>The POOR BOYs ENTERPRISE (AUT)

Marie Therese Harnancourt (1967), Florian Haydn (1967), Ernst J. Fuchs (1963)

Since 1994, the Vienna-based Poor Boy's Enterprise has already built and converted several buildings in Austria, including the "Zirl House" in 1997. This house originates from an open infrastructure, and a non-functionalist compositional process. The maquettes for this project (blocks within blocks, in which the site surface has been extruded) deny any anticipated image of architecture. From these abstract maquettes, for example, a volume of shadows will be taken, which are the shadows projected by the houses roundabout. The architect comes across as the "conscious organizer" (J.L. Godard) of the formative process. They have devised a non-centralized system in which all the individuals are interchangeable, and defined solely by the situation at a given moment. Architecture is an open arena of possibilities, originating in the articulation of fragments, like generative elements of thought.

>Mathias KLOTZ (CHILE)(1965)

Mathias Klotz graduated in 1991 from the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, and has already chalked up an impressive body of work, including, in particular, some twenty private houses, apartments, shops and small facilities. At the same time, he teaches in the architectural workshop at Federico Santa Maria University in Valparaiso, and the Santiago Central University. His architecture is informed by the many different local activities of avant-garde groups, ranging from Enrique Gebhard to Emilio Duhart, and from Juan Borchers to the experiments of the Valparaiso School. His soft spot for simple geometry, and straightforward proportions and figures that are easy to read points to a predominance of the volume and the monolithic box as project referents. Through a "modernist" rhetoric of the stilt and the cantilever, Mathias Klotz's architecture juggles with the imposition of this abstract box on the site's topography. In order to construct a volume, he invariably makes use of wood--his favourite material--and metal and stone, but without any sophisticated effects; always with the simplicity and "brutalism" of an application fuelled by vernacular practices.

>Vicente GUALLART (SP) (1963)

Architecture has no more forms; it is a dynamic process, a co-nature, and nature itself is the image of architecture. Between digital nature and artificial ecology there is an operational place: architecture. In "La Ville aux mille géographies" [The City with a Thousand Geographies], Guallart takes territorial samples which are as much fractal extrusions as they are bits of landscapes. In the project for a prototype dwelling for a digital person ("Scape House", 1997, with Willy Müller and Enric Ruiz, "36 modèles pour une maison" [36 Models for a House] by Périphériques), the house is a reactive skin and fashions its own use through its transferable spaces. Architecture must be forever mutating in real time: trees may be man-made (using photovoltaic fibres), and mountains can act as dwellings. Making use of various forms of fractal geometry, Guallart explores the city like an interconnecting network, with impacts that are local and global alike. It must be permeated by a new functionality: each person who enters the urban space must be able to alter it; the street may be farmland, punctuated by telecentres, etc. The city is this media-related cross between the natural and the digital.

>ACTAR Arquitectura (SP) Manuel Gausa (1959), Oleguer Gelpi (1964), Ignasi Pérez Arnal (1965), Florence Raveau (1965), Marc Aureli Santos (1960)

For ACTAR, architecture is a plural space. Its field of action is that of the new relational mechanisms that are springing up between society, territory, and city, reacting to both global and local demands. ACTAR is developing an "extroverted" architecture which is more expressive and relational, and capable of creating "links" between the diversity of things. ACTAR is also developing dwelling--habitat--projects ("M'House", Nantes, 1997-2000) with multipurpose areas and combinational modules. These minimal habitats are "à la carte", insomuch as their users can alter the colour and texture of the façades at will, and inform the space by using prefabricated fitted walls--the only hard components in a fluid space. ACTAR is making a cross-section in the territory understood as cartography, and opening it up to a multi-hubbed reality. Their "lands-in-land" urban schemes, for Barcelona and Graz-Maribor, among others, laminate space in many semantic layers, in which city and nature overlap. As a conveyor of hybridization between interior and exterior, and nature and city, architecture is presented as an artificial geography.

