Academy of Fine Arts - IKA, analog digital production, Vienna AT
Spring 2015
Wolfgang Tschapeller
Werner Skvara
Eva Christina Sommeregger

The essay “New Babylon, a nomadic town” from 1974 Constant Nieuwenhuys describes a world without frontiers, a world of freedom. It gets described as a city of the future that spans the globe as a network 20 meters above the earth.

All land would be collective property, all work would be done by machines and all people are free to define and experience themselves through creative games. The project “Babylon 3 - reconstruction of the future” is based on the ideas of Constants drawings, descriptions and models and elaborated from the perspective of an architect or engineer in training, rather than from a visionary. It is a reconstruction of an excerpt of the city network and presents itself as a framework of a future city and society. The free society of Babylon 3 is not bound to private possessions or personal belongings. Games rule the everyday life, a place where the Babylonians experience themselves. This is a collective society which does not differentiate between public and private situations. Concepts of privacy, intimacy, sensuality and sexuality are redefined through architectural interventions. On different levels of the structure, the Babylonian has to prove his own perception and interpretation of intimacy. The project seeks to investigate an experimental setup of a ludic society, where repressive notions of sexuality and play are questioned and liberated.