-hide and find yourself
Residence X.
Queenstown Microsociety.
From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to films like Minority Report and The Lives of Others, our law and culture are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives, many have tried to shed light on the notion of mass surveillance.
Surveillance is mainly carried out by governments or governmental organizations, but also by corporations such as Google, either on behalf of governments or as their own initiative.
This design proposal revisits that phenomenon with the mindset that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy and creates a new form of society in which occupants can feel secure.
In the 21st society, a time when people’s data has become the new currency, Queenstown aims to re-evaluate covert responses by proposing an architecture where people can live, work and hide together under a sustainable economic network.
Queenstown encompasses a primary school, workshops and factories with the aim of achieving being completely autonomous. The construction sequence of the proposal is structured into 3 phases and is planned to be completed in approximately 100 years from it’s start date.
Queenstown philosophises several and varied pedagogic systems and aims of illustrating ideas that combined could result in a Utopian system of education which could form the foundation of an idealistic society. This speculative proposal is a device, a thought experiment which give an alternative way of living to London citizens beyond the limitations and the insecurity of the modern society.
We are actively present in a moment in history where surveillance has reached a point no one could ever imagine .Video cameras, or closed-circuit television (cctv) are becoming a more and more widespread feature of European Life. Fears of terrorism and the availability of ever-cheaper cameras have accelerated the trend even more.The use of sophisticated systems by police and other public security officials is particularly troubling in a democratic society. In Central London, the police are planning to set up a centralized surveillance centre where officers can view thousands of video cameras around the downtown and police-operated cameras have proliferated in many other cities across Eu in just the past several years.
The design reacts to this phenomenon and aims to provide an oasis, a utopia where people could remove themselves from the rigors of daily life refresh and expand their imaginative capabilities. Queenstown is not detached from the physical reality and is proposing a radical social change something between ‘daydreaming’ and ‘escapism’ which aims to produce the seed for a new, more humane social order.
Temples
It seems that there is nowhere to hide anymore! Everything is public, transparent, visible to invisible others,the sheltering walls of privacy have been digitally disvolved. Nowadays surveillance emerges as an aesthetic in almost all the aspects of cultural production, from fashion and advertising to architecture and design.
