METASITU
TDCU IZZ
The chronicle of increasing isolation of a group of artists attempting to reach the World's most remote human inhabited place, the island of Tristan da Cunha.
THE VISIT
Meziara is a village in Northern Lebanon, where most of its residents do business in Nigeria for most of the year, before returning every summer. The suburb to an invisible city.
TORA BORA
The extraction and export of 'Jerusalem Stone' is one of the most lucrative businesses in the Palestinian Territories, and remains highly unregulated. Everyone wants a piece of the holy land.
MEMENTO LOCI
Souvenirs are tokens that help to perpetuate spatial narratives. Mass produced around the world, they serve as a vehicle through which power narratives are unfolded and displayed.
MEMENTO LOCI unpacks some of these strategies.
14th DISTRICT
Slavutych was built to rehouse the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It is made up of 13 districts, each inspired by a different Soviet city. With 86, we are building a new district based on Athens.
STOP OVER CITY
Moscow City is a decaying business district in Central Moscow. By linking it to the two largest airports in the city and giving it the status of 'international transfer zone' we would revitalize this vacant territory.
STATES, STATUS,
STATUES & STATUTES
VDNHk park in central Moscow is a spatial technology that serves to advance an imperialistic idea based on an old regime.
(re)appropriating (post)soviet narratives.
NATION STATE OF MIND
Nation State of Mind proposes an alternative understanding of the nation in a post-national world. What is the role of territoriality and locality in Ecumenopolis?
#mariupolwillnotdie
#itistheworldthatwillend
Mariupol is a mono-industry town in Eastern Ukraine. Its population has been shrinking since the collapse of the USSR. This is a manifesto to embrace its shrinking condition and work with it.
EXPEDITION TO ECUMENOPOLIS
Expedition to Ecumenopolis is a series of workshops that we deliver to different groups in order to collectively think about ideas evolving around contemporary urbanism in the age of hyper-globalisation.
VOCABULARY FOR ECUMENOPOLIS
In the era of Globalization and the Antropocene, we find that there are a new set of urban qualities/phenomena that take place globally. Here is a glossary that attempts to identify some of those.
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The speculative video piece “Stop Over City” was the outcome of rigorous research about global office typologies rooted in case studies in Moscow, Russia. The main objective of this research enquiry was to critically ask what the future of Grade A offices is; executive landscapes where many of the decisions that affect our everyday are taken.
“Stop Over City” is an exploration about the future of Moscow’s International Business District (aka ‘Moscow City’), which is located just 4 km away from the Kremlin. Under construction for over two decades, and with a vacancy rate of over 40%, this area, the second densest in the world and the home to Europe’s tallest buildings, still has an uncertain future. Alongside offices, one can find multiple retail spaces, dwelling, hotel, and leisure facilities distributed throughout the different towers.
Our proposal is to create a Mega Airport in Moscow, linking Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo with Moscow City, situating the latter as an International Transit Zone of the airport, a terminal without planes. A visa-free space that would escape national jurisdiction. This would not only give a competitive edge to this defunct-before-birth district, but would also create a new framework in which new actors could participate.
Equipped with a shopping center, a hotel, residential facilities and over 400,000 workstations, whistleblowers like Edward Snowden would not have needed to ever leave the airport.
A city within the city, yet connected to the globe. A subversion of Ecumenopolis, yet a physical manifestation of it. Stop Over City - a zone that is both a terminus and a carrefour, an end and a transition, a non-lieu and a lieu-de-mémoire. Stop Over City is a non-place that physically embodies that connection: landscapes that are repeated ad-infinitum holding individual stories.
ECUMENOPOLIS
STOP OVER CITY
The future of Moscow International Business Center is in the air.
Video/ 8’42’’ ----- 2014
US