Mass-Customised Cities

What happens when computational design and fabrication technologies ramp up to the urban scale? Though these innovative production processes are currently now largely limited to small-scale design projects, what will happen when they are applied to the vast scale of the 21st-century world city? Could new technologies enable an important shift away from mass production to increasingly bespoke and custom-designed systems? The introduction of standardisation and mass production processes in the 20th century saw the industrial city take on a repetitious and homogeneous quality through the duplication of component parts. Today non-standard, bespoke systems hold out the promise of realising a distinctive urbanism; characterized by the differentiation of serial production and the variation of simple parts that should lead to a more complex and compelling whole. Given the current pace and rate of urbanisation in Asia, the mass customization of the city is set to have imminent and far-reaching practical consequences for the rest of the developing and developed world.

Editorial 05 Helen Castle About the Guest-Editor 06 Tom Verebes Introduction Cities and Their Specificities: Standards, Customs and the Making of 21st-Century Urbanity 08 Tom Verebes Mass Customisation and Standardisation: An Urban Dialectic 18 Martin Bressani Towards a Distinctive Urbanism: An Interview with Kenneth Frampton 24 Tom Verebes Miesian Grids and the Domain of Ink 32 Elena Manferdini Standardising Heterogeneity: Public Housing and the Absent(ed) Architect 40 Michael Bell From Mass Customisation to Design ‘Democratisation’ 48 Branko Kolarevic On Modelling Complexity and Urban Form 54 M Christine Boyer Samsung Raemian Housing Masterplan, Haan River, Seoul, Korea: Contemporary Architecture Practice 60 Hina Jamelle and Ali Rahim (In)formational Cities 64 Neil Leach Growth Typologies, Localities and Defamiliarisation: Experiments with Artificial Urbanism in Sichuan, Guangzhou and Beijing 70 Jeffrey Huang Shanghai Lilong Tower Urbanism, Shanghai, China: Rocker-Lange Architects 76 Christian J Lange Permanence and Change: An Interview with Mark Burry 80 Donald Bates The Repulse Bay Complex, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong: Davidclovers 86 David Erdman and Clover Lee Catalytic Urbanism: The Role of Customised Design Solutions in Delivering Transformational Urban Change 92 Elad Eisenstein Second Development Zone, Umekita Area, Osaka, Japan: OCEAN CN Consultancy Network 100 Tom Verebes Engineering Urban Complexity: Bespoke Integrated Design 104 Rob May Archi-Union Architects, City of Breeze, Shenzhen Bay, Shenzhen, China 110 Philip F Yuan Technological Transitions, Industrial Innovations and the Marching Chinese Urban Revolution: An Interview with Jerry Ku and Philip Vernon of E-Grow, Shanghai 114 Tom Verebes Automated Diversity: Gramazio Kohler Research New Morphologies of Vertical Urbanism 122 Jan Willmann, Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler Counterpoint Cities on the Edge of Chaos 128 Colin Fournier Contributors 134