Fourth Door Review Number 8: The Hall of Risk Issue
£16.50

Fourth Door Review is ostensibly an occasional magazine about green architecture, but where it excels is in treating architecture less as a practice than as a worldview. Inspired by practitioners like Juhani Pallasmaa, profiled in this issue, it believes in a deeper purpose to architecture: “that of strenghtening our sense of real experience.”

So while it investigates the work of architects like Peter Zumthor, it also delves into a dazzling range of disciplines, encountering artists, writers and musicians, even hands-on craftsmen like John Russell who writes about the disappearance of the local sawmill, not as a nostalgic plea for revivalism, but as a logical missing link in the survival of a sustainable timber industry.   

Russell's short, simple article exemplifies the magazine's underlying philosophy. Editor Oliver Lowenstein and his colleagues are seeking the long view, one in which human ecology dominates. This is Nicolas Bourriaud's relationalism applied to the world of architecture, (relationalism being, after all, the new, less-beardy holism). And Fourth Door Review looks to the arts to provide signposts. Jem Finer, creator of the 1,000-year Longplayer project, discusses  Score for a Hole in the Ground, a self-playing musical installation at King's Wood in Kent commissioned by Stour Valley Arts, in which our human sense of time is confronted by the naturally produced rhythms of the earth. Artist Chris Dury, whose career is examined at length, puts his finger on the shared excitement about the potential for thoughts and practices to come together when he says:

“Physics is about the smallest of things, but also how man cannot be taken out of the equation. We have to factor ourselves in. Over the last century there have been these giants of physics, Einstein and Planck and people like that, who were contemporaries of the south pole explorers – Scott and Shackleton. On the one hand there are these explorers exploring the extremities of the earth and on the other this metaphysical exploration. I found that really interesting as it seems to be coming to a head now.”

A plea for an integrated view sustainability Fourth Door celebrates often technology's part in creating a future. Comuputers have revolutionised architectural design; they continue to revolutionise building techniques. At Zurich's Technical University ETH Zurich, Lowenstein marvels at new digital fabrication techniques – walls built into dizzying organic shapes from brick and wood – by machine. “Robots for ruralism?” ponders Lowenstein. “Perhaps.”

But Fourth Door's is a post-digital world in which the techological positivism of the age is challenged too. Under the veneer of the new, monsters sometimes lurk. In a wide-ranging and revealing interview with the digital artist Susan Collins, Sean Cubbit pauses to ponder this: “The famed immateriality of digital culture is mistaken: their environmental presence is extremely material. How do we square this unpleaant truth with the lure of the digital?”
   
The thrill is in the range of activity it dives into. But behind the eclectic rush of topics covered in this latest issue – from interviews with musician David Sylvian to a review of Mongolia's Roaring Hooves festival – lies a generous, inspiring vision of how to build the world around us.

   
www.fourthdoor.co.uk

See also:
www.annular.org.uk Timberbuild for the 21st century