Palace

Right to the City (Ongoing)

Client: N/A
Year: 2009
Description: To design is to impose and the city, even without reference to surveillance, represents a totalitarian form, planned undemocratically and without public voice to change its very structure and distribution.

The ongoing online project Right to the City investigates such an imposition and aims to revert it, so that the form of the city is configured through a process of voting. Users are encouraged to vote for changes of a test city block. To do so, follow these basic steps:
- Click on any of the sites (eg. 'Site One'),
- Bear in mind the context of the site you are voting for,
- Cast your vote.
Every second month, the test block will be re-drawn to reflect the elected changes.

The process of democratising the development of the city could be done by voting for options both on macro and micro levels (this is seen as an endless and revisable investigation like that of science); of plot organisation, the occupation of these spaces and who is entitled to reside in them and the form of the architecture itself (a topic that is seemingly redundant).

Like David Harvey's notion, the common right to the transformation of the city could effectly reshape the distribution of capital and could create cities/localities with different reasons of existence and/or the failure of them (eg. the redundancy of the 'Central Business District'). Architects, in their current state would not exist, if anything, anti-architecture would manifest itself like that of the replusion many psychiatrists had of their profession in the 1960s (thus the creation of anti-psychiatry). Trained architects and their proposals would be considered on equal terms with those submitted by society, only garnering an advantage of submitting many proposals, as they are trained and efficiency of such work has been accelerated. Style and design would become unecessary (as in crises), only functionally beneficial work would be permitted and the elected work would represent a cause/future society needs.

Casitas (Small Houses)

Awards: 2008 Shortlisted for the Arquia "150%" Grant.
Client: Arquia
Year: 2008
Description: Referencing work of the structuralists of the 60s, the project provides additions to delapitaded houses and a re-cultivates a dis-used plaza in Granada, southern Spain. Like a Peer-to-Peer framework - a network of 'Casitas' (small houses) are centralised with public resources - a relatively low number of services (gardens, theatre, a greenhouse, food bank...) provide the core value to the functionality of the plaza. One can share content, space and experience. The ownership of such a 'Casita' directly feeds back to the plaza as tool to be involved, and to share. A licence to be active.

No Hope: Redundant Geographies

Client: N/A
Year: 2008
Description: The rectification of problems of oil, consuming levels and expansion is ubiquitous, the answer lies in the centres of large cities, particularly in Europe. This model is stacked apartments, shared cores, densely located, satellite commercial nodes and a lesser reliance on the automobile as everything is neatly connected with public transport or accessible by bike or foot. There is no sure-fire way of converting the American dream into this sustainable response. It will be a process of taking away the life that has been common to generations and blindingly easy to live in. It might just generate a civil uprising if running politicians promise the un-promise-able: that one can keep their SUV, and their double-story house, and the luxuries that come with it. Rendundant geographies projects life as it could be, a world relentlessly aiming to make convenient the suburban lifestyle, justifying growth however proving the original intention of the commuter (farming) surburb is now but a figment of tentant's imaginations.

Dubai: Home Away From Home

Client: N/A
Year: 2009
Awards: 2nd Prize International Architectural Students and Young Architects Award, 2008.
Description: Most of contemporary urban planning is dedicated to re-solving problems. Due to the non-centralised infrastructure of Dubai, and the advent of major expansions, the focus of urban planning should be dealt with prominence on transit-oriented development, reducing the proportion of new development occurring in low-densities. Construction should redirect new development to defined and established areas. The other criteria should be the proximity of dense housing. The relationship of three factors (mixed-used activity centres, transit orientated development and the proximity of high density) should be numerously plotted over Dubai’´s current urban structure in already developed and established zones.

Similarly to Walter Christaller's 'Central Place Theory' the effectiveness of this design assumes numerous things about Dubai: 1. Dubai has an even distribution of resources and population throughout the city and 2. that the city is set on an isotropic, homogeneous and unbounded limitless surface.

Each centre (Activity Node) aims to minimise the distance that consumers are prepared to travel to acquire goods as in the case of Dubai now, the inconvenience of the good outweighs the need for the good. The concentration of development within designated activity centres close to transport nodes places particular emphasis on public transport over automobile mediated suburbs of Dubai dependant on the car. The notion of public transport also fills the anti-social void that the abundance of motorways and the lack of public space Dubai garners. The implementation of urban-growth boundries in Dubai will reduce urban sprawl and these dense nodes, utopic in their method of un-engineering, aim to consolidate the current built environment and multiply it vertically forming ten dense clusters and to allow for the addition of public green zones, or more aptly sand-space to propagate naturally in-between.

Common to each centre is an irregular ovoid structure whose role as a didactic leitmotif both formally and functionally forms the framework for Dubai to regenerate. This, termed 'entosurb' (from entos- "within, inside" + urbs (gen. urbis) "city."), is formally a vertically aligned system with common spaces for meeting and decision making, and private living spaces with the aim of minimising the geographic impact on the Earth’´s surface. Each ´'entosurb' located within a centre will have the common program of being housing for construction workers, a component of local government and a third program suited to the centre it is housed in. For example if a centre has more potency in energy production then the third component of the entosurb could be the department of energy and be responsible for the education of the workers. The 'entosurb' described specifically in this project is part union, part local government, and part housing for construction workers.