TRAFFIC is a collaborative design practice working across architecture, urbanism and computation.

We are interested in behaviour, form, the behaviour of form and patterns of occupation of the city and its architecture through the lens of procedural and process-driven experimentation.

This methodology is deployed as a mechanism to engage with the real, the hyper-real and the counterfactual. We observe, research, lecture, analyse, design, speculate, make and exhibit.

TRAFFIC is located in Melbourne, Australia with global projects, interests and collaborations, primarily in Australia, Europe and Asia.

TRAFFIC presents vivid, critical, hyperreal and counterfactual depictions of the city where technology, architecture and urbanism intersect with precision, evocation and nuance shaping individuals, communities and societies.

The work sits at the intersection of the physical (built environment) and post-material realities (metaverse), the threshold of architecture, design, urbanism and computation, the brink between physical objects, and digital artefacts, and the verge of static and real-time sequences.

Increasingly, projects and research are concerned with the depiction of analogous urban experience—a virtual world that is parallel to the physical world, and a physical world that is a proxy for mixed reality experiences—inhabited by a variety of entities, including humans, objects, assets, and artificial intelligences—physical and virtual stuff. A stream of projects and research actively engage post-carbon material futures, and a staged liberation from carbon and carbon-form.

The practice is interested in the potential and transitory nature of the physical city, but also the manner and terms by which physical spaces and structures are emergent gateways and portals, nodes within a network to access and interact with a virtual landscape.

We see urbanism as an immersive, complex and densely plotted apparatus through which we explore themes of technology, economics, politics and society. The city in all its forms is an embedding space for complex and contradictory variables, for advanced technology, AIs, distribution, centralisation, alongside the historic and futuristic hybrids. The emergent city is a field condition of quantum and exponential change, uncertainty and risk.

Through simulation, visualisation, speculation, writing and collaboration TRAFFIC aims to participate in discussions about technology, ecology, economy, culture, politics and contribute to the discourse of design practice research.

Our projects have been published, awarded, and exhibited locally and internationally. Most recently, the work of TRAFFIC has been featured at the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture, the Barcelona Architecture Festival, and the Media Architecture Biennale.

Ian Nazareth

_{Bachelor of Architecture, Master of Architecture
Registered Architect - COA}

Ian Nazareth is an Architect who has practised in Mumbai and Melbourne. Ian is the founder and director of TRAFFIC. He is also an educator and researcher in Architecture and Urban Design at the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, and the former Program Director and Head of Urban Design at RMIT University.

Ian’s professional practice, research and teaching, focuses on the relationship between architecture and the city and has been exhibited internationally.

In addition to leading international and industry-partnered architectural, urban design and research projects, Ian contributes regularly to architectural discourse through lectures, talks, symposia, podcasts, and exhibitions. As an essayist, critic and writer he has been featured in The Architectural Review (UK), MONU (Magazine on Urbanism), Architectural Review Asia Pacific and the Australian Design Review.  He is also the series co-editor for - The Practice of Spatial Thinking (ACTAR).

Ian was previously an Associate Director at the Urban Design Research Institute in Mumbai.

Email

contact@trafficcollective.com

Instagram

@trafficcollective