Reimagining Economic and Legal Space: The Design of a Potemkin City in Ljubljana

Cities are not static—they evolve through adaptation, reuse, and transformation. The project proposes a new approach: material bank repurposes deconstructed materials, Potemkin city tests façades in real time, and seasonal urban ground reclaims streets through legal tools. Intelligent ruin designs durable yet flexible structures, while economic detail makes cost a design tool, ensuring financial clarity. By reshaping economic and legislative space, these steps cultivate renewal, preserving identity while enabling cities to adapt, endure, and evolve—rooted in their past yet open to change.

This project rethinks how cities evolve, moving beyond rigid zoning and wasteful demolition toward a model that regenerates urban space from within. Instead of expanding through master plans, the city is treated as a living system, where materials, spaces, and infrastructures are adapted, reused, and transformed through architectural and legislative tools. At the core of this strategy is the material bank, an urban resource system that collects, sorts, and reintegrates deconstructed materials into new developments. This circular metabolism minimizes waste while preserving the physical continuity of the city. To test new urban identities before permanence, Potemkin city introduces a process of real-time prototyping, assembling temporary façades from reclaimed materials, allowing architectural forms to evolve through iterative adaptation. Beyond material reuse, the project leverages legal mechanisms to reclaim urban space. Seasonal urban ground challenges the dominance of cars by reconfiguring streets as temporary public spaces, expanding urban accessibility while redefining ownership. Intelligent ruin ensures that the built environment remains adaptable over time, designing structures with layered durability—where core elements endure while flexible configurations evolve with changing needs. The economic viability of this process is embedded through economic detail, reframing cost as a proactive design tool that ensures financial clarity from the outset, preventing inefficiencies and reducing waste. Through this approach, architecture is no longer fixed—it is an ongoing process of renewal. The city learns from itself, integrating material, spatial, and legislative strategies into an adaptive framework that grows rooted in its past yet open to change.