Jakob + MacFarlane Architects, Euronews Television Headquarters, 2015. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

For this biennale exhibition, Jakob+MacFarlane presents three projects that were born out of sites within ‘the abandoned city’ – undeveloped, forgotten, post-industrial urban areas that have become the subject of, and an example for, the challenge of tackling urban regeneration projects in today’s cities.
Landmark projects such as the Docks of Paris, the Orange Cube, and the Green Cube in Lyon have each found ways to bridge the past with the future by rehabilitating existing urban structures, creating a new language of architecture generated from these past traces and the demands for innovative urban spaces. These projects act as urban signals that engage and expose the public to the importance of urban regeneration and the re-use of our cities’ existing fabric over time.
Jakob+MacFarlane uses parametric technology and research as a tool to integrate new and sustainable materials, forms and construction methods in their work. With the three projects presented here, Jakob + MacFarlane has collaborated with some of the world’s most innovative engineers in structure, building systems, and sustainable design to create projects that are both innovative and sensitive to the environment and its users.
Jakob+MacFarlane’s work explores digital technology both as a conceptual consideration and as a means of fabrication to create a more flexible, responsive, and immediate environment. Urban connections, thresholds between the interior and exterior, the façade as an interface between architecture and the city – these themes are explored at every scale of their work.
Their projects focus on the physical context, which triggers a set of conceptual and technical processes that informs Jakob+MacFarlane’s way of seeing and experimenting.