>Marcos NOVAK (USA)

Marcos Novak is an architect, theoretician, web artist and composer, who defines himself as a "transarchitect". While reformulating his role in relation to current technological changes under way, he is keen to open architecture up to all kinds of fields, be they real or virtual. As an acknowledged theoretician of "liquid architecture", he has been carrying out research since the early 1990s on the reciprocal forms of involvement between architecture and cyberspace, as a space-time field in its own right. His projects explore the tectonics peculiar to electronic worlds and, by way of mathematical tools (matrices, algorithms...) and computer tools, come up with new processes for creating shapes and forms. This "virtual", dematerialized architecture which, in Novak's view, has reached an advanced degree of evolution and independence, is in turn capable of radically altering the physical universe, and generating the possibility of an extended space-time which links matter and information, in an on-going real and virtual continuum.

>KOLATAN/Mac DONALD Studio (USA) Sulan Kolatan, William J. MAC DONALD

Sulan Kolatan and William J. MacDonald are both graduates of Columbia University, New York, where they have been teaching architecture for some ten years. Their design process is organized around a flexible, inventive, computer-assisted method: "co-citation mapping". Project features (formal, spatial, programmatic...) are converted into computerized data, then undergo a classification, and a systematic combinatory system. This process helps to bring out conceptual links between different categories, and build a sort of topology and tabular cartography which shows up possible associations, dissociations, continuities and hybridizations between features. Whatever the scale--from furniture to city structures--Kolatan & MacDonald use this active, matricial classification in their architecture to produce every manner of latent combination contained within a situation, and give form to what they call "chimerical hybrids", a reference to the mythical half-lion, half-dragon monster.

>NAGA Studio (USA) Tarek NAGA (1953)

Tarek Naga is the director of Naga Studio Architecture. Based for the most part in Los Angeles, his work is divided between the Middle East and the United States. At the present time, he is working on the rebuilding and extension of the Marina del Rey international hotel in California, and the Sharm Desert Safari Gate, an amenity linked with the exploration of the Sinai Desert. Since the early 1990s, many of Tarek Naga's projects, be they private residences, public facilities or private installations, convey a sensitive and complex architecture, combining instability and precision, force and confusion. With a tangle of planes and exfoliated strips, borne along by the overall movement of the project, the forms invariably seem at once emergent and convergent, explosive and implosive. Tarek Naga's architecture resists being pigeonholed, just as it resists being dictated to by any kind of external order. Rather, it is intended as something open and available to all its varied forms of potential, be they topological or architectonic, symbolic or metaphorical.

>JONES, Partners (USA) Wes JONES (1958)

Wes Jones is one of the leading figures behind "architecture machine", that movement which, in the 1980s, found its specific aesthetic terrain in the world of industry and technology, and the ultimate architectural form in the machine. After spending six years working in association with Holt, Hinshaw & Pfau, where he was responsible for the Kennedy Space Center Astronauts' Memorial, he set up his own agency in 1993, Jones Partners Architecture. Based in San Francisco, Wes Jones's major works include the chiller plant at UCLA (1994). In asserting the technological origins of architecture, from a technical, symbolic, metaphorical and critical viewpoint, he revisits the western industrial aesthetic, within what he calls "boss architecture", an "interventive upgrading process", in which "the expressiveness of intervention is as important as its effectiveness".

>X Kavya (USA) Karl S.CHU (1950)

Karl S. Chu has set up his X Kavya Studio agency in Los Angeles. He is also involved in the theory and teaching of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SciArc). By regarding architecture as the structural expression of information systems, it is Karl S. Chu's intent to rethink the actual field of the architectural discipline. By way of a line of thinking that is at once philosophical, mathematical, geometric and even metaphysical, about the concept of "space", he ponders the "nature" of virtual territories. Ultimate mechanical universe, metaphysical combination of figures and data, or simply a placeless extension of our contemporary reality, the world that is opened up to us by the computer interacts in any event with ourselves. According to Karl S. Chu, architecture is one of the means of working out a real "ecology" of our relationship with this artificial, virtual, or hyper-real environment.

