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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." 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.
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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.
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What drew AD 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 architecture's relevance at a time of economic, social, environmental and political change.
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—Helen Castle
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