Theo Games Petrohilos Air Futures

Wall Street, Manhattan, NYC.

Air Futures looks at the trade of Air Rights (TDR’s - Transferable development Rights) and the current development of an Air Bank in New York City which sees the proliferation of a commodity with essentially no intrinsic value. The Air Futures system - the system that trades in this developing commodity, air - embraces both the legality and physicality of the air above New York. Air is manipulated, bought and sold within the Air Futures Building to the ends of the traders, and the financial system as a whole. They are set on Wall Street at the end of an axis that runs from Trinity Church to the west. 

The architecture - based on research within my thesis; ‘The Architecture of Mania’, takes the genesis for its forms and themes from explorations of how thresholds, ritual-paths and hierarchies can create authenticity of value in a traded commodity. The Air Futures Building provides a speculative future for how the alchemic mania of commerce in the present day can become manifest in an architecture that is completely embedded within the system it contains.

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