About

Surrounded by the Mediterranean and a transit point into Europe from North Africa, Marseille is both a space of crisis and of communication. It is, in a sense, full of contradiction and paradox. It is a city that conveys a sense of strangeness, exteriority, non-belonging or what Lacan might have described as ‘Extimacy’ – or lacking a sense of Intimacy – and yet it holds a strange foundational condition “ A city where, the second one stepped foot on the ground, one could say: ‘That’s it. I’m home.’ Marseille belongs to those who live there.”

The city has its own epistemic kind of latitude; a strange type of milieu or middle-space between Eastern and Western Europe that hinges and ensnares the populations and spaces of Northern and Southern Africa around it. As a port city with the confluence of cultures, people, and histories, Marseille also exudes an evocative and intoxicating quality – and has extorted a profound influence on several writers and cultural observers. Or perhaps it is the opposite? Maybe because of the way it is so inherently liquous and full of glitches, porous to the movements of unseen and anarchic bodies and geometries – a transactional and dissonant geography par excellence - we could describe it as a place subjected to a form of total decay and having an  'absent centre' or   Verlust der Mitte, using Hans Sedlmayr’s phrase.

The focus this year evolved distinct architectural positions that produced new poetic types of architecture – something we might say is tethered between speculative realism and new types of material and urban cultures. The design projects form a dialectic that situates a series of challenges that confront the city – from post-colonial institutions, human health, biodiversity, urban dereliction, airborne pollution, and mass flooding scenarios - to the safety of migrant and other underrepresented populations. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork observations,  the projects foster new approaches in reimagining future urban fields – exploring possibilities for the city to act as a space for continuous civic immersion while anticipating more sustainable urban futures.