The shortest way is not a straight line in three dimensions.
A virtual replica, a simulated reality.
A variant of the fable.

The canals in Amsterdam froze in (incl. Elfstedentocht): 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1897, 1900, 1901, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1912 ,1915, 1917, 1920, 1925, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1933, 1938, 1939 , 1940, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1950, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1971, 1978, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1997, 2009, 2012, 2018.

Next time the canals will freeze, the urban furniture of Amsterdam will adapt to include a railing so you can safely enjoy the frozen surface.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the Dutch government decided to introduce Electric Shepherds in order to minimize contact between humans and farm animals. Drones have replaced all farmers, breeders and shepherds. This has lead to better hygiene standards and considerably less contagion risks. Even traditional small scale farming has turned into fully automated animal production.

The world is big and small, known and unknown, past and future, all at the same time. Balkh is in Italy and Rome on the Hindukush.
Nothing stays forever but change always will.

Make money and reinstate your faith in humankind – at the same time.
All you need is optimism and a city.

What should I do? These eyes bother me. I cannot play. I even cannot walk straight. I am desperate because I have no money. No one can go out after 9pm because the thieves will steal anything you have on you. If you don’t give them what they want, they will hurt you. I love my children. But society humiliated us for them being different. I started smoking today. Maybe I will take drugs tomorrow so I do not feel hungry, so I do not feel that time has stopped, so that I can be far from this. I am bothering girls to feel strong, make them feel weak. See, I am actually like you. I am thirteen years old. I am a young girl. Do they miss us?

Tactile substitutes and fleshy simulations.
An unacquaintable quest for physical contact and geographical proximity online.

Sugar is usually called on as “hazardous”, “bomb of calories”, etc. – but it is also a vehicle for socialisation and education in taste. Challenging the values of gastronomy and food heritage, Marshmallow Shawarma imagines alternative possibilities re-signifying the consumption of sugar.

Take control over your water.
To have control over your resources is not only a matter of possession.
It is a matter of an attitude towards life.

Fighting for an ecological understanding of our environment, we argue that water is more than what you think it is. No ecology can exist without perceiving a resource, both as a matter and a holy gift. Water is a shared good, the city’s blood, a space activator, a public denominator and should never be privatized. Our lives should revolve around it. Think how drinking a glass of water connects you with the intimacy of a flowing river. Is life really much more than this?

We design and build tools to steal water, stock it and share it. We turn infrastructures into superstructures that will help you to master your environment as much as it is mastering you.

There is a stack of pale pinky-yellow bricks in the attic, 300 years old they say, a dividing wall dismantled and carefully placed one by one into a dusty corner in the eaves of the roof, nestled together into a square column piled waist high. I think of holding them in my hands, their rough dusty surfaces crumbling under the soft touch of my fingers, their weight in my palm, their half faces fitting between my fingers and thumb. I think of the room they housed, the home, which from 1768 became solely for Portuguese-Jewish widows. I think of what they have witnessed; the strength, care, struggles of womanhood in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter. The silent, democratic, repetitive units of burnt clay. Still porous, their permeable bodies holding the memory of their making, from river clay to kiln, passing through the hands of the makers to the masons, absorbing into their material memory the stories of the women they embraced.

While the city of today turns into a computer, gathering and processing data of its citizens from public squares to private shopping malls, the interfaces the city offers for human-machine interaction have almost become invisible or almost non-physical where an active interaction is still needed. Today, futuristic architecture offers us the vision of a ‘hands free future’ where infrastructure move to our command or wave. But the more our voices and airy gestures take over the roles of intermediaries between us and the architecture around us, the more we loose touch – quite literally – with our surroundings.

Urban Alchemy imagines a completely new system of mining, departing from current ways of production. It shifts our focus from natural resources to man-made things such as urban architecture and landscapes, extracting resources from the redundancy of human activities and using them to produce new objects. Urban Alchemy tries to find the philosopher’s stone of the anthropological world by using the contemporary city as a field of experimentation.