"Following many years of international research, the curator Elke Krasny presents 19 historical and contemporary case studies of bottom-up urban development in Chicago, Leipzig, Vienna, Bremen, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Porto Alegre, Havana and Quito. They provide an overview of informal, self-organised collective movements and of the spaces that are created by them. The exhibition shows how decisively small projects have often led, and are still leading, to major changes." We are very proud that an adapted version of this project was later shown at La Biennale di Venezia 2012 - as a part of the exhibition Common Ground curated by David Chipperfield.

I have designed another exhibition for the same house in 2008: The Making of Architecture. Whereas I created a unique setting for each architect at that time, I found an overall structure that would provide exactly the same space for each project more appropriate this time. This structure should remind the visitors of urban space, its main characteristics for me being: the urban grid, the repetition of urban infrastructure such as benches, street lamps or street signs, as well as the diffuse border between private + public space and constructed space + nature. Just as important for me during the design process was the use of recycled material and local resources.

I created a labyrinth with used construction fences, they defined the inside and outside of the exhibition spaces. I used aluminium panels that refer to street signs as the information carrier. I used the existing lighting system, stripped it to it's bare neon lamps and extended it with vertical ones, which resulted in linear light brackets that held the whole space together.

I collaborated with the municipality of Vienna, namely the waste and garden departments, to use the town's resources for the cubic seats (from recycled wooden panels), local plants and soil created from biodegradable waste. And I convinced local plastic bottle producers to sponsor some of our plant pots - I wanted them to be see-through to show two more urban resources: soil and water.