Haunted Futures of Architectural Past

This project explores hauntology as a method for architectural design, working with the traces of unrealised futures and the lingering presence of abandoned imaginaries. Rather than treating architecture as fixed or disciplinary, the work engages with ghosts of past utopias and speculative infrastructures to question how design might remain tethered to what has been lost, deferred, or forgotten.

Applying this method, the project reimagines Ron Herron’s “Walking City” through a hauntological lens. The machine is not envisioned as a triumphant figure of mobility and freedom but as a spectral artefact—an architectural body bound by the very conditions it inhabits. In its wear, decay, and impossibility, the Walking City becomes a design provocation: a reminder that architecture is always shaped by what it cannot escape, and that its futures are as much haunted as they are imagined.

keywords: hauntology; architectural design; speculative design

• year: August 2025 — ongoing