Culturally diverse communities often struggle with prejudice and division among the member groups. Considering the current positive trend in globalization, and thus, also migration, the cultural diversity of communities is on the rise. As a result, The World Economic Forum assessed the erosion of social cohesion to be the 4th most dangerous risk on a global scale within the next decade (WEF, 2022).

Beyond Divisions is a proposal aimed at addressing this problem. Located in Lublin (Poland), which nowadays struggles with hostility and xenophobia, the building draws from the site's past cultural diversity to bring back the social cohesion lost during the WWII era.

The universal research and symbolism of the proposal ensure the transferability of the solution to other sites that also struggle with the deterioration of social cohesion to create a community beyond divisions. ... Read more

This contribution is part of Fashion House, a collective project on the spatial implications of a decentralized and more tightly regulated fashion industry across Europe that reimagines the function and design for a fashion house.
The Unmentionables envisions a new clinic that substitutes surgical procedures with non-permanent and risk-free body enhancements, that allow for periodic modifications of the body. Therefore, this contribution positions the consumer’s body as the product and the clinic as a space of Fashion retail. ... Read more

The Non-Fungible Cult is an exclusive data center designed for luxury fashion NFTs. It is located on a fortified island and serves as a secure space for digital fashion assets. Fashion brands use the data center as a space of mediation between virtual and physical realities, granting selected NFT holders access as a part of their loyalty plan. The underground facility is a nod to Marseille’s past limestone industry and aims to create a sense of mystery and exclusivity.

This contribution is part of Fashion House, a collective project on the spatial implications of a decentralized and more tightly regulated fashion industry across Europe that reimagines the function and design for a fashion house. ... Read more

Scale to feet is a small, vertical sneaker factory in Zurich’s “Culture Mile.” It uses zero-waste production techniques and is designed to have a relationship with customers and its surroundings through testing facilities and a public program. The production process starts on the ground floor and moves upward. The factory becomes a destination in a scenario where online shopping dominates fashion consumption. ... Read more

Equity Road is a foundation in Valencia that provides professional opportunities to vulnerable local groups such as immigrants and the unemployed. The preference for regional resources, such as wool, within the Red Thread, creates social sustainability by training people as manufacturing experts of fashion goods and therefore ensuring a circular economy in the region.
The foundation seeks the well-being of the people and animals involved by having two facilities located in residual spaces that can benefit their neighborhoods. An atelier and offices are located next to the train station to ensure an accessible location for vulnerable groups. It aims to restore unused railway buildings to expand the public space in the community. It’s a democratic complex of buildings where most of the space is dedicated to the training of vulnerable groups, while the administration occupies the least amount of area. A second location ensures the well-being of sheep by locating it next to grazing zones where people learn to shear sheep.
The certification “Ready to Grow” certifies individuals who have sufficiently completed the requirements to own and operate wool textile production facilities in coordination with and from financing of non-profit foundations. Therefore, this contribution looks for social mobility, as a means of equity, through vocational training in vital emergent industries.
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Crafting Heritage is a made-to-order textile workshop dedicated to the perpetuation of Provence’s ancestral know-how on the textile block printing technique used for Provencal or indienne prints.
Located in the former industrial and artisanal district of Les Crottes, the workshop recovers and adapts seven warehouses by rethinking the traditional assembly line of a factory decomposing it into a set of specialized production and workshop spaces combined with learning and break areas. ... Read more

A bank with the hair collecting system to deal with hair waste, cooperating with local hair salons and barbershops and bi-products to fill up the hair cycle from maintenance consumption to post-consumer offer. ... Read more

Ready to Rent envisions a fashion rental hub that provides the rental, delivery, and maintenance of a wide range of clothing options. It supports a model of usership in fashion consumption by offering clothing as a service rather than a purchasable product.

The fully automated processing facilities handle used garments used garments for user-to-user transfer in a vertical assembly line, ensuring Good as New certification guaranteeing the same quality standards than the shop floor. Collection and drop-off lockers located throughout the city facilitate the transfer of rental garments and empower unboxing, packaging, and fitting at home, challenging traditional retail settings.