>Michael SORKIN Studio (USA) Michael Sorjin (1948)

Michael Sorkin is a leading light in New York's architectural landscape. Famous for his critical contributions to The Village Voice, he is the author of two theoretical reference works, "Exquisite Corpse" and "Variation on a Theme Park". In his studio he also designs many architectural and urban projects. They are all invariably polemical and iconoclastic, and each one denounces the static, mineral, inert character of architecture. The Godzilla Tower in Tokyo (1990-92), the Hanseatic Skyscrapers in Hamburg (1989), the Animal Houses in Jamaica (1989-91) and the Turtle Portable Puppet Theatre (1995) all explore the theme of zoomorphism and the analogy with the body. Using a vitalist aesthetics, his urban works for Bucharest 2020 (1996), Berlin Spreebogen (1991) and the Beirut souks (1994) likewise reveal a permanent reference to biological forms: cell tissue, circulatory systems. Rather than built forms, Sorkin invariably prefers the organic logic of traffic, flows, and movement, the vital medium around which architecture coils and unfolds.

>Stan ALLEN (USA)

New York-based Stan Allen is a graduate of the Cooper Union Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, where he was a student of Bernard Tschumi and John Hejduk, and Princeton University. As a historian, architectural theoretician and critic, who keeps a close and enlightened eye on contemporary architectural work, he divides his activities between writing, teaching--mainly at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture--and practical work. His architecture strives to go beyond residual discussions and categories (modern/postmodern, form/function...), and offers a radical challenge to the reifying tendency of modern architecture and its systematic cult of the object. Stan Allen is keen to contrast present-day issues with strategies rather then forms. Lying somewhere between choreography and spatial phenomenology, his work, which uses maps, diagrams, and plans, analyses all the crucial "in-formal" factors of architecture: topological distribution and organization, and logical systems involving flows, fields, movements and pyscho-geography.

>Archi-tectonics (USA) Winka Dubbeldam (1960)

Winka Dubbeldam was born in the Netherlands and is a graduate of the Rotterdam Faculty of Art and Architecture. She rounded off her architectural studies at Columbia University, and then opened her own agency, Archi-tectonics, in Manhattan. It is her view that, in the face of all the contemporary cultural changes going on, the architect must abandon his/her traditional status and specific categories, associated with a craft-like praxis, and focus on basic disciplines like philosophy, mathematics and physics, in order to regain a foothold in ever-accelerating systems of knowledge and production. Winka Dubbeldam's architecture is thus organized around major paradigms, the most conspicuous apparently being topology. As a science encompassing all the non-dimensional and non-geometric properties of spatial figures, topology is actually a way of thinking in a continuous and undivided way about the disparate conditions, programmes and spaces with which the contemporary architect has to deal.

>PETETIN & GREGOIRE (FR) Claire PETETIN (1963) Philippe GRéGOIRE (1963)

After spending the ten year period from 1987 to 1997 working for big names (Nouvel, Perrault, Piano and Decq & Cornette), Claire Petetin and Philippe Gregoire set up their own agency in Paris. Their work, which combines competitions, building work, experimental projects, on-line website set-ups, and videos, explores the various new avenues opening up to architects from one day to the next. A "Situationist" interest in areas of crisis and rupture, and in spaces and places that are problematic, hybrid, or merely overlooked by the contemporary metropolis, recurs in all their projects. In 1998, as part of a Villa Kujoyama grant, they worked on transitory dwellings for "victim nomads" after the Kobe earthquake (1995), and, as a result of new communications technologies, they came up with a "virtual rehabilitation" of the destroyed social bond. In 1996, as part of the "envers des villes" ["Towards cities"] grant, they designed a project around a group of Berlin nomads, the "Rollheimers", for whom they produced a "portable home" prototype.

