Architecture's Escape to Remote Sites: Ambition or Avoidance?

In an essay published September 16, 2026, Diogo Borges Ferreira argues that architects increasingly favor remote, unclaimed sites over complex urban problems. Projects like The Line, a 170-kilometer city for nine million residents, and Telosa, a planned city by Marc Lore and Bjarke Ingels Group, illustrate this trend. Telosa's land model, Equitism, aims for collective ownership, but five years after announcement, no site has been found. Meanwhile, Battery Park City's two-billion-dollar flood wall, stalled for over a year due to two condominium buildings refusing easements, shows the difficulty of negotiating existing claims. Ferreira contends that designing for empty sites is easier, not harder, because there are no prior owners, histories, or political processes to navigate. He traces this impulse to Superstudio's Continuous Monument (1969), which used distance to critique Florence, but notes a shift: contemporary projects like NEOM's Oxagon and Oceanix Busan, both by BIG, borrow critical vocabulary—resilient, regenerative, adaptive—from climate justice, diluting its meaning. The Venice exhibition Zero Gravity Urbanism (2023) showcased Oxagon and credited Adjaye Associates, Coop Himmelbau, and Studio Fuksas. Ferreira warns that this language drift undermines its credibility for communities that need it most. He concludes that the line between ambition and avoidance depends on whether architects plan to return to the places they escape.