Neil Spiller

Synthetic biology: Living quarters

Synthetic biology could offer truly sustainable approaches to the built environment, predict Rachel Armstrong and Neil Spiller.

Violence of the sun

The Communicating Vessels is a drawn, polemic architectural project that has been twenty years in the making, it explores the impact of twenty –first Century technology on the old dialectic between house and garden. The project is highly surreal and often uses narrative, particularly the relationship between “The Professor” and “The Boy”. The Professor lives on the Island, that is its site. By 2015, it was clear that it was time to start to design the major piece of the constellation-the Professor’s house- it has become named the Longhouse. It is a prytaneion, a place of surreal banquets inhabited by ghosts, dreams, desires and mythic creatures. A Memory Palace of shifting relationships, of momentary fluttering’s, cartographies and trajectories, where objects have the same accountability as people. It is a place of flame, of heat, of a rotten sun, of dusk and dawn, where the vertical is assimilated into the horizontal and where Modernism breaks down. The Longhouse is a highly reflexive and responsive series of spaces and relationships. The house choreographs itself and develops this daily choreography by reading its site; this site is a virtual changeling site- constructed infinitely by a mysterious Chicken Computer.

Detailing the Walled Garden for Lebbeus

Neil Spiller, the Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London, has an unrivalled international reputation for the virtuosity of his visionary graphic work. Here, in a highly personal and poetic eulogy to Lebbeus Woods, Spiller pays tribute to his master through the lens of his own work, where detail becomes an important element in an imagined, augmented world in which the concrete or the specific lends credence to the fictional.

The Magical Architecture in Drawing Drawings

I remember one vivid winter’s day at Versailles.... Everything gazed at me with mysterious questioning eyes. And then I realised that every corner of the place, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us without love.... At that moment I grew aware of the mystery which urges men to create certain forms. And the creation appeared more extraordinary than the creators... 1

Protocells: The Universal Solvent

Protocell architecture inverts the current economic and procurement processes of construction with their emphasis on cost, speed and quantifiable outcomes. Wet, semi-living and symbiotic with ecological systems and materials, protocell systems promise a pargadigm that is the very antithesis of existing practice and will require the employment of very different skills sets and approaches. To ease the intellectual transition from hard engineering to chemical solutions, Neil Spiller investigates the enduring notion of alchemy.

Surrealistic exuberance – dark matters

For Neil Spiller, there is a current vacuum in much of contemporary parametric design. It is devoid of embodied cultural experience and character. Much can be learnt by rediscovering the dark matter of Baroque and Surrealistic art and architecture, which through repressed eroticism optimised on the simultaneous presence of the secular and the profane - the heaving physicality of the everyday world and the repressed strictures of the Catholic church.

What Are You Looking At

There is a rebirth of interest in anamorphic perspective - that erudite artistic trick that allows one to represent different points of view in a single plane or view. Neil Spiller sees a new future for this arcane spatial practice that enables objects to dissolve their muteness. Copyright

Complex Systems Architecture

Neil Spiller reveals the complexity of architectural systems to us, or is it the complexity of the architectural mind? For Spiller, the potential of a single notation as a seed for a truly ecological architecture provides an essential catalyst, triggering a multifaceted musing that takes in diagrams, Paul Preissners new competition entry for the Taiwan Centre of Disease Control and his future work with Dr Rachel Armstrong on complex biological systems. Copyright

Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion

Neil Spiller flees the nihilism of the shards and blobs of the last three decades in architecture and finds redemption on the north shore of Lakeside Way in Kielder Water, Northumbria. He describes how with this exquisitely tailored pavilion sixteen*(makers) are opening the way for a new way of working. Copyright

Basking in a World of Your Own Making

As the credit crunch bites in, are pockets of young architects reviving a battle against commodified materialism? Neil Spiller describes how he has experienced this close to home with his own class of 2009 at the Bartlett which has reactivated its own brand of Surrealist cybernetic research, inspired by Dali. Copyright