Winter Garden City: Õismäe Collective Space

Physiologically humans are essentially tropical mammals, in their naked selves physically ill-equipped for withstanding the frigid climates modern man inhabits. Thus, the relationship between our body and the world is necessarily mediated through the technologies of clothing and shelter. Zoos for animals and greenhouses for plant life replicate the exact same process as the construction of houses and cities does for humanity: a simulation of the climate the organisms inside are adapted to and able to thrive in.

Neither consumption nor being social requires the homeostatically taxing act of leaving the comfort of one’s home; neither does going to work, because, either there isn’t work (and we haven’t even witnessed the full effects of automatization and its corollary technological unemployment yet), or there is no physical office or factory to go to anymore.

By encapsulating unused and underdeveloped parts of cities in light greenhouse-like structures, we can part by part reclaim the street from the indifferent violence of weather into a public, climatized realm. Eventually: vast interior agoras; malls with nothing to buy, with no other purpose than providing a hospitable climate to human endeavor; a co-working space for entreflâneurs at the scale of a gigafactory; an unconditional conditioned space; a non-assuming standard greenhouse structure for a poorer one; the city after the internet happened.