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antoine vaxelaire
Inter 7

No-Stop City is an investigation for a Hidden Landmark exploiting figure / ground reversals as an urban strategy. In search of  Moscow’s Identity new landmark figures Formally negotiate with cartographic excavations and projections onto the square grounds. Negative spaces are used to filter and condense marketing culture and public Program from the commercial systems. The Void Figures are legible against the continuous solid of the shopping sectors, calibrated according to quantifiable density of products and services. These sectors are made of Highly Generic Shops juxtaposed to Extremely Specific Identifiable Identities, both being deeply conflictual in their spatial configuration but operating in symbiosis.

Investigation of landmarks shifting from solid isolated object towards constructed voided figuresDreamed, exported and anchored identities are ways to capture Moscow's essence: its scale-less appearance as an abstract-enough identity to unify the city, and concrete enough to be used as a tool for the project.By segregating pure shopping and the identities of these same shops, the two new entities will work in symbiosis, their conflictual spatial configurations as well as their extreme operatives conditions is what will allow them to honestly support each other.Understanding the site as a 'Moving Arrows' implies that passed physical elements of the site are as important as those present today. The souvenir of these appears as traces materialised at different levels.The Juxtaposition of the Highly Generic, as Stack floors, and the extremely Specific, as overlapping debrisThe wall as the main souvenir from the past. If it used to protect the city with its thickness, it is today using its inhabitable qualities as an escape to Moscow's FrenesiaIn opposition to the linearity of the wall, these ponctual elements are cutting the solidity of shopping and filled with high-speed vertical circulations.The inbetween no-man's-land void is a static zone, where seated visitors can enjoy the two extreme conditions surrounding them.A gigantic floating souvenir of a sphere filled of shopping Identities. A architectural structure based on a spiral ramp acting as the stage set for extreme branding culture.The voided figure containing the floating specific sphere is clearly legible against the generic shopping diagrams.