5×5: Participatory Provocations Exhibit at the Center for Architecture
ABA is one of 25 offices invited to participate in 5×5 Participatory Provocations, a traveling exhibition that invited architecture teams to tackle five charged prompts about the near future. Our contribution examined how the hidden infrastructures that shape daily life—optics, data, and the thin spaces between devices and buildings—might become architectural material. The exhibition presented a series of physical models that reframed familiar systems as design territory, offering speculative but grounded takes on how architecture could respond to shifting cultural and technological conditions.
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Emily & Gerald participated in a panel discussion, “5×5 Provocative Presentations” at AIA New York / Center for Architecture. We joined a group of young architectural teams selected from the “5×5 Participatory Provocations” exhibition to present physical models and bold responses to provocative, and very real, future scenarios: drone-based deliveries, high-end real-estate investment, lunar tourism, border infrastructure, and NSA community branches. The event highlighted how young practices imagine architecture’s role in shifting futures.
5×5: Participatory Provocations Exhibit opens at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The exhibit, curated by Original Copy, Kyle May, and Kevin Erickson, brings together architecture and design studios to respond to contemporary cultural and political questions through small but pointed objects or models. The show emphasizes architecture’s role as a civic instrument, asking how design can spark dialogue, reframe norms, or expose unseen systems. Rather than polished proposals, the work focuses on clear ideas, direct gestures, and accessible formats, inviting visitors to participate, question, and reflect.