State of Exception

This project seeks to explore the relationship between architecture and the code which governs its execution. Here, the building code’s origins and definitions are the battleground, asking where architecture is to be found between the rules of the code and the desires for an object. It is at the intersection of these qualities that an architecture is to be recovered.

The proposal is sited on Mantra Bell City – a precedent where the laws around imprisonment of refugees was recently suspended. Departing from this irony, the restrictions and classifications of the architectural industry are scrutinized with the vision statements of an activation centre becoming the testing ground for the exploration of rules. From this, a new metropolis emerges with the code performing to reveal the priorities of our discipline. The project delivers form to our rules so that one day we might shape it.

The process finds the tolerance between code and function, use and value. It occupies the tension between how a building acts and the requirements of law. These thresholds are then tested against our desires, finding irony in the gap, and affording value to the code as an architectural construct.

Symbiotically torn between requirement and desire, the project finds value in the labour of an object.