A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates

The book entitled ‘A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates’, by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample from MOS Architects (NY) is currently exhibited in the US pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016. Cities structure our lives, resources, interactions, and identities. From Sebastiano Serlio to Rem Koolhaas, architects have used the metaphor of theater, presenting the city as stage, as comic sets for comic acts, as a delirious city for delirious subjects, generic city for generic subjects, and so on. Today, however, we are social anywhere, actors on- and offstage.

So what happens when the city no longer structures us, or when basic urban elements - streets, buildings, facades, and addresses - have been augmented, superimposed, and untethered by or replaced through technology?

‘A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates’ is a playful investigation into urban alternatives. Employing neither the holistic worldview of mapping nor the isolated islands of architectural typology, MOS imagines a proposal where the city is everywhere…

Includes essays by Jack Self, Co-Curator of the British Pavilion, 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale; T. Conrad Therrien, Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum; and Ana Miljacki, critic, curator, and Associate Professor of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).