Branding Islands Making Nations is a case study competition intended to open the discourse on added value in design, expanding upon the 15th International Architecture Exhibition’s call to arms by inviting an extended field of spatial practitioners to the Biennale Architettura di Venezia. Consultants and communication designers, marketing and advertising experts shall speculate on the role of branding in the making of a place. The conceptual framework is based on the understanding that the politics of representation determine the success of an intervention in the built environment.
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Departing from an ethical critique through satire, a competition format foreign to architectural design is employed to value and review works under the framework of a sales pitch. In the case of a government seeking to determine the feasibility of a territorial claim, entrants are tasked with the presentation of a branding package surrounding an artificial landmass instrumental in legitimizing a nation’s territorial claims. Select teams will represent the mix of stakeholders and issues at play in the political economy of global geopolitics and geoeconomics in the South China Sea. Their goal will be to construct land that will transition to a sovereign state in the eyes of the public as political and economic contexts change. Thus, the creative scope of entries will not be evaluated upon their moral stance. Rather, entries will be analyzed in their rich interrogation the role representation plays in its ability to distort, mislead, disguise, or reverse meaning. By creating incongruity between reality and what is represented or not, successful entrants will be able to make the negative appear positive in legitimizing a nation’s territorial claim.
Conscious of the possibility to manipulate representation as means of subversion, the project shall create a discourse on the status spatial practitioners hold within societal decision-making structures between accountability and profitability. Expanding possibilities rather than shifting responsibilities, it is based on the firm belief in the necessity to expose the glitches, loopholes, and gray areas in systems as first step toward conflict resolution.
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The Biennale Architettura di Venezia is the world’s most prestigious showcase for new design projects by emerging talent, attracting over 350,000 visitors every two years. Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate of the same year, the 2016 edition is curated by the Chilean architect and founder of Studio Elemental, Alejandro Aravena. In order to improve the quality of the built environment and consequently people’s quality of life, the Biennale Architettura di Venezia 2016 is interested in how architecture can introduce a broader notion of gain – design as added value.
This research investigates built objects as evidence for the projection of power, authority, and influence. Specifically, my doctoral dissertation studies the architectural resolution of imperial-colonial expansion throughout history.
The assumption that governance is an invisible and immaterial force ignores the physical manifestations of power. As facts on the ground, built objects can link a polity to its claimed domain, asserting governance spatially through structure, appearance, function, siting, and scale. Still, architectural techniques have rarely been subjected to theorizing throughout the history of imperial-colonial expansion. The question is how built objects have been employed to legitimize governance through which bodies and spaces were made subjects. This question guides my research, which hypothesizes the possibility of tracing back the historical origins of architectural techniques that have shaped how built objects are used to legitimize expansion. Structure of my dissertation are various types of built objects and their corresponding rhetorics of expansion. The first chapter looks at scenic tents, sacred barriers, and military standards. These built onjects used scenographic techniques along ancient procession paths to lay claim to governance. Giving a description of extraterritorial techniques along trade routes, the second chapter analyzes how traveler inns, nation houses, and trade factories legitimized power in medieval times. The third chapter examines semaphore towers, timeball towers, and telegraph poles. In order to lay claim to authority, these built objects employed geodetic techniques along modern signal lines. Offering an account of filtrational techniques along transit corridors, the fourth chapter analyzes how quarantine facilities, detention facilities, and prescreening facilities legitimized influence in recent times.
In its larger aim, my research seeks to untangle how material conditions embody social imaginaries and relations in space. These can become apparent through seemingly minor or banal architectural techniques with often nevertheless enormous implications. My research seeks to interrogate the ability of design to manifest power where stable and extensive means of control are challenged. This will ultimately allow the audience of my research to reconcile with a condition that has always been inherent but never fully untangled.
Built objects can become instruments of power projection. In its research-based debut exhibition, entitled ‘How to Steal a Country’, the Vertical Geopolitics Lab detailed how Russia has instrumentalized architecture and infrastructure to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty from 2014 to its ongoing full-scale invasion. This project decoded, deconstructed, and analyzed various case studies of buildings and infrastructures — innocuous built objects of the everyday — with nevertheless enormous implications. These objects, deployed by the Russian government as displayed in this exhibition, appear to be neither diplomatic nor military in function, which has rendered their use plausibly deniable, often helping them evade detection as potential threats.
The exhibition transformed the gallery into scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine using scale- and life-size dioramas, vignettes, and tableaus to create an immersive experience, revealing the key role architecture and infrastructure play in the ongoing sovereignty dispute. Based on open-source investigation, the exhibition critically highlighted humanitarian aid operations, bank branches, internet and telephone facilities, as well as child boarding and care facilities as theatrical prop-like objects akin to those deployed by Russia to stage ‘facts on the ground’ in Ukraine. Employing techniques from scenic theatrical set model-making, key scenes from the invasion established sovereignty as a performative concept dependent on an audience.
By studying Russia’s power project in Ukraine as a paradigmatic case, firstly, this project challenged the widely held notion that imperialism and colonialism are events confined to the past. Rather, they persist as ongoing processes. Secondly, this project disputed the notion that practices of imperial-colonial expansion primarily rely on legal and cartographic means. Instead, it emphasized the facilitation and legitimation of expansion through visual, material, and spatial means.
