A two week studio exersise. The aim was to rethink what a suburban retail store could be. The idea is rather simple: The store is 'pushed' partly underground, the parking is coming above the store, and in the back side are housing units, divided from the retail with a 'garden' lower than the level of the street. At the same time several smaller 'gardens' are dispersed inside the parking area (always at a lower lever) along with vertical translucent surfaces dividing the parking spaces.
The aim was to 'create' different ways in which you can perceive the same object as you move on the street, in the parking lot and inside the store (the object being the trees, the cars, the store itself). Infuenced in a way by Deleuze's description of the point of view as what is taking the place of the missing center...
In this project the 'point of view' is becoming literal. As a general idea though is much more interesting, since it implies that the importance is displaced from the object to relations between objects. Like in the example of the conic sections where what is of importance is not the cone or the plane but the relations established between the cone and the plane.
This is a project, already quite old, that we presented at the 2005 UIA conference in Istanbul. It looks like it took some time but finally they published a selection from the presentations, including ours, under the title "Folding the Suburbs". I hope that it still makes some sense after five years... It was written and presented in collaboration with Vana Tentokali, Katerina Tryfonidou & Magdalena Pantazi.
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