Utopian Laboratory Ilica Exhibition

Utopian Laboratory Ilica exhibition presented four collective speculative scenarios that read Ilica as a space between the possible and the impossible. Using utopia as a critical method, students reflected on potential futures for this urban space. Ilica became a laboratory for testing architecture as a discursive and speculative practice. Instead of a nostalgic look at the lost activities of street ground floors or creating quick fixes for urban regeneration, students embraced the street’s current condition as a starting point for a critical reading and imagination of alternative futures. Starting from utopia understood not as an idealized picture of the world, but as a method, the projects explored the interrelationships of spatial and social forms through different scales – from the individual and the immediate environment, through communities and institutions, to the city as a whole. Observing space through the themes of habitat, process, system and care, the projects reflect on contemporary climate, social and political challenges. Through collective drawings, diagrams and texts, the students developed narrative visual scenarios offer an alternative development of the location which simultaneously questioned the present and proposed new forms of coexistence with other beings within the complex urban space. The exhibition presented the results of that process: Ilica as it is and as it could become.