Ready to Rent, located in Rotterdam’s innovative M4H district, offers a unique solution for fashion consumption and supports it as a means of aspirational self-expression. ... Read more

This contribution is part of Fashion House, a collective architecture project that anticipates an alternative future for the fashion industry in five emerging European fashion centers in and around Berlin, Marseille, Rotterdam, Valencia, and Zurich, creating a pan-European cooperative and regulatory body that intensifies regional production and increases conscientious consumption patterns by granting product certifications, providing industry services, and offering brand consultancy.
Aporia envisions a generalized curriculum fashion atelier for students from regions without crafts heritage. This fashion atelier directly adjoins Fashion House Berlin, near Alexanderplatz, in the German capital of Berlin.
Aporia proposes a fashion atelier in Haus D of the DDR government Haus der Statistik in Berlin. This atelier offers a generalized curriculum teaching multidisciplinary skills competency. Atelier workers train in at least five of forty-four Red Thread artisanal disciplines, from wool artistry to patternmaking. These disciplines occupy enfilade studios under one roof, with minimized spatial and organizational hierarchies, altogether facilitating interdisciplinary knowledge exchange.
An increasingly regionalized fashion industry intrinsically entails the proliferation of skills and knowledge to support regional manufacturing. Regional artisanal manufacturing declined as a result of brain drains to centralized Taylorist production—which strives for peak productivity via production process atomization—emblematic of the previous fashion paradigm. Specialized workers of this previous paradigm are susceptible to economic volatility, and to a self-deceptive conflation of specialized knowledge mastery with growth.
Generalist ateliers fill that knowledge gap as centralized sites of education and knowledge exchange. Workers learn and share knowhow through collaboration and mentorship, all within shared work and evaluative spaces. Mastery is traded for inexperience each time the worker begins a new discipline, dispelling self-deceptive overvaluing of mere knowledge.
These atelier workers become professionally autonomous generalist artisans—certified “Know it All”, or proficient in at least five fashion artisanal disciplines—upholding geographically and organizationally decentralized manufacturing required for the regionalized fashion industry.
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The sensatorium is a 3,500m2 healing clinic for the six senses—taste, touch, sight, smell, sound, and atmosphere—within the historic healthcare city of Geel, BE. Located adjacent to Sint-Dimpnakerk—a fourteenth century Catholic church dedicated to the resident saint of mental illness—the sensatorium consists of five courtyards—two within the existing Gasthuis—a seventeenth century monastic hospice— across the street from four courtyards within the main structure . Containing sixty—twelve representative apostles for each of the five senses—boarding rooms borders are encouraged to interact with the other senses, residents of Geel, and city. The taste courtyard within the Gasthuis—that previously used land for food production— grows the holyberry—a white strawberry that tastes unrecognizable—along with companion plants within the month of October. The public beholds the holy site where the holyberry can be tasted within one for the five taste bud rooms—sweet, sour, salt, unami, and bitter—along with four other produce cultivated to heighten the taste buds within the Blue Banana. Individuals walk through the taste bud enfilade black rooms highlighting the food with palette cleansing rooms in between. Within the second courtyard of the Gasthuis, white liliesthe symbol of the patron Saint Dymna and purity—and its pairing notes are surrounded by four smell therapy rooms—clove, rose, eucalyptus, and lemon—that infuse each of the black enfilade rooms. Across in the main building, the brick simple facade shows no indication of the three crystal shaped courtyards to intensify the emphasis of the senses. Three entrance doorways lead to the courtyards where the public can meander to the other courtyards and healing rooms. The sight court is surrounded by mirrored columns reflecting colorful plants and refracting a perimeter of water. The three sight healing rooms—red light, dim light, and low contrasting colors that blur—are turned on by a switch by the individual. The touch courtyard opens directly to the borders where everyone can walk around the garden of different tactile plants—exaggerated during abscission—and encouraged to interact and touch. The sound courtyard has interior space that separates the access to border rooms from the zen courtyard where individuals listen to the sound of raking and fountain surrounded by sound barrier composite panels to remove the noise of the city and focus within the sensatorium. The sound healing rooms—nature sounds, white noises, fractal sounds, and multi-sonic—are connected to the sight and touch healing rooms by smooth stone space for a moment of silence. At the end of their day, all sixty borders come together for a multi-sensorial meal in the dining room looking out to the sixth sense garden—an extension of Sint-Dimpnakerk’s forest cemetery.
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This contribution envisions a new land-based aquaponic shrimp farm that replaces the practice of traditional fishing, reflecting on the planet extinction of marine species. It is sited next to the existing Borth salt mine located in Rheinberg, North Rhine-Westphali, Germany. ... Read more

This contribution is a wholesale market that reintroduces the face-to-face interaction within the trading process, catalyzing a paradigm shift in the Dutch potato production mode quantitatively and qualitatively. ... Read more