>Frédéric BOREL (FR) (1959)

Since the late 1980s, Frédéric Borel has been developing a living, reactive form of architecture. By way of an aesthetics of assemblage and composition that is steeped in autonomous components, his unfailingly spectacular works offer the city as many events as they do buildings. Borel replaces the idea of the identity and unity of the building, where each part is only valid in relation to the whole, with the idea of an open balance, where overall and independent volumes conduct a dialogue in the manner of a scaled-down city. In Paris, his apartment blocks on Rue Oberkampf, the Boulevard de Belleville and Rue Pelleport stake out and punctuate the urban fabric around them, while at the same time subverting it from within. For Frédéric Borel's architecture is above all "patent" and "obvious"--it expresses a resistance to uniformity and the conventional order of things. His invariably unusual works contrast with the work of people advocating a commonplace, "qualityless" architecture, that obeys urbanness as the rule.

>Jean-Marc IBOS (1957) (FR) & Myrto VITARD (1955)

It was in 1989 that Jean-Marc Ibos and Myrto Vitard set up their agency in Paris, after a lengthy association with Jean Nouvel. They worked in particular on some of this latter's landmark projects, such as the Nemausus residential complex (1987), the "endless tower" (1989) and the Tours Conference Centre (1993). Ibos & Vitard's architecture has retained a certain radicalness from that experience. Starting from a very subtle data analysis (site, programme, restrictions...), the manner in which their projects are formulated passes by way of a conceptualization phase, during which the endlessly recreated "rule" of each one of their architectures is laid down. In 1991, their works were shown at the French Architectural Institute as part of the exhibition "40 Architects Under 40", which strove to put a generation that was emerging in the early 1990s on the map. They won recognition in 1997 with the completion of the renovation of Lille's Palais des Beaux-Arts, for which they received the "silver set square" award.

>Rudy RICCIOTTI (FR) (1952)

After studying engineering at Geneva (ETSG) and architecture at Marseilles, Rudy Ricciotti set up his own agency in this latter city in the early 1980s. For a decade or so, he produced hedonistic architecture, focusing on the intensity and pleasure of form and space in a kind of spirit of radical euphoria. In the early 1990s, and more specifically for the Vitrolles Stadium project (1994), his work took on a more critical, not to say negative dimension. The Stadium--a sort of suburban bunker made of black concrete--powerfully forces its aesthetics on its surroundings: monolithic aesthetics, based on an opaque and isolated mineral block. As a contemporary art lover and collector, Rudy Ricciotti then explored more conceptual avenues. In his recent projects, inspired by Arte Povera, he has been developing an aesthetic involving poorness, low-tech, harshly minimalist assemblies, and details. In its on-going quest for intensity and raw expressiveness, his architecture, which he describes as "impure", stems from a tension between optimism and negativity.

>Périphériques (FR) Louis PAILLARD (1960) & Anne-Françoise JUMEAU (1962),Emmanuelle MARIN-TROTTIN (1967), David TROTTIN (1965)

The "Périphériques" Association was set up in Paris, in 1995, by three pairs of architects, Anne-Françoise Jumeau and Louis Paillard, Emanuelle Marin-Trottin and David Trottin, and Dominique Jacob and Brendan MacFarlane. "Périphériques", whose primary aim is to promote young architecture, and create critical linkages within a fragmented, individualized generation that has been affected by the recession, operates as a kind of condenser. In its name, Paillard & Jumeau and Marin-Trottin & Trottin are presenting many events (meetings, lectures...), exhibitions ("concours perdus" [lost competitions], 1996, "36 modèles pour une maison" [36 Models for a House], 1997), publications (IN-EX architectural magazine, launched in October 1999...) and joint architectural projects (competition at the Musée des Arts Premiers, 1999, Café-Musiques at Savigny le Temple, delivered in 1999...). Through their at once critical and experimental architecture, this architectural collective attempts to deal with the issue of the very role of the architect. As authors and go-betweens alike, they lay claim to the status of "producers of architecture" - a reference to the film world.

