely comfortable standing under a concrete slab supported by just a few steel columns. It should also be acknowledged that consumers are apprehensive about nanotechnology. So while companies are very happy to use nanotechnology to improve the performance of their product, they don’t necessarily want the 'nano' name on them, because of concerns that if something went wrong, it would backfire in terms of public comfort with the idea of nanotechnology. CR: You've focused much of your career on broadcasting the potentials of nanotechnology for sustainable design. Do you see nanotechnology as being inherently sustainable? GE: Well, many believe that the responsible use of technology can get us out of the mess we got ourselves into through the irresponsible use of technology. Right now, because nano is a new and very powerful technology, we don’t know its impact on human health or the environment. There are concerns about bioaccumulation. For example, Samsung makes a washing machine that injects silver nano-particles into your wash. Even though it is a minuscule amount, silver is a heavy metal. So there is reason to be concerned about its accumulation over time in the body and the environment. Of course buildings would be a primary source of nano-particle pollution, as they wash off buildings into the larger environment. So we have to consider the large-scale effects. JG: How might nanotechnology affect the urban scale and what is its capacity to change or manipulate the nature of public space? GE: One thing this brings up, particularly in the case of sensor technology, is privacy. As we get further along in our ability to control matter and materials, objects become more malleable and responsive. As people want more intelligent and interactive environments, this implies a give and take of information. With what they call ‘push technology' in Japan, for example, your cell phone will ring as you're walking past the Gap, telling you that the jeans you bought last week are now on sale. Or consider the University of Illinois Computer Science building: when a faculty member swipes his card to enter into the building, the lights and heat in his office kick on. Nanotechnology would amplify that kind of intelligence, and you would get a much more personalized environment. We’re talking about buildings and urban environments that are much more dynamic and changing. On the one hand, it has the potential to put people more in touch with their environment. But if all of these sensors are communicating with each other, the environment, and users, then an important question is: who controls this information? Who has access to it? This article is published as online part of 'Volume #24: Counterculture'.

Indesem explores the future of architecture. Order now! "Architecture should put itself in the middle of the public debate on space." With this ambition Indesem, the biennial International Design Seminar, explored challenges and potential of architecture. Curated by Winy Maas, the workshops focused on major issues, confronted these with specific locations in Rotterdam and presented these as billboards all over the city. "Think not what you would like to make, but what in fifty year’s time should be your legacy", was the brief. 2067: The Legacy contains the lectures and inspirational input of Herman Hertzberger, 2012 Architects, Ronald Wall, Floris Alkemade, ZUS, Wouter Vanstiphout, Michiel Riedijk, Winy Maas, Dirk Sijmons, Salomon Kroonenberg, Juhani Pallasmaa and reports on the students’ struggle to formulate an agenda for architecture. With beautiful photography of Jeroen Musch, graphic design Maureen Mooren with Sandra Kassenaar. 336 p, ills, color & b/w 17x24 English pb. € 19.90 ISBN: 978 90 77966 518. Click here to order 2067: The Legacy.

An impressive animation of satellite images taken before and immediately after the flood shows how rising water leaves a trail of destruction in Brisbane. A split second transforms the city's colorful urban landscape into a brown quagmire. Monitoring changing landscapes using satellite images provides insight in various scenic transitions. The New York Times has made available a shocking series of aerial photos from GeoEye and Google that show Port-au-Prince before and after the January 12, 2010, earthquake. Specifically interesting to take notice of here is how Pétitionville's tent city is organically constructed with an almost Medieval street pattern.

Excerpt from Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued By Digby Lidstone In the autumn of 2008, as the first ripples of global recession spread across the Gulf, Bahrain announced its Vision 2030 plan. It was not the first Middle East country to draw up a blueprint for long-term development. But in the words of Sheikh Mohammed bin Essa Al-Khalifa, Chief Executive of the Bahrain Economic Development Board, 'it came at an opportune time'. With oil prices falling from an all-time high in July 2008 to a seven-year low a few months later and stories of debt defaults, redundancies and investment scandals flooding the newspapers it was a good time to establish where the Bahraini economy was heading. Vision 2030 was not intended to pilot the nation through the storm. Yet its clear appraisal of every issue from road traffic to healthcare, as well as its basic targets, provided much needed clarity in a time of confusion. Vision 2030, developed with the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers, is not an urban planning document per se. Rather it is more of a social strategy. The central aim of the vision is to create 'an economy that raises a broad middle class of Bahrainis who enjoy good living standards through increased productivity and high-wage jobs'. Yet many of the plan’s provisions relate to the future development of Manama and its outlying urban areas.

