The Reasons Offsite exhibition focuses on prefabricated and modular building systems, referred to throughout the exhibition as “offsite architecture”. The global population is rapidly moving toward cities, creating high demand for urban spaces to live and visit. There are currently 3 billion people living in cities, but the number is expected to rise to around 5 billion by 2030, with 2 billion living under the poverty line. This rapid urbanization challenges experts to define new strategies to accommodate this growth.

This challenge calls for pragmatism, and sets the same task to architecture: time and physical resource optimization. These requirements are also the main struggles of offsite architecture, and this exhibition highlights opportunities, while examining reasons previous offsite attempts failed.

The exhibition will be presented in a 3D virtual reality environment and viewed on Oculus headsets and projected. The virtuality is a characteristic of offsite architecture—it is produced in a place to be used in another context, in a different reality. The virtual format also allows the exhibition to be sustainable and accessible as it travels to different galleries and spaces around the globe.

How can offsite architecture be used to face the challenges of the present? What are the take-aways from the experience? How can prefabrication help to lower the environmental impact of construction? The objective is to provide research, stimulate ideas, and start the discussion of these questions.

This exhibition includes works from Yona Friedman, Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palamora, Jorge Christie and Martín Alvarez, and Pablo Jimenez Moreno.

Associated exhibition programming

Curator Tours
Saturday, March 16, 2:00 pm
Sunday March 17, 2:00 pm
Monday, March 18, noon
Tuesday, March 19, noon
Wednesday, March 20, noon

Exhibition Closing Reception
Thursday, March 21, 6:00 pm

SUMMARY
SUMMARY is an architectural studio based in the Science and Technology Park of the University of Porto, Portugal. Seeking the balance between pragmatism and experimentalism, SUMMARY develops building systems assuming the optimization of time and physical resources as the core theme of its practice. SUMMARY’s exhibition credits include “INFRASTRUCTURE-STRUCTURE-ARCHITECTURE” at the main exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2016. In 2017, SUMMARY received the RED DOT AWARD for the “habitat” category. Recently SUMMARY was a finalist of the YAP competition, promoted by the Italian museum MAXXI in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, USA.

Author: SUMMARY studio (Samuel Gonçalves, Inês Rodrigues, João Meira, and Borbála Papp) - www.summary.pt

Virtual Reality Programmer: Luca Sabbadini