Architecture seems increasing implicated in the generation of a ubiquitous surveillance society, not simply in the relatively longstanding modernist obsession with glass and visibility, but with security increasingly considered not as option but as infrastructure. It was nice to see at least some people concerned with creating anti-surveillance architectures. Two great examples are Deborah Natsios, and Eyal Weizman, and another I recently came across (via The Verge), is Asher J. Kohn, whose Shura City project, aims to create a living environment in an Islamic cultural context, that is protected from drone surveillance. As Kohn states:
“Shura City is constructed to be livable. It is built according to local logic, using local materials, and amenable to local needs. It is meantto be alien – but not hostile – from the outside while homey and familiar from the inside. It is meant to confuse the machines and their distant operators while creating a safe zone forpeople whose lives are being rended by war. Shura City is not about judgment on the survivors or destruction of their persecutors. Shura City is about using architecture to create a space for humanity in an increasingly inhuman sphere.”
ubisurv 