The Compact City

In the current European context, there is very little ambition to establish new cities. 

Due to all kinds of regulations, existing cities are undergoing major changes in their peripheral parts. Instead of intensively using what has already been built, cities extensively expand, drifting out everything they cannot absorb. However, inner cities do not represent finished, definite structures: they rather constitute ever-changing organisms which need new impulses from the inside. Compact city does not mean creating new boundaries, but opening up new opportunities in already constructed space.

Instead of posing the question:

How to design a city?

one should ask:

How to design within a city?

or:

How to design in already designed?

The Compact City Exhibition is an interactive reaction to these questions, taking up 359 m3 of space in the Brno Gallery of Architecture. Five exhibitors, four of whom are from countries of the Visegrad Group and one from Austria, create, by means of continual workshops, thematic installations through the whole exhibition time. Each participant uses the whole exhibition hall for the period of one week, assisted by students participating in the workshop. Individual installations will then be presented by the exhibitors and confronted with invited lecturers. Each installation makes use of space shared with the others, forming an additive exhibition composition. The basis of the exhibition represents an unfinished experiment – just like a city itself.Later the Compact City will be transported to forum experimentelle architektur in Vienna. During the Brno exhibition each new part of the installation will also be presented by video projection from the window of f.e.a. to Museumsquartier courtyard.