URBANSCAN
URBANSCAN is the raw data and the foundation of our design methodology -- a systematic, obsessive, on-going observation and documentation of the contemporary urban/suburban reality. Our research focuses on man-made objects and systems and the way they proliferate, accumulate, overlap and interfere with the built, and natural, environment around the globe.
Our approach to ecology and economy begins with technology. We don’t promise some utopian future technology that will make everything effortless. We don’t look for a false cleanliness, or hide the effort behind making, maintaining, and inhabiting the built environment. Instead, we begin by looking for the dirt: for the backstage objects, products, and artifacts that enable architecture to exist. We look at the wrong sides of things. We look under tables and under cities. We scan for hidden messes. And hidden systems. The manufactured objects that interest us include: air-conditioners, airplanes, antennas, billboards, highways, jetways, and tunnels; boats, booths, boxes, coils, cranes, ducts, lifts, lights, strips, scraps, stacks, shacks, sheds, and trucks; packaging, parking, plumbing, scaffolding, shipping containers and tanks.