Offshore Architects (NL) Peter Trummer (1964), Hannes Pfau, Astrid Piber, Penelope Dean (1969)
A student of Günther Domenig at the T.U. in Graz and Bart Lootsma at the Berlage Institute, and a former associate of UN Studio, the Austrian architect Peter Trummer now divides his time between Graz and Amsterdam. As co-founder of Offshore Architects in 2001 with Hannes Pfau and Astrid Piber, he also finds time to pursue his own theoretical research projects. With the Australian Penelope Dean he has been developing Time Sharing Urbanism since 1998, a social ecology research programme focusing on the urban and territorial consequences of telecommunications systems and infrastructures. Through a hundred or so graphic works, they show how the Australian outback, covering more than 2,700,000 sq.mi./7,000,000 sq.km. with a density of 0.07/0.02 inhabitants per sq.mi./km respectively, can be likened, in the way it functions, to a large city, and its inhabitants to a networked society. Based on the model of the Royal Flying Doctors Service (a medical grid based on the range of a radio transmitter, the range of a light aircraft, etc.), they suggest the topology of this new urban territory which is neither city nor region, but imbued with a complex network, where interactions have no need of any unity of place, and occur within the unity of a "shared time".