Loopholes and Extralegal Architectures
Postponed Summer 2020 to Fall 2022

The architectural legacy of engaging with occupied space has shifted during period of extreme social unrest. In Milan in the 1970’s, architecture classes were held for youth squatters and protestors to instruct them on safe building materials and construction methods. In Berlin in the 1980’s, city planners would collect ways in which building codes were disregarded, and would work toward legalization and amendment. Contemporary architects have engaged with legality by publishing ways to hack the building code, like Santiago Cirugeda’s Recetas Urbanas and Finn Williams and David Knight’s SUB-Plan. In the case of Michael Sorkin’s Local Code, a city is reduced only to the restrictions that are applied to it.


This project aims to place ‘loophole’ architecture and extra-legal architecture in conversation with each other through their action as a spatial occupation, to understand how code generates form. None of the chosen sites are clandestine and some receive official support despite their (il)legal standing. The existence of sanctioned illegal architecture forces us to reevaluate the building code, not as an absolute but rather, a negotiation.

I will be visiting sites that engage with this ‘grey zone’ in different ways, divided into Occupations of Site or Occupations of Code. In some cases, they may occupy both site and code, or in their lifespans, fluctuate between the two.  Occupations of Site could be a resettled medieval village, scaffolding hovering above the street, or farm land claimed from aristocrats. For those who believe the refrain, “The land belongs to those who work it”, they might not be occupations at all. Occupations of Code include acts such as the installation of an exterior room latched onto an urban apartment, or an addition stacked onto an existing building that becomes a rentable apartment, and then a second addition stacked onto that.

This research will develop an analysis of built works that confront legal ambiguities, and look to these occupations as a generator of form, whether at the scale of a single scaffold, or the development of an autonomous city within a city. It is situated within a robust literature of alternative settlements and anarchist architecture, but aims to fill a gap in the understanding of the evolution of built sites that contradict legal expectations, in addition to furthering investigations into the formal manifestations of ‘squatting’ the code.