ciro najle general design bureau

Metamegalopolis is a territorial-scale drawing developed in collaboration between architects and artists to create the remnants of a non-existing city in the desert of Nazca. Its pattern, resultant of abstracting the density of the infrastructural network of South America, projects the fictional enigma of a hypothetical city that has allegedly left continental-like traces, accounting for all infrastructure mapped Google Earth at a given scale. The network is reconstructed as a vectorial field assumed as the register of the interactions between the infrastructure and the geomorphological, geological, cultural, and ecological conditions at place. The project miniatures these forms into a city that replicates the organization of the continent: a mise en abyme of the continent within the continent. The pattern is exaggerated through the assignation of forces triggered by the density of the pattern, transforming the network until a point where its figure is longer recognized at first glance, yet keeping a hidden identity that can be laboriously deciphered. The construction is planned through the robotization of a tractor that, through feedback mechanisms, builds the site without direct human intervention.