Young Blood (Architectural Design) - Softcover

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Established architects will be stunned by the design dexterity and creativity contained in Young Blood, which brings together the speculative architectural projects of the very best young architects worldwide. Guest-edited by the cutting-edge architect and passionate architectural educator Neil Spiller, it features graduates of the premier architecture schools - the Bartlett and the Architectural Association in London; Sci-arc and UCLA in Los Angeles; Columbia in New York and RMIT in Australia.
Imaginative, innovative and accomplished in their technical skills, this generation of young blood exude a unique 21st century freshness and confidence. It is a confidence that those currently at the top of their profession also share in their likely successors. This is illustrated by the enthusiastic and supportive words from renowned architects that accompany each young designer's work.

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Editorial Neil Spiller boasts that after two years in his unit on the diploma course at the Bartlett his students are unemployable. For rather than coaching the nuts and bolts of the profession, he and his partner Phil Watson are educating their unit to think for themselves and to nurture their own inner vision. (Technical skills are not taught per se; postgraduates master the elementary, such as IT skills themselves, often learning from each other.) As Spiller testifies in his essay, 'Architectural Education and Critical Paranoia', it is by necessity a 'journey of the radical'. It is a reach for sublimity, which in its exploration of virtual and actual spaces transcends the mundane.

Spiller's championing of the radical over accomplishment and compentency, acknowledges education's vital role in an architects' development. For full-time education offers individuals the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to concentrate for an extended period on his/her own work. This process should thus be formative and inspiring. As Spiller states in his introduction many of the young architects, whose work he has brought together in this issue of AD, have emerged capable of matching if not putting neo-avant-garde practitioners to shame.

The architects featured in Young Blood are graduates of architecture schools worldwide, including the Architectural Association in London, Columbia in New York, IIT in Chicago, RMIT in Melbourne and UCLA in California, as well, of course, the Bartlett. This title of AD, however, does not aspire to being geographically comprehensive or in any way representative. It is Neil Spiller's own choice of the best work of contemporary young architects. It straddles the entire gamut of media from Nick Williams's Leonardoesque mastery of draughtsmanship to Sixteen*(makers) exploration of computer-aided manufacture. What is, however, consistent throughout is the quality of work and the vision it encapsulates.

Introduction Spilling Young Blood

Globally architectural education has its back against a wall not of its own making. The new technologies are reeking havoc with its polite sensibility. Traditional architectural schools still rely on a mixture of arcane teaching methods, outdated conceptual models and posit a ubiquitous, ambivalent, inert spacescape. This sickening state of affairs is forcing architectural practice far from society's centre. Around the world, in a minority of educational institutions, a small band of teachers are trying to prepare their students for an unfamiliar future, a future that no longer assures us with its constancy. Whether that constancy is sought in ideas of architectural space, technology, material or use. Some will tell you that a student needs to learn compromise, this is bunk. I have selected contributors to this issue, that seldom compromise, often their work is extreme in some sense. So little good student and young architects' work is published. The best of this work can match any neo-avant-garde, black-suited hero. These guys are the future, they are lean and hungry and yet to be weighed down by too many self-congratulatory lunches. Come feast with me on a glimpse of the future. - Neil Spiller