Architects today play a marginal role in the production of built environments, often entering a project long after its critical limits have been defined. OUALALOU + CHOI seeks to reestablish the architect’s role as necessary and pertinent, to expand and redefine the profession’s perimeter of action.

The architectures presented during TERRITORIES OF DISOBEDIENCE are just that, a form of disobedience, a challenge to entrenched systems of construction. To question and pervert the established parameters of an architectural project is the practice’s modus operandi. This search for singularity is not an investigation into formal distinction; it is not a fetishism of the architectural object. It speaks to a desire to define a project’s conditions of existence, to be responsible for more than a project’s formal incarnation.

TERRITORIES OF DISOBEDIENCE touches on four themes inherently tied to the office’s design philosophy, and exhibited in its body of work: Cultural Resistance, Occupying Earth, Public Prerogatives, and Urban Transgressions.

With radically dissimilar projects, the office’s work is first and foremost an exploration of scale and territorial structures. Notable examples of this research include the Volubilis Museum, the FLIJ installation, the COP22 Village, the Moroccan Cultural Center in Paris, and the Leïla Mezian Foundation Museum.

Linna Choi and Tarik Oualalou are Design Principals of OUALALOU + CHOI, an architectural practice based in Paris and Casablanca. TERRITORIES OF DISOBEDIENCE traces the first fifteen years of their work.