BUILDINGS AND THEIR TERRITORIES

While cities are shaped by political, financial and cultural concepts, people occupy, experience and reimagine them according to very different ideas. Some of these ideas are personal and inaccessible, but those which lie in the broad social and cultural agreements of a society can form the basis of communicative architecture. We find them evident in buildings that exist and in the imprint on them of use, alteration and interpretation by mass media such as newspapers, film and other types of fiction. It is with the inventive use of these things that we work as a practice, using the rough forms of empathy that are the basis of human relations and understanding. So we are not so much ‘Reclaiming the city and redefining architecture’, as working with the ways that cities are constantly and persistently being reclaimed by their citizens.