Editorial

Helen Castle

Innovation has become the golden goose of the 21st century, as expressed
by Barack Obama in his presidential victory speech on 7 November
2012 in Chicago: We want our kids to grow up in a country ... that lives
up to its legacy as the global leader in technology and discovery and
innovation with all of the good jobs and new businesses that follow.1
For stagnating developed economies, innovation remains the great white
hope the essential stimulus to ongoing prosperity sought through
entrepreneurship, Internet startups and biotech, software and hardware
companies.
For the practice of architecture, no simple equation exists between
innovation and commercial success. Most truly innovative designers are
not purely motivated by wealth. In contemporary architecture, innovation
is a life force. Architecture thrives off the impulse to innovate. At a
day-to-day level it is what elevates architecture beyond mere building
production, and the original and analytical thinking that makes clients
come back for more, while making us reach for our smart phone to see
the latest architectural project on Facebook. What guest-editors Pia
Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry and Andrew Burrow bring to this issue is a
new clarity and tautness to the definition of innovation in architecture.
Their subtitle for the publication architectures of vitality chimes
with notions of emergence, but also of architecture as a collective practice
in tune with current processes and cultural shifts.
What drew 3 to the theme of this issue aside from the opportunity
to work with key members of the Spatial Information Architecture
Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT in Melbourne was its timeliness. The
innovation imperative today requires a greater intensity than it might
have 50 years ago. As the guest-editors state in their introduction: The
urge to examine innovation more closely and in relation to architecture
in particular is inflected by the broadly defining conditions of rapid
change we find ourselves in. A new level of ingenuity is called upon
not only to keep in step with shifts in technology, but also to retain
architectures relevance at a time of economic, social, environmental and
political change. 1

Note
1. For the full text of Barack Obamas
victory speech, see: www.guardian.co.uk/
world/2012/nov/07/barack-obama-speechfull-text.
Text 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Image Steve Gorton