>Didier Fuiza FAUSTINO (FR-PORT) (1968)

A 1995 graduate of the Paris-Villemin School of Architecture, Didier Faustino splits his many different activities between Lisbon and Paris. His work encompasses several experimental areas: architecture, visual arts (video, performance etc.), writing, and exhibitions. A joint founder member of the LAPS (Architecture, performance and sabotage laboratory, 1996) and of the Fauteuil vert/Green Armchair workshop (1997), he has also been editing NumeroMagazine, the Portuguese review of aesthetics, since 1998. His architectural and artistic projects are above all focused on the issue of space as a physical and bodily experience. In his book, our age of technological comfort, over-information, and cultural homogenization is causing people to lose their sense of reality. To counter this ambient lethargy, Didier Faustino conceives of architecture as "a tool for exacerbating our senses and sharpening our awareness of reality", as a means of intensifying situations in all their various dimensions (physical, cultural, urban, and political).

>FAT (GB) Sean Griffiths (1966), Charles Holland (1969), Emma Davis (1968), Sam Jacob (1970)

Fat is a collective of London architects and artists. Based on a critical line of thinking about the representations, ideologies and iconography of architecture, Fat aims at questioning its current limits and meaning as well as its problematic relationship with the contemporary city. Like Archigram and the Situationists in their day, Fat mingles popular culture (advertising, Disneyland...) and high culture (Dadaism, philosophy...), and produces many kinds of projects and activities, in a style that is half-ironical and half-provocative. Their "An i-oedipal House", a suburban home which frees the children from the repressive eye of their parents, the memorial bridge for Princess Diana, a linear garden suspended above the river Thames, and the transformation of Marxham Street into a park. Fat's work speaks out against the legitimacy of the auteur, the cult of authenticity, and the might of the powers-that-be, and advocates architecture being open to other cultural arenas.

>O.C.E.A.N. UK (GB) Michael Hensel, Tom Verebes

O.C.E.A.N. is an international, trans-disciplinary network which includes practitioners and theorists alike, and focuses on competitions, experimental town- and city-planning, architectural and design projects, art installations and university works. O.C.E.A.N. was established in London in 1995 by some former Architectural Association students, and is now split into six branches located in London, Helsinki, Oslo, Ljubljana, Cologne and Boston. O.C.E.A.N. UK, the network's London branch, was set up by Michael Hensel and Tom Verebes. Whether their projects involve installations (urban surface installation, Helsinki, 1997), buildings (Constantini MoMA, Buenos Aires, 1997), or neighbourhoods (Bucharest 2000, 1996), they all show an abiding interest in present-day urban issues, globalization phenomena, metropolitization, instability, and dispersal... They also explore alternative processes and strategies, injecting a dose of openness, randomness and flexibility into form, and combining therein the immaterial input of new technologies.

>IaN+ (IT) Luca GALOFARO (1965)

After various joint projects with major agencies in Europe and the United States (Fuksas, Eisenman...), architects Carmelo Baglivo and Luca Galofaro and engineer Stefania Manna set up the IaN+ studio in 1997. This multi-disciplinary agency is aimed at being a place where the theory and practice of architecture overlap and meet. IaN+'s areas of activity are conducted on various scales--interior architecture, institutional projects, and urban and territorial projects. In each instance, through architecture, their projects explicitly question the contemporary urban condition. Construction and building, seen as an open and variable arena, must usher in a permanently repeated encounter between subject and programme. IaN+'s architecture is thus conceived as a method endowed with independence, like a perpetual updating of a programmatic and topological diagram. In tandem with their design production, the IaN+ architects are also involved in the teaching, publication and exhibition of architecture. In 1998, in particular, they planned the exhibition "Architetture Americane@ the edge of the millennium".

>Ushida & Findlay (JP) Kathryn Findlay (1953), Eisaku Ushida (1954)

Based in Tokyo, Ushida Findlay Partnership was founded in 1987 by the Japanese architect Eisaku Ushida, a graduate of Tokyo University (1976), and the Scottish architect Kathryn Findlay, who was involved with the Architectural Association (1979), both former associates of Arata Isozaki (between 1976 and 1982). Their architecture lies at the crossroads of a Bachelard-like conception of space, which explores its symbolic, psychoanalytical and even "psycho-geographical" components, and purely scientific and geometric research into form. For Ushida and Findlay, this diversion by way of the basic sciences, and more specifically by way of the geometry of chaos and non-linear mathematics, is a way of introducing a real autonomy of the architectural object--form becomes its sole self-reference. Through an architecture which may call to mind Antoni Gaudi's formal explorations, Bruce Goff's organic spaces, and André Bloc's cabin-sculptures, their diversion also helps them to offer a possible synthesis between the subjective desire to free up form, and the requirement to give it a subjective basis, and, by the same token, a synthesis between the often contrasted arenas of topology and geometry.

