The City in the Age of Hyperobjects

As architects but also as humans that live in the greatest artifact of our culture, that is cities, we have to pose the question: What happened to urbanism? Every generation has to ask this question anew and redefine its answer. The last time this question was raised within the discipline of architecture was in the late 90’s, when OMA’s Rem Koolhaas and Sanford Kwinter investigated how neo-liberal capitalism and globalization have transformed our cities.

“The City in the Age of Hyper-objects” is a design research project, which revives the question of urbanism. The field of investigation is the architecture of the contemporary city.“Hyperobjects”1, a term coined by Timothy Morten, refers to entities that defy our traditional understanding of things due to their spatial and temporal scale for example contemporary forms of capitalism, investment strategies of real estate assets or global warming. They have the capacity to withdraw even more from us, the more we know about them. Humans are responsible for their existence and they affect our daily lives in cities.

The design research on “The City within the Age of Hyper-objects” studies how capitalism shapes the contemporary city and its buildings. This research project wants to discover new architectural typologies produced by such hyperobjects. The goal of this project is to define a new realist approach within the discipline of urban design. The results of this task aim to contribute to the larger cultural debate of how to approach the contemporary city according to the emerging post-humanist zeitgeist.