The hotel has always been the stage of multiple identities and multi-national relations, but it is also the most foreign and alien home for those who inhabit it. In this project the hotel is seen as a potential device to preserve, display, and redistribute multiple identities into the centre of the city. The proposal expands on the concept of perpetual movement and transit already present within its travelling guests, channelling the energy of travellers into a requirement of use and dwelling in both the hotel space, and the city. Through this channelled and subsequently redistributed movement, a confrontation of both the city and the multiple identities of the hotel guests is effected.
The Ship of Fools was a 15th Century invention – it was the first active ritual to expel unwanted figures and protect moral values. It was, in many ways, the precursor of social hospitals, prisons, and eventually, 20th Century modernist urbanisation. Spaces of confinement have normally been studied from an external point of view – they were little more than spaces of exclusion. But they can also be spaces where “souls succumb to the temptations of the world”. This is the premise of an urban confinement structure built on the outskirts of Lisbon.
Operating with new techniques and methods of urban intervention, conflict and negotiation are used as spatial practices. A new machine inhabitant is built in Berlin: one which grows, dies, creates or steals spaces, interacts and interconnects on an urban and cultural scale. An animate form that grows and learns with the Turkish community of Kreuzberg.
Morphotectonic architectural design. Just as the Opera Seria Casrtratti singers exhibited sounds of beauty, fruit of the pain and torture their bodies had to endure, so can the Earth display sounds and shapes of beauty through its own torture. The Villa Seria’s perilous location is imperative for the ‘house’ to fulfill its function as an early warning system for earthquakes, a model for seismic study, a bio-ecological performance studio, and a holiday home that, rather than confronting, responds and reacts to tectonic activity.