New City | Peter Frankfurt, Greg Lynn , Alex McDowell
Peter Frankfurt, Greg Lynn and Alex McDowell collaborated within MoMA’s Design and Elastic Mind Exhibition and created New City – a means in which they propose to rethink the way we interact with the internet and perceive it, by creating a media environment depicting a living virtual world, which is parallel to our known one.
The idea is that we view the internet as a 2D existence, scrolling its pages without understanding their context. Formally, the team have created a 7 tori volume, each torus representing a continent and each of them sharing information along its surface.The piece is highly relevant in the digital present context, since “statistics and data visualizations of the interconnectedness of everything have really sprung to life, they are mere ‘snapshots’ into the experience of real-time online data streams”.
Architects have gone far from simply re-shaping our world – they are shaping new ones and they are challenging us to review our existing one, which pushes existing architectural paradigms to their new existence.
Lidia Ratoi is a Romanian architect, educator, and researcher, currently serving as Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Architecture. With a background in both architectural design and theory, her work explores the intersections of technology, media, and politics in the built environment. Ratoi’s research focuses on the aesthetics of power, surveillance, and virtuality, with a strong interest in critical and speculative design. She has practiced internationally and exhibited in venues across Europe and Asia. Passionate about challenging conventional narratives, Ratoi integrates digital tools with philosophical inquiry, encouraging experimental approaches to architecture. Her contributions continue to shape emerging discourses in design and architectural pedagogy.