In just a few decades 80% of mankind will live in cities where more than 90% of our wealth is generated. And all that covers less than 3% of the earth’s surface. Cities are effective, they drive innovation, offer the best answer to overpopulation, and are the greenest answer we have on a planet where crisis and climate change are forcing us to find rigorous solutions. But then cities must be better managed, better designed, better organized, and better planned than they currently are. Only then can cities save us from ourselves. With Making City, the International Architecture Biennale will therefore actively engage with ‘city making’ in the form of concrete projects in three cities: Rotterdam, São Paulo and Istanbul. For this, an international team of curators is engaged in a two-year research programme in these three cities. Their main goal is to redefine the role of and the relation between planning, design and politics and thereby contribute to a more effective toolbox for making the city. Open and new alliances among urban planners, scientists, businesses, developers and local administrators are the driving forces in this endeavour. It will culminate in presentations, exhibitions, lectures and debates in the three cities, after which it is the stated intent of all partners to see the projects realized. The IABR calls for submissions of projects that advance innovative responses to today's most pressing urban challenges. Municipal, metropolitan and national governments, cultural organizations, researchers, designers, and other parties are invited to submit design projects that rethink the existing interaction between politics, planning and design. The selected projects will be integrated into the 5th IABR’s overall research and development process and they will be presented in Making City, the 5th IABR’s main exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, opening in April 2012. Projects can be submitted until 1 April 2011, 12:00 CET. Click here for submission guidelines, the complete Call for Projects and more information on the 5th IABR — Making City.

Thursday 20 January, 2011, 20:00-22:00, The Dépendance, Schieblock, Rotterdam. Entry fee: € 5,-/€ 3,- (students/friends of NAI), register here. Click here for more information. How has Tehran dealt with rapid urbanisation, modernisation, the Islamic revolution, severe pollution and congestion in the twentieth century? Do the current economic sanctions pose a threat to social cohesion? The architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout and Tehran expert Ali Madanipour try to get to grips with this complex metropolis. The prominent Tehran expert Ali Madanipour will give a lecture on the social and environmental developments of the past decades on Thursday 20 January. He will tackle the design, planning, development and management of Tehran, from the old master plan of 1968 to the present-day one. He will also touch on the challenges with regard to social cohesion and other contemporary problems. The architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout will introduce the speaker and chair the discussion afterwards. This evening is the first in a planned series on the Iranian capital. Debates on Tour The NAI Debates on Tour programme is intended to promote the exchange of information all over the world between (mainly) architects regarding current global themes in architecture. During the last few years the NAI and local partners have organised a large number of debates all over the world in which Dutch architects have debated with their international partners, often linked to workshop sessions or architectural guided tours. A series of lectures and debates builds on the knowledge acquired in this way. Where is Tehran? The Netherlands Architecture Institute and Archis/Volume are jointly focusing on the Iranian capital. Under the title Where is Tehran? this project investigates where Tehran is at the moment in terms of geography and level of development. This research project was launched in October 2010 with a Debate on Tour in Tehran on its architecture and urban planning. It is being followed up with the evening debates in the NAI and a second visit to Iran later this year. Archis/Volume is preparing an alternative travel guide to this fascinating city.

We have created a photo set on Flickr containing covers of all Volume issues that have been published so far. When you click on a cover, you will also find information on that specifice issue, along with an 'Order on Amazon' link. Enjoy!

After Richard Branson's Virgin, the Dutch airline KLM has announced to offer space trips for 'normal people'. Starting in 2014 the airline will offer this unique 'life changing experience' for a price of 70,000 euros, with a discount for regular KLM customers. The trips of only 40 minutes are made from the Space Experience Curaçao base (SXC). A supersonic Lynx with space for two persons will rise to hundred kilometers altitude, where the occupants will experience weightlessness for about ten minutes before returning to Curaçao. At one hundred kilometers altitude the passenger is also not yet officially in space. The exosphere, where the earth's atmosphere turns into the vacuum of space, starts at five hundred to one thousand kilometers and ends at about ten thousand kilometers.

Every amateur philosopher has dreamed about what they perceive as a utopian society. It's fascinating to think about a world without the ills we experience today and how perpetually imperfect humans would achieve such an existence. Utopian fiction does just that, enabling readers to travel to a world that will never truly exist. Below is a list of the 20 essential works of the genre. Each are an excellent read when the real world seems as though it's becoming a dystopia.

