Dark Patterns - Formal Transgression

This collaborative work examines the architectural violence of value-driven form shaped by late-capitalist, neocolonial systems. While promising urban beautification, financial districts produce increasingly impermeable environments that reinforce social, political, and economic crises under the guise of progress. Our focus is Amsterdam Zuidas, the Netherlands' financial district, where we experience these dynamics firsthand. Its facades resemble digital interfaces: responsive systems that both reflect and enable the forces that created them. Though visually appealing, their polished surfaces conceal "dark patterns" engineered to shape behaviour. 

The installation takes the form of a steel structure inspired by modernist facades. By reconfiguring architectural elements into a surface for video and sound, it becomes an engineered grey zone that blurs surface and structure, digital and physical, interior and exterior. Through this transformation, the work gives tangible form to the hidden mechanisms of finance-driven urbanism.

Collaborators: Gionata Girardi, Hannah Weisz, Liam Statz, Patrick Bosmann

Video and sound installation projected onto a 600x300x45cm structure combining glass and steel. 

Exhibited at OZW Gebouw, Amsterdam NL in 2025