Misfits & Hybrids: Architectural Artifacts for the 21st-Century City

<p>Contemporary cities are shaped by the unlikely adjacencies of objects that are vastly different in kind origin and scale: buildings infrastructure and other urban components that over time accumulate into mismatched configurations. However despite the ubiquity of these oddities and their impact on the city we rarely give them much consideration. In <i>Misfits & Hybrids</i> Ferda Kolatan explores the untapped potential in these unexpected conditions for a new kind of architecture. A diverse array of projects developed in Kolatan's design studios at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design illustrates how hybrid artifacts can reveal the often overlooked cultural socio-political and material histories of a site fostering design tactics invested in reinventing the existing. Set within the cosmopolitan megacities of Istanbul Cairo and New York the projects are conceived as real fictions conjuring novel narrative aesthetic and representational forms to reflect the pluralistic postindustrial city.</p>