Architectural Competitions

This collection of essays will focus on terrain vague-marginal, semi-abandoned space in or along the edge of the city-as abstract concept, specific locale, and subject of literary, architectural, or otherwise artistic intervention.

Ignasi de Sola-Morales defines terrain vague as land in a potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which we are external, or  strange places that exist outside the citys effective circuits and productive structures (119, 120). Gil Doron similarly defines landscapes of transgression as derelict sites where "nature has started to reconstruct the built or (now) ruined environment. . . . space[s] that opened in the dichotomy of what we perceive as city and nature (255).

We are particularly interested in responses to the idea, as expressed by Luc Levesque, that -terrain vague- offers a counterpoint to the way order and consumption hold sway over the city. Offering room for spontaneous, creative appropriation and informal uses that would otherwise have trouble finding a place in public spaces subjected increasingly to the demands of commerce, the terrain vague- is the ideal place for a certain resistance to emerge, a place potentially open to alternative ways of experiencing the city.

Competition website: http://sitesituation.wordpress.com/