The web foundations of a contemporary garden.PLOT’s e-tecture as a precedent for BIG’s Superkilen

Abstract

This paper sheds light on PLOT’s first project: Information Technology and Architecture, an unpublished proposal for a web-based design platform. The study of the project brings to the fore the theoretical principles that the founders of PLOT, Bjarke Ingels and Julien de Smedt, associated with an architecture conceived for the age of the World Wide Web, including the definition of design as a relational device or the acknowledgement of its global condition. In hindsight, much of the work produced by both architects after the dissolution of PLOT in 2006 seems to respond to such principles. In particular, the logics of Information Technology and Architecture resonate with Superkilen, the public park built in 2013 by BIG as a compilation in Copenhagen of a hundred objects from all around the world.