After Exodus : re-occupation of the metropolitan wall

Abstract

The title "Exodus alludes to a restricted exclave encircled by a forbidding wall -- effect, a prison on the scale of a metropolis, and one in which people sought refuge voluntarily. Over the past forty years, similar walls have grown in the city of Belfast in an increasing effort to divide its Catholic and Protestant populations. Although the troubles have subsided, the walls continue to grow creating interface zones along their edges, where civic infrastructure becomes abandoned and left to ruin. Such zones become the stage for a new urban culture invigorated by invention and subversion, each with an objective of territorial gain through a type of architectural warfare that stakes its claim on the conterminous ruins along its edge. The result is manifested in adaptive architectural typologies that reinforce the edge condition of the wall through the re-appropriation of critical infrastructure, forced to confront its intersection with barrier lines.