Magnetic Urban Field

Team point of view

The project reconfigures ‘found objects’ in Graz’s sprawling streetscape – kiosks, street lamps, parked cars –and condenses them into a new artificial landscape: a field condition blending the notion of landscape, architecture and infrastructure. Their intricate aggregation acts as a catalyst activating the latent space of a parking lot (scaled for occasional peak events) and re-imagines it as a public space for a variety of formal and informal urban activities. A clockwise spiral organizes flows of cars, public transport, bicycles and pedestrians through a unifying topography while offering shortcuts and oblique perspectives. Here, the spectacle of the arena is transposed to its urban setting: the props of everyday suburbia turn into a stage for the “choreography” of traffic and re-frame it as an attractive urban setting.

Jury point of view

This project approaches the subject of traffic flows in a rather different way, suggesting an amalgam of movements in a context of maximum compression and proximity. The clearly defined idea of creating a “traffic show” can be seen as the primary condition for the creation of an attractive urbanity. This is a particularly valuable message for the urban strategy; it offers another solution which takes into account the potential of what exists and extrapolates its qualities in a poetic way.