>Kengo KUMA (JP) (1954)

Kengo Kuma sidesteps both neo-modernism and postmodernism, abstraction and minimalism, on the one hand, and the "linguistic" dimension, on the other, and explores a more critical architectural avenue. His work, which is radical not to say negative, denounces among other things object architecture, the tyranny of perspective and academicism in all its different guises. He has often expressed a desire "to erase architecture", and make it vanish. The building M2 (1989-91) was an ironical attempt to dissolve architecture in its own chaos. More recently, with the Kiro-san observatory (1994), embedded in the mountain, the construction is dealt with like an interruption, and architecture is extended over the entire site. The seen/seeing dialectic is intentionally reversed here, as it is in many another project. For Kengo Kuma, digital technologies are just another way of de-territorializing architecture. He explored them in particular for his recent landscape projects, liquid combinations of computerized surfaces and textures--kinds of architecture-less architectures.

>Shuhei ENDO (JP) (1960)

Shuhei Endo, a 1986 graduate of the Kyoto Art School, set up his own agency in 1988. Like Greg Lynn, Kovac & Malone, and Ushida and Findlay, he is part of that generation of architects which, in the early 1990s, explored a "third way" between neo-modernity and de-constructivism--the ideal of "Folding Architecture" as theorized in the March 1993 issue of "Architectural Design" is one of the keys to Endo's work. Through the folds and twists of its surfaces, and through the delineation of its lines, this smooth and continuous architecture is freed from the orthogonal restrictions of Euclidean space, and opened up to a "soft" conception of complexity. For Endo, the "fold" also offers a chance to shed tectonics, and experiment with lighter and more flexible constructive methods: corrugated iron, for example, at once cladding and structure, roofing and wall, has been given its full meaning in this architecture of synthesis and incorporation.

>SNOHETTA (NOR) Graig Dykers (1961), Christoph Kapeller (1956), Kjetil Thorsen (1958)

Since the mid-1980s, the Oslo-based Snohetta group has encompassed within one and the same organization architects, landscape artists, and designers. As the author of the future Alexandria library, and runner-up in the Kansai-Kan library competition, this team has already chalked up many public and cultural buildings to its credit. At the crossroads of diverse architectural territories, Snohetta does not actually subscribe to any single object-producing logic, but is rather part of a broader research programme dealing with the meaning, coherence and readability of our contemporary environments. They keep a very close eye on the territorial and urban conditions of architecture, and extend into the details and design of furniture their questioning of the role of mystery and necessity, the visible and the invisible, in architectural form. The Snohetta architects are concerned with the continuity and unity of design; they have also developed computer tools and processes helping, for example, to put all the data for a given project into global "hyper-files".

>NL Architects (NL) Peter Bannenberg, Walter van Dijk, Kamil Klasse, Mark Linneman

NL Architects is unquestionably the Dutch firm which is the most resolutely involved in urban work. Territory is invariably seen as an interface liable to swift changes and reconfigurations. Pixel City (1997) juggles with programmes as if they were themes that can be organized and shifted about. Territory has to get rid of restrictions, and do away with specific properties in order to admit, on an on-going basis, a reshaping that gives it a new form. A carpark (Park House, 1996) turns into an extension of the road, creating a volume and a continual ramp. The urban grid can be twisted into a fold, as revealed in the title Return to the Fold (1997), where the various functions of a programme, workshop, studio, exhibition rooms, and/or gardens close in a loop and form a protected space. Architecture is truly interactive, updating new uses which go beyond the traditional concept of the urban space.

