The Tale of the Growing Village

A polemic against the commodification of architecture and city-making, The Tale of the Growing Village is a speculative project that proposes community development as an alternative method of urbanism. Offering both a metaphor and a material, the project uses the growth and decay of mycelium to explore the democratic production of urban space.

Where land is increasingly privatised and transactional, the project seeks to explore what land is worth beyond its financial return. Through a community’s occupation of site and the collective growing of a bio-structure, they are able to confront private claims to space, and ultimately redefine the value of land.  

If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities, until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear. We can live without architecture

Adolfo Natolini, Superstudio