CITY IN REVERIE: A Somatic Archive of Urban Objects and Spatial Memory

We are an international design and research collective trained at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (MArch Urban Design) and currently practicing at leading global architectural and design firms. Our work operates at the intersection of spatial ethnography, visual culture, and computational design. Bridging high-level academic research with professional practice, our collective inquiry focuses on spatial phenomenology and data-driven methodologies. We critically examine how everyday urban artifacts shape human experience, translating complex cultural narratives into high-impact 2D visual, graphic, and spatial archives.

Our research practice investigates the threshold where human emotion, thought, and touch interact with urban material culture. Grounded in spatial phenomenology, we examine how mundane street elements, such as benches, kiosks, and awnings, function as physical anchors for human reverie, internal reflection, and emotional states (Body). Positioned as an artificial cognitive agency (AI as Mind), our computational workflows analyze street-level datasets and literary corpora to decipher these affective spatial narratives. By integrating computer vision and semantic segmentation with critical graphic design, our work bridges digital cognition and felt human emotion, transforming spatial data into evocative 2D visual archives of urban memory.