Endcommercial is a compelling study of urban phenomena - 60 000 photos have been shot since 1997. the soul of new york city in its details - encoded into broken bicycles, markings on pavement, words on signs, on concrete, on buildings, on people…

between urban structures and individual existence, organic and improvised systems emerge. situated beyond the sophisticated economy and below a level of recognition, they are familiar yet paradoxically invisible. the ordinariness of certain objects is so ubiquitous that they fail to evoke reflection. reading the city conducts a visual research project of urban street territory, unveilling embedded social conditions and contradictions.

endcommercial / autopoietic design “a main area of our case study is dedicated to a phenomenon we call autopoietic or self organizational design. it encompasses the results of an organic process driven by social contradictions. this process, marked by improvisation, reinterpretation, misuse and the pragmatics of chaos, result in the “design” of objects of daily coping, usually occuring in the territory of the street. these results are always mobile, ambiguous constructions and transitory architectures that arise anonymously within a structure of self-organization. their usefulness and object intelligence is based on the necessity of creating instruments resistant to crisis. never intended as products by the industry, these socially legible things are often superior to industrial products in their equivocal functionalism and their lack of representation.” so scheppe böhm associates.