Misfits & Hybrids: Architectural Artifacts for the 21st-Century City

Contemporary cities are shaped by the unlikely adjacencies of urban components that over time accumulate into mismatched configurations. This book explores the untapped potential in these unexpected conditions for a new kind of architecture through projects set in the cosmopolitan megacities of Istanbul, Cairo, and New York.

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Contemporary cities are shaped by the unlikely adjacencies of objects that are vastly different in kind, origin, and scale: buildings, infrastructure, and other urban components that over time accumulate into mismatched configurations. However, despite the ubiquity of these oddities and their impact on the city, we rarely give them much consideration. In Misfits & Hybrids, Ferda Kolatan explores the untapped potential in these unexpected conditions for a new kind of architecture. A diverse array of projects, developed in Kolatan’s design studios at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, illustrates how hybrid artifacts can reveal the often overlooked cultural, socio-political, and material histories of a site, fostering design tactics invested in reinventing the existing. Set within the cosmopolitan megacities of Istanbul, Cairo, and New York, the projects are conceived as real fictions, conjuring novel narrative, aesthetic, and representational forms to reflect the pluralistic postindustrial city.