ANTHONY TAI 2019-20 YEAR 3

Co-workers Café: An architectural hack for a surveillance society

First Class Honours
Bartlett Medal

An internet café, veiled in skins of digital glitch-induced anonymity, presents differing interpretations to the passer-by, the street-view car, and the satellite. Learning from known glitches of mainstream surveillance practices, the architecture deconstructs itself digitally using techniques of countershading, algorithm baffling, and photogrammetric disturbance, in a bid to offer unrivalled privacy to its inhabitants.

With the rise of the right to be forgotten, amidst ever-increasing governmental and corporate surveillance, privacy has become a pillar of contemporary US culture. Aspiring to interrogate traditional ways of seeing and inhabiting our cities, the project questions how architecture might soon come to be design-driven by the blind spots of surveillance technologies. Through translations and mistranslations of both digital and physical space, the building bastardises both analogue and digital modes of viewing, inducing glitches that dismantle the veracity of what we see.

Tutors: Greg Storrar, Farlie Reynolds