Territories of Disobedience

Architects today play a marginal role in the production of built environments, often entering a project long after its critical limits have been defined. OUALALOU+CHOI seeks to reestablish the architect's role as necessary and pertinent, to expand and redefine the architect's perimeter of action. The architecture presented in this book is a form of disobedience, a challenge to entrenched systems of construction. To question and pervert the established parameters of an architectural project is OUALALOU+CHOI's modus operandi. This search for singularity is not a search for formal distinction; it's not a fetishism of the architectural object. It speaks to a desire to define a project's conditions of existence, to be responsible for more than a project's formal incarnation. This compendium of essays and projects is divided into four themes: Cultural Resistance, Occupying Earth, Public Prerogatives, and Urban Transgressions. Presenting radically dissimilar projects, it illuminates the core of OUALALOU+CHOI's work: the exploration of scale and territorial structures. Linna Choi and Tarik Oualalou are partners in OUALALOU+CHOI, an architectural firm based in Paris and Casablanca. Territories of Disobedience traces the first fifteen years of their work.--Publisher's description.