Intermediate 7 is concerned with transfers between conflicted urban systems, relying on design infrastructures to align formal and programmatic strategies. This year, we exploited clashes between culture and commerce in the context of post-Soviet Moscow to define new hybrid typologies. We explored the convergence of museums and markets, salons and archives, expo-cities and pop-ups into catalytic ‘incubator galleries’.
To convert ruptures into associations, student projects advanced architectural mediations for the city’s paradoxes. Exploiting cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction, our mappings of urban layers and palimpsests defined generic scaffolds for specific cultural and commercial fragments. Engaging with dispersion and concentration, density models and figure-ground reversals generated compressed megastructures as filing and display mechanisms. Alternating between concealment and revelation, our collapsed images and intertwined circuits produced thick facade interfaces as accumulations of surfaces, atmospheres and events.
Projects traversed several methodological platforms that link city and architecture, analysis and projection, operation and appearance. Through diagrammatic diagnostics and graphic condensations, we extracted Moscow’s latent solutions and redeployed them in incubator ‘provocations’. These hubs relied on transplanted seed ‘elements’ – such as sorting walls, orientable facades and extendible cores. We incorporated diverse elements in synthetic ‘infrastructures’ as conceptual frameworks and material assemblages, while relating networks, fields and ecologies to space-frames, mat-buildings and thick surfaces. Applying diagrams to prototypes, we opted for a ‘plastic’ fit between form and programme that drew on opposing case-studies. Generating sorting machines and atmospheric passages, buffering condensers and immersive pods, our ‘infrastructural formalism’ reconciled economy and excess, structure and cosmetics, efficiency and effect. Final catalogues and portfolios combined theoretical and practical outputs at the levels of the city, building and content.
Thanks to
Roz Barr
Peter Karl Becher
Carlos Villanueva Brandt
Brendon Carlin
Barbara Ann Campbell-Lange
Monia De Marchi
Ricardo de Ostos
Sarah Entwistle
Wolfgang Frese
Kostas Grigoriadis
Eugene Han
Francesca Hughes
Sam Jacob
Max Kahlen
Tomas Klassnik
Dirk Lellau
Melodie Leung
Kathy O’Donnell
John Palmesino
Catherine Pease
Damian Rogan
Natasha Sandmeier
Ingrid Schröder
Eva Sopeoglou
Brett Steele
Charles Tashima
Johan Voordouw
Thomas Weaver
All our guests and our exhibition sponsor, ABC Imaging