Dragana Zorić
https://doi.org/10.60152/9a5iow1r
Abstract: Temporary, moveable, and deployable architecture has transitioned from the margins of architectural discourse to a central site of experimentation in contemporary practice. Such structures challenge the discipline’s historical privileging of permanence and monumentality, proposing instead design strategies rooted in ephemerality, adaptability, and event-based spatiality. This article situates these architectures and their practices, within a broader historical and theoretical continuum, connecting current examples with a long lineage of past examples and experiments with temporality, many modernist and postmodern. It argues that mobility and modularity have become critical tools for addressing shifting urban conditions, environmental imperatives, and evolving social needs. After a select critical survey of key examples of architectural transience in contemporary practice including its impacts and meaning, this study examines the related pedagogical production of advanced undergraduate studios at Pratt Institute (2024–2025). These studios, framed around a speculative project titled The Critter, tested how nimble and provisional urban structures might selectively and strategically inhabit the margins of New York City, in an attempt to spark permanent change. By integrating historical reflection, theoretical inquiry and design pedagogy, the article argues that temporary architecture constitutes not simply a logistical solution but a critical design strategy that aims to impact urbanism at a large scale. The microform proposes architecture can become more agile, sustainable, and open to new materials, typologies, and uses and respond to conditions of uncertainty so as to rewrite the stasis of the urban condition at large.
Keywords: temporary architecture, ephemerality, deployable structures, design theory, design pedagogy, urbanism, microform
How to cite this Paper (Harvard referencing style):
Zorić, D. (2025) ‘The Critter: Temporary Structure as Agent of Contemporary Urbanism‘, in R. Bogdanović (ed.) On Architecture — Crosscutting and Fusion of Disciplines, Proceedings. Belgrade, Serbia: STRAND, pp. 9–19.
See publication On Architecture (2025) Conference Proceedings