Urban re-personalisation Urban re-personalisation

The group Urban re-personalisation worked on two different aspects that are common to the micro-rayons: the housing block and the space in-between. To re-personalise both, the group proposes a frame in front of the housing block facade, and a system of movable boxes for the in-between space to generate spontaneous activity. The residents can customised the frame and the boxes according to their needs and taste. On an urban scale the re-personalisation takes place at junctions where poles and cranes with boxes are installed to serve as landmarks and permanent structures that allow temporarily activities to take place.

In what ways can the individual express him or herself in the existing build environment of the micro-rayons? Instead of making a finished design, the group will presents frameworks with which the people living in the micro-rayons can appropriate themselves their neighborhood. The group looks at this task on three different scales: the private, the space in-between, and the public. The method they use is deconstruction. The private. People living in social housing, do not have a choice where they want to live. Although the housing blocks look rigid and uniform from the outside they do not necessarily have to be rigid on the inside. Suggestions will be made of how the residents can alter the inside of the housing blocks. The space in-between. In what ways can the residents appropriate the small zone between the building block and the public space? The designers want to propose a kind of frame work which invite the residents to appropriate it and change it according to their own needs, but what can be used by others as well. For this they alter the first floor. The public. How can you personalise the urban scale when it is massive? The group will take a closer look at the junctions and see if they can be altered in a way that each neighborhood can create its own identity.

Moscow is made up from old settlement with mansion type houses. These mansion type houses reflected the personality of the people who built it, who lived there. Most people now a day live in unpersonal looking buildings. How can the personality of the people living there reflect in the architecture?

> Juan Pablo Accotto > Ali Ghazi Al-Najjar > Sergio Alvarado Vazquez > Shereen Akram Amarin > Alissa Bankovskaya > Mauro Ivan Barrio > Renato Collacique > Eleonora Cortese > Ana Gabriela Maldonado Barragán > Ohad Yaacov Meyuhas > Adish Patni > Dicle Taskin > Esteban Rauhut

The importance of the individual in the society is immense - especially in a society where individuality was deemed suspicious for decades. The manifestation of the individual in the urban fabric is the private house - it is a manifestation of personality with all of its merits and downsides: dignity and vanity, taste and flaws, wealth and fame or ambition and will. Is there a place for an individual in the urban fabric of today? What can this place be? What message delivers individual manifestation in the city and what is it's meaning for the society? Last but not least - can an individual settlement form a crystallization nucleus in a city? Silvia Franceschini is a researcher of contemporary art and design based between Milan and Moscow, where she works as an independent curator and writer. She studied at the Design Faculty of the Politecnico di Milano and at the Strelka - Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow where she conducted a research about the institutionalisation of the contemporary art system in Russia after 1989.