Seeking SuperCollective Living

Market in tradition, whether as system or place, has played a significant role in urban formation and growth. The main streets, village centers, marketplaces and housing communities have served as anchors and agents generating specific a culture and identity for our built environment. Recent global phenomenon of the market, however, is heavily influenced by the virtual and remote mechanism of commercial transaction, forcing urban production out of the inner city, and thus changing our neighborhoods and the way we produce and consume our everyday goods. Much of the commerce and form of social exchange has shifted to online space while our retail centers, public domain, and main streets are becoming vacant and losing their vitality. With consumption and production relying more on online commerce, credit cards, social media, mobile phones and information technology, the traditional conception of our physical territories and domesticity must be reconsidered. How can architecture confront these issues and potentiate its role towards a condition of new collective engagement? The studio seeks architectural possibilities that can 'supersede' the way we conceive our traditional boundaries of domesticity and urban forms, and explores new forms of architectural conditions in response to emerging forms of exchange and the network of the market.