The shopping mall gave us the ‘climatized’ commercial space, doing away with real nature, detaching us from the outside world, in favor of the fully artificial. Architects strived to recapture the public realm, displacing generic volumes around caricatures of public space, and overwhelming spatial mess. The spectacle of the latter can be understood as an excessive attempt to add urban complexity to consumerism.
Culture, as the ideological inverse of shopping, is booming, first and foremost commercially. It has more often than not become the celebration of a parody. At the same, time culture has a surreptitious influence in small, almost imperceptible constellations that appropriate and transform the public realm.
Rather than generate further simulations of the urban spectacle, an oversaturation of the familiar, and the functional, we began by stripping our own illusion and speculate freely on urban ecologies – commercial, culture, living, working, office, entertainment, and leisure.
