Fragile State(s): Lines, Walls and the Possibility of Interrupting Processes of Privatisation is an exploration into architecture as a practice of negotiation and disruption. Situated in the uncertain context of Brexit, the project is a critique of how architecture, a profession that often claims to mediate and resolve socio-political and economic issues through spatial intervention, is a vehicle that continuously drives marginalisation, embodied state violence and power. Buildings make visible conflict, control and prejudice and in the context of late-capitalism and Brexit, will continue to perform as a means through which income is produced for the wealthy. An architecture that can instead unfix, destabilise, blur lines and edges, as opposed to fix and define, acting at fragile moments uncovered within oppressive socio-political processes, is a relational practice through which collectivity and publicness can be maintained. This concerns an architecture that is not physical (static / fixed), that composes and aestheticises, but that is collectively negotiated, practiced, choreographed, enacted, evolving, adaptable, fragile (dynamic / unfixed). The thesis proposes a fragile network of infrastructural interventions that can facilitate the emergence, transformation and deterioration of social spaces, inhabiting the ongoing changing state of the quay walls of the River Clyde in Glasgow. The fragile state of the quay walls draws a parallel to the uncertain context of the Brexit vote, as a moment in which something else could happen. Emergent inhabitancies that temporarily maintain an illusion of regeneration or certainty, that fluctuate in relation to flows of water and the hydrological cycle, embrace Glasgow’s wet climate: a disruptive force that threatens privatisation. The project investigates a fragile architecture that can exploit destabilising processes as an opportunity to curate edges, choreograph surfaces and inhabit spaces within and from the wall, that in turn deter market speculation. The temporal inhabitance of the wall is a process whereby infrastructure is reactivated and extended, claiming back public land: as long as the city is kept as wet as possible, unstable edges and landscapes allow for processes of privatisation to be subverted.

Informal actors possess a practical knowledge of the city, a sort of ‘secret know-how’, of how to move and operate in an environment that is unwelcoming to them. How could this knowledge be used as a tool or input of urban design? By considering the knowledge and ways of operating of the informal actors in a city, the project incorporates the elements observed in the interaction between informal actors and city infrastructure into the finished, non-prescriptive and multi-functional city interventions. By incorporating that knowledge, the project aims to create spaces of increased number of opportunities and affordances, and as such, to give voice to the informal, marginalized actors in the city, that are often dismissed and excluded.

Cities are becoming places for Instagramable experiences and Disneyfication. People are moving as fast as possible to get from one place to the other. We often forget to really look and be aware of our surroundings. I believe that some parts of the city should be dedicated to a more slower, more enjoyable, experimental way of moving through and being in the city. Within this thesis, the decision is made to intervene in an extremely sensitive and politically charged point in the urban context of Bogota. Not by traditionally transforming it by giving it back its original function, or by simply demolishing it, but by introducing an alternative way of transformation; namely transformation by ruination. This is inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire who says: ​“To prepare for ivy and passing time, a ruin more beautiful than any other.” Ruinating one part of the building creates opportunities for a biotope and gives the importance of time and imagination a place in the city. Besides that, I am also introducing basic and minimal architectonic elements to create a public space which connects the ruin to the river on the site. I have decided to only introduce platforms, plazas, and plateaus. By these 4 interventions, the area becomes an articulator of public and natural resources of the city. By being guided by genuine curiosity and evolved through multiple instances of trial and error, I have created a project that is elegant and provides clarity. Besides that, this project reflects upon the collective nature of architecture (e.g., architects layering their work on top of their predecessors), the acknowledgment of decay and destruction as necessary complements to creation and construction, and the possibility of developing serious, rigorous work with simplicity and happiness. This project is inspired by and operates at the work of Rogelio Salmona. The inspiration and underlaying guiding theme can be perfectly explained by an excerpt of a speech he gave at the Alvaro Alto Award: "…between the “elephant” and the “butterfly”; between the permanent and the ephemeral, there is a relationship that we cannot ignore, for it would mean sacrificing the enormous importance of diversity. .... The issue is to constantly extract, as Baudelaire used to say, the eternal from the transitory. There it is."

An archive is everything but definitive. It is the nature of every living collection and such a collection is a city as well. The project is an archive holding a collection of lost, disappeared or forgotten in the former centre of the textile industry in Brno. It is composed of physical urban artefacts discovered through a series of interventions. These proposed interventions will serve as a model in the area of the city burdened with a disturbing past and expecting blurred future. The graduation project is trying to embrace a wider social context by looking at the complexity of the environment and trying to capture the everyday practices that form the place. By looking at mundane and marginalized, the project elaborates inclusiveness that is present at current architectural discourse.