The Architecture of A Non-Narrative Theatre: An Investigation on Spatial Absurdity

Marseille as a port city that is in constant flux carries out a vast array of qualities and experiences that creates a dynamic collection in which heterogenous conventions, orders, and routines interrelate and collide. It is a complex urban network of places and fragments that come together in this context of ‘otherness’. <br/>Analysing...

Dwelling in Uncertain

We spent hours sitting in silence, until he turned his eyes away from the window and spoke: ‘I would like to tell you one last story, It has been decided, there will be no more travels beyond the edge for me.’ In the following days I heard, not one but five, stories of people M encountered – inhabitants of the land he traveled to. Truth be told,...

Urban Improvisation: Research and design about resedents' spontaneous architectural and urban practice in Marseille

Starting from a port, Marseille was born as the result of improvisation and spontaneous architectures rather than urban planning. Same things happened in the architecture scale. architects are not the only doers of architecture. Long after the building has been made the non-architects continuously do architecture. When non-architects occupy...

Reclaiming the landscape: an alternative understanding of the waste cycle in Marseille

As a major transit city on the Mediterranean, Marseille’s urban history and landscape are largely defined by the continuous flows of matter and energy over time. Amongst these interwoven flows, the waste flow is one of the striking focal points. This is not only because the city of Marseille has historically struggled to escape its "dirty"...

The Revolution of the Roundabout: The Arch as the Spectacle between Function and Deactivation

To every rise and fall of nations, crowds were vital. They could appear in the form of armies defending their motherlands or revolutionaries rewriting the courses of history, but they are also vital to political baiting beloved by every ‘big guy’. Crowds also bring in life to the masses; it is the various social spectacles that we (occasionally)...

In Shadows we Boogie: Light, Shadow and the Repression of Darkness

Light, shadow and shade are at the foundation of our cartesian understanding of 3D space. Where light falls on matter the difference in shading allows us to see this space. However, light also breaks this understanding creating the potential for a phenomenological understanding instead. Which is seen with an extradimensionality in certain...

Reform: the Space of the Gaze

Rethinking the Infra- Culture space: bridging, providing, enhancing

Mashhad has been geopolitically an important city in the region and a trade and connection hub to Central and East Asian countries. It is also the second-largest Muslim pilgrimage city after Mecca. It is a global city for which religion shaped the identity and influenced the spatial configuration of the city.<br/><br/>Religion, politics and...

The Banality of Death: Interweaving territories of life and death at the outskirts of Mashhad

The Banality of Death addresses the way the city of Mashhad deals with death. It is an attempt to architecturally translate and expose the tensions that arise between traditional values and the modern transformation of the burial process by the design of three extended rest-stops along the Bagcheh Highway that act as mediators with the goal of...

Mazar of the Treasury: A Pilgrimage in the Taklamakan Desert, of Data Centers and Destroyed Heritage Sites

This project embraces the latent tensions and conflicts within the mysterious Taklamakan Desert, where cultural history is being rewritten within the contemporary paradigm of surveillance capitalism. By binding the national demand for data centers with the archaeological excavation of destroyed heritage sites, the material and cultural memory of...

Encountering The Voidness

Urban voids are the indispensable configurations within the urban environment. They should be recognized as distinct spatial entities within the cities and also in the sense of human culture, as the holder of the memory and historical layering of the life of the city. The project mainly focuses on the current urban conditions happening in...

Amplifying trajectories: in the marginal settlements of Mashhad

In Mashhad, one million - a third of the people - live in marginal settlements also known as slums. Migrations from the countryside and Afghanistan to Mashhad, and housing crisis have pushed many to settle in the literal margins of the city. However, their life is everything but settled: their existence can instead be characterized as a nomadic...