>West 8 landscape architects and urban planners (NL) Adriaan Geuze (1960)

West 8 was set up in Rotterdam in 1987, headed by Adriaan Geuze. The practice it embraces does away with the boundaries between architecture, design, city-planning and landscape architecture. Their multidisciplinary approach strives to answer the complex and often paradoxical questions raised today by city planning. Their philosophy is rooted in an optimistic attitude towards the contemporary landscape, which, for them, expresses both the vulnerability and the euphoria of mass culture. Nature, landscape, infrastructure and archaeology are the ingredients of a contemporary, man-made landscape in which they play a part at differing levels, from the level of the object to the level of urban planning and architecture. Their programmes retain a conspicuous share of indeterminacy, intended to help towards their "colonization" by the citizenry. West 8 develops its own narrative spaces within the urban space-- spaces which incorporate ecology, climatic conditions and infrastructure. Their aim is to achieve an awareness of the heterogeneous, component parts of the cityscape, by enabling the inhabitants to win and, themselves, take possession of the urban space. Engineering here links up with poetry by way of a hybrid process of reflection about the landscape and its many, fluctuating identities.

>MAX.1 (NL) Rients Dijkstra (1961)

MAX.1, which was set up by Rients Dijkstra and Rianne Makkink in Rotterdam in 1994, is developing a broad sphere of activity: furniture, interior arrangements, bridges, buildings, and large scale city infrastructure and planning. They are currently at work on the construction of 30,000 homes near Utrecht, due for completion in 2005, as part of a huge city plan. In conjunction with Crimson, an agency of architectural historians and critics, they are basing their work on the "orgware" [Organization Ware) concept, a term borrowed from the economic strategies that they apply to the many different dimensions of city planning, lying somewhere between the implementation of ideas (software) and the adoption of physical elements (hardware). "Orgware" represents a conceptual landscape underpinning their praxis which, far from any avant-garde dispensing with the global market dimension, on the contrary incorporates these restrictions as an area of new possibilities, just as, on the very smallest scale of urban design, they incorporate user appropriation of territory. They are currently also building a series of some thirty bridges, presented as an extension of the road system. These bridges are joined together and separated in relation to traffic; their sides are curved, creating empty spaces which punctuate their arrangement. Architectural form, here, is never predefined, but rather comes across like an interactive field of data (conceptual, physical, etc), which will determine its specificity and its visuality.

>Schie 2.0 (NL) Jan Konings (1966), Ton Matton (1964), Lucas Verweij (1965)

Rotterdam-based Schie 2.0 develops an interdisciplinary praxis oriented towards the public place, and issues to do with city and environmental planning, exploring new forms of urban typology. In this spirit, they designed an "Autarkic House" (1998/99), operating on ecological principles, to be built at the same time as its farmland is created. Their approach also explores the cartographic dimension of territory (Randstadt, 1995/6), stressing networks which connect cities, and emphasizing the movements of territories. As part of "Nederland 2030", the Dutch government asked Schie 2.0 to come up with innovative urban strategies for the Netherlands in 2030 (Schie Power 2030). Their thinking is thus focused on the concept of the global city, involving an investigation of urban flow phenomena, like traffic jams, in order to develop, by way of an example, leisure activities that are associated with transport systems. Schie 2.0 is also proposing new environmental solutions, among others, for problems of urban design and territorial infrastructure.

>Sadar in Vuga (SLO) Bostjan Vuga (1966)

Jurij Sadar and Bostjan Vuga, Slovenian engineer-architects and graduates of Ljubljana University, have been working together since 1992. After studying for one year at the Architectural Association, they set up their agency together in the second, in 1996. The thrust of their architecture is, above all else, determinedly open--open to all lines of thinking which have to do with building and built structures (engineering, economics, landscape design, graphic design...), to all kinds of parallel influence (art, fashion, new media, technology...) and likewise to the European architectural setting. Sadar and Vuga are active members of the O.C.E.A.N.net collective, an international network of young architects and designers hailing from the A.A. Their projects, like the extension to the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce (a prize-winning project), the rebuilding and extension of the National Gallery in Ljubljana, and the Ljubljana University University sports centre and grounds (also a prize-winning project) illustrate a desire, in each instance, to renew and requestion the conceptual process and shun conventional solutions.