©S AM 

Hello, 

we are KOSMOS Architects, and we took part in the Future Architecture platform this year, which proved a very interesting and enriching experience for our office.

It all started with a speculative proposal on the "Future of Architecture", which triggered our imagination and gave us exposure to hundreds of other young architects and their ideas. With all the information available online that we have today, it is hard to find a good collection of interesting contemporary speculative projects that strike a good balance between design and theory. The FA website became just such a resource for us, and has all the potential to become a great archive of ideas on and for the future.

After that first encounter we were invited by the director of the Swiss Architecture Museum, Andreas Ruby, to curate an exhibition and propose design ideas for Basel and public space there. This was a unique opportunity for us, and we, together with our new friends Plan Comun (co-curators and FA participants) proposed an exhibition entitled "Forum Basel". In contrast to the complete commercialisation of the city during the week of Art Basel, the museum was given over to public use – for free. The whole museum was transformed into an actual public space: the entry fee was abolished; the four rooms of the museum were transformed into an open co-working space with free Wi-FI, a living room with ping-pong, and a common library and film-screening room. The exhibition explores the potential of public space, and uses the case example of Basel to propose new communal urban typologies. We had lots of fun and met many interesting new people who came to the lectures and symposiums hosted by S AM. And the Forum Basel exhibition was a truly fresh and lively event.

©K O S M O S

The third component of our participation in the FA festival was a lecture/talk at the Museum of Architecture in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Here we had another opportunity to meet with the co-curators of "Forum Basel" to discuss it and present our ideas about public space to the public. The symposium took the title "breaking down the walls" – and we do hope we broke some! The several-day event was organised in a very nice location, and the best thing was the multi-disciplinary character of the participants, with very diverse topics for the discussions and panels, and the opportunity for us to meet other architects, artists, curators, journalists and writers.

We really liked all of the events connected with FA, and would be happy to take part again next year! We already have some new ideas!

– K O S M O S Architects, Moscow, Basel, New York and Bangkok

K O S M O S Architects is an office collaborating virtually, bringing together partners based in Basel, Moscow, Bangkok and New York. K O S M O S designs projects and environments of all types and scales: from a door handle to a city; from hardcore architecture to pop-up art installations. The office combines art and technology, global experience with respect to local context, European professionalism and Russian drive. Find out more on Artem, Leonid and Nikolay and apply to the Call for Ideas 2018.