build_r&d

𝑪𝑨𝑳𝑳 𝑭𝑶𝑹 𝑺𝑼𝑩𝑴𝑰𝑺𝑺𝑰𝑶𝑵𝑺: build_journal 01: Territories Is your research/work geared towards understanding and redefining our ever-changing built environment? We want to hear from you:

As interest in new cities, special economic zones, and startup enclaves grows, Proto-Town raises a central question: can engineered communities for innovation remain open and democratic, or do they inevitably reproduce new forms of control and dependency?

Socially, Proto-Town operates as a communal living environment, where founders reside on-site in shared or temporary housing. This arrangement collapses distinctions between labor, domestic life, and experimentation, producing an always-on culture of innovation.

Proto-Town is a recently developed “innovation hub” in Caldwell County, Texas, positioned between Austin and San Antonio. Conceived as a company town for hardware startups, it reflects a renewed interest in spatially concentrated production ecosystems.

As a foundational work of radical architecture, New Babylon continues to inform discourse on post-work futures, mobility, and spatial agency. It asks whether architecture can support a society organized around play, contingency, and collective authorship rather than necessity.

Constant developed the project through drawings, models, texts, and films, positioning architecture as a speculative and critical practice. New Babylon operates less as a buildable proposal than as a theoretical apparatus for rethinking social and spatial organization.

New Babylon (1956–1974) by Constant Nieuwenhuys is a speculative urban project envisioning a post-capitalist society structured by automation. Developed alongside Situationist theory, it proposes the abolition of labor in favor of continuous creative production and social play.

The Pepsi Pavilion remains a key moment in media architecture, reframing space as programmable and experiential, rather than static and formal.

Internal conflicts between artists, engineers, and sponsors revealed the limits of collaboration, exposing tensions within corporate-supported avant-garde practice.

The Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, developed with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), marked a shift from architecture as object to architecture as immersive system, foregrounding experience, perception, and information.