• Working Lines ____________________________________________ Zuloark implements life-work propositions on every new project. These protocols and methodologies are transversal to all our local initiatives and however globally applicable.
  • THE SITUATED CITY. ‘Participation’ is the new term that architects and public powers want to include in their city issues and while we agree that is fundamental to introduce it in our everyday praxis we still think that we have a long road until its strategies and methodologies are mature and our society fully prepared to understand its consequences. Thus we raise this concept in our studio as a working progress, ready to experiment trials and errors, exploring its potential through many projects assuming it's difficult for the time being to achieve full success. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Image: Campo de Cebada (Since 2011) Is a neighborhood-driven public space built in the center of Madrid. The participative strategy is to deliver an infrastructured public space with common tools available to all users in order to build their own city in a non-driven way.
  • Our personal approach to this matter is mainly based on the “Situated knowledge”, concept coined by Donna Haraway on which we start trying to include in every new commission the maximum number of existent local agents and networks, grassroot knowledge and tacit pacts.,Understanding that ‘Participation’ is the difficult, expensive and long-term task of assuming the high range complexity within every inhabited territory. Developing new rules and a ‘game boards’ where the biggest quantity of actors can be included, where dissensus is assumed and we are prompted to reach new agreements to ultimately generate true social innovation. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Los Madriles (Since 2015) - An active online map or a qualitative atlas of citizen initiatives in Madrid.
  • SECOND LIVES. When it's possible this initiative applies on all our designs by trying to agree on an alternative use and relocation for every element we design, architectures, furniture or materials that otherwise would be thrown away at the end of every event we are involved in. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ #Operación Herminio
  • This working line is more than a zero waste or a materials life-cycle tracking policy. It’s about how apparently different projects can be interconnected by reusing parts of one in another, conceiving this as a strategy from the design starting point, considering each project, all its parts and every piece of material as a public source for the future; a kind of reusable public heritage and also how can we make agreements with public entities and city council technicians to use all this elements and materials that are stored and underused in state-owned warehouses. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________-#DSS2016 Donosti Pavillion - The construction of the pavilion is an assembly of 278 pieces of "Pajarita" benches designed to be part of the urban furniture.
  • URBAN RIGHTS. The Universal Declaration of Urban Rights started as a theoretical project in 2011 to discuss and sum opinions about the ‘City’ from the citizen’s point of view. This open database initiative has derived in the construction of Urban Parliaments through open workshops involving all kind of neighbours and technicians. The main strategy is to infrastructure public space in order to promote discussion and agreements about the city.
  • As a result public+expert Parliamentary Sessions have been organized in several architecture meetings, such as the Lisbon Triennale or DEMO:POLIS exhibition at ADK, with the aim of drafting an always updatable Urban Chart, a non-fixed manifest made by infinite inputs, where everyone is invited and experts are guides, all in contraposition to the “Athens Chart” made by a few, implemented by a few but with profound impact in billions of citizens lives around the world for nearly 100 years now.
  • ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT. Starting on Lev Vygotsky's notion of ZPD we established Zuloark in 2001 as a place where “everyone can learn to do something with the help of another”. We created our student working environments as learning contexts and ever since we’ve been exporting this policy in our professional life. Our classes at design and architecture schools and urban workshops are focused on the student's interests and inherent skills as classroom strong assets that can be shared taught to fellow students where our role is expert escorting while we also learn and push the limits. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - Ciudad - Escuela (Since 2014) Project in collaboration with MNCARS Museum and the Mozilla Foundation Open Badges Technology to legitimate the knowledge and skills that citizens, as city actors and users, are achieving and generating through online or non-standard pedagogies.
  • . These strategies are conducted more through ‘do tank’ rather than ‘think tank’ attitudes, we thus promote action and registration more than pure theoretical academic exercises. Ultimately we are radically focused on developing self-driven learning processes, where students are induced to the led their own educational journey and professors are experts escorts.
  • INTELIGENCIAS COLECTIVAS. (inside meta-studio Zoohaus) ‘Inteligencias Colectivas’ (Collective Intelligence) is an open infrastructure but most of all a methodology to research, share and legitimate emergent design and human creativity around the world. The aim is to build an online researching tool concerning informal knowledge, citizen agreements and non-driven urban processes. Firstly throughout travelling workshops we categorize and taxonomize intelligent urban solutions, uploading and sharing them under Creative Commons licenses.
  • On the field, our actions have nothing to do with cooperation in its traditional conception. ‘Inteligencias colectivas’ procedures consists in bidirectional teaching-learning processes, taking feedbacks and organizing urban actions together with local agents to implement what we’ve learned together, building new or unexpected solutions from which everyone might benefit by the hybridization of scientific and traditional knowledge. Ultimately what we seek is to understand, what has been called, “tactical urbanisms” around the world as intelligent emergent city-living-making. If we can document, share and implement all this knowledge and hybridize it with scientific city-development we will be able to ensure decent, healthy and safe living conditions in however more livable and grassroot-planned urban environments.

Zuloark is a distributed architecture and urbanism open office that enquires into new ways of urban practice and the role that architects have in cities experiencing the Anthropocene. Its practice engages with creativity and innovation that emerges from citizen initiatives as a means of strengthening the local resilience patterns and designing projects around them.

In the 18 years since Zuloark’s founders first started sharing their work and proposing new agendas at university as a reaction to conventional modes of architectural education, in particular its emphasis upon the twentieth-century figure of the architect as a lonely creator. The practice seeks to facilitate dynamic, collaborative working contexts characterised by an ethos of co-responsibility. The members have transferred their intuition into concrete ways of describing and manifesting heir internal organisation, working policies and professional practice.

Throughout their existence, Zuloark have never stopped questioning the issues inherent to the traditional understanding of authorship in architecture. Presently, their focus is upon how to re-read and blur the limits between professional office and project. Zuloark has always been the most important project of Zuloark but the practice has always enjoyed and sought to include other projects and offices as part of their ongoing work.

Zuloark is a distributed architecture and urbanism open office currently based in Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Madrid and Mexico City. Zuloark will be developing Making Futures School infrastructures during a 2-week workshop this June. During the School, Juan Chacón – a zuloark’s founding member and part of Making Futures team – will act as an implementation researcher, host and facilitator for different activities and spatial practices.