We are looking for motivated and enthusiastic people to strengthen our research and production team! Candidates should bring: commitment to the field of work of Archis and Volume magazine fluency in English and or Dutch capability of working independently and ‘carry’ a theme. You’ll get: ‘behind the scenes’ insight of editorial research and production and publishing exchange with and feedback from the small and dedicated Archis team access to the wide Archis and Volume network Archis is a foundation with 3 basic sections: Publishers (Volume, Beyroutes, e.g.), Interventions (workshops e.g.) and Tools (lectures, debates, e.g.). Volume is an English thematic quarterly magazine, dedicated to the potential of architecture in its broadest sense. We are specifically looking for interns on the following themes. Architecture of Peace For our long term (2 years) project consisting of two issues of Volume, two exhibitions and several (online) debates and forums we are looking for interns on several aspects of the project from research to production to publicity. Period: from January 2011 to February 2012 for a minimum of three months and two days a week. Aging The upcoming issue of Volume deals with several aspects of Aging: like demography (aging of populations), technology (aging of matter) and politics (aging of ideology). The issue will be released in March 2011. We are looking for someone to help with the research and production but also with the ‘afterlife’ of the issue once it’s out by actively searching for relevant platforms (virtually or physically) to continue the debate. Period: January 2011 - April 2011. Internet of Things The summer issue of 2011 will be dedicated to the Internet of Things. The issue will be about ways to go beyond the gadget and application mode. We are looking for someone to help with research and production but also with the ‘afterlife’ of the issue once it’s out by actively searching for relevant platforms (virtually or physically) to continue the debate. Period: March 2011 - July 2011. Video postproduction We are looking for people with video editing skills to create ‘digestible’ video/audio material for the websites, vodcast or other use. We have raw material from launches of Volume issues, debates and research trips. Most pressing to tackle is the video capture of our Tehran research trip. The Tehran research (in collaboration with the TU Delft and the NAI) will result in an alternative travel guide to Tehran to be published late 2011. Period: January 2011 - July 2011. We are flexible and open to proposals on your side, regarding working hours and input. If you are interested in any of these positions please write an email with your background and motivation to Valerie Blom: vb@archis.org.

The Shift Boston Moon Capital Competition has announced a winner. The competition called on all architects, artists, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers and anyone to submit their most provocative wild visions about a capital for the moon in 2069. According to the organization some of the ideas are "way impossible", says CNN. But that's what the non-profit group Shift Boston aims to collect: ideas that change our perception on society and building. The competition is a typical architectural 'what if' competition — not meant to propose useful solutions but to broaden scope. "When considering the future of design let's start looking out into space. What if we could occupy the Moon only 100 years after our first visit there in July of 1969? Might the Moon become an independent, self-sustaining, and sovereign state? If so why not start designing for that new world now?" There are some amazing concepts among the entries, such as a complete inflatable membrane city, a modular city enabling an organical growth of the new moon capital, and a proposal to for a moon cemetry. The winning idea by Bryna Andersen imagines a moon base surrounding a massive satellite dish that would collect solar energy and beam it back to Earth. Another finalist is envisioning the process of gradual colonization of the moon's surface and represents this process with growing cluster settlements at different density and configurations. Other entries, designs and jury comments can be found at the competitions website.

American scientists are busy building the "world's first sustainable fusion reactor" by creating a miniature star on Earth. Their project at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, which costs 3.5 billion dollars, could mean a breakthrough in the development of safe renewable energy of the future. According to the plans, a workable fusion reaction should be realized by the 2012. On November 2, the scientists fired up the 192 lasers beams at the centre of the reactor and aimed them at a glass target containing tritium and deuterium gas. "The resulting release of energy was of a magnitude of 1.3 million mega joules, which was a world record and the peak radiation temperature measure at the core was approximately six million degrees Fahrenheit."

Order now: 'The Complex History of Sustainability' timeline, which was part of Volume #18: After Zero. Limited edition, only € 5 (shipping included!). Look for 'Special' on this website. Did you know that the term Sustainability first appeared in a German forestry manual in the 1700s? Did you know that some people feel paranoid about an alleged conspiracy plan of world domination behind global warming? What did French philosophers in the Seventies think about ecology? Discover all the different attitudes of humans towards Nature throughout history. Learn more on the architect’s approach to environmental design and get inspiration from a wide utopian fiction bibliography! Impress your friends with a full set of fresh notions! The Complex History of Sustainability is a timeline of trends, authors, projects and fiction made by Amir Djalali, with Piet Vollaard.