In 1973 artist Gordon Matta-Clark purchased fifteen ‘useless’ pieces of land  in the city of New York.
All of the plots were forgotten, left over pieces of land, inadvertently created by the rules of the neighbouring plots, real estate regulations, or surveying errors.

Some of these plots were “untenable” : a pavement, a strip less than 1m wide, an unusable  gap between two houses, and Matta Clark paid on average  $50 for each plot. Matta Clark, a trained architect, mapped, recorded and documented the “irrationalities of a city”.
In this seminal project ‘ FAKE ESTATES’  he questioned the meaning of land, property, urban-rules and the increasing commercialisation of (built / non-built) space.

ODD LOTS
Within the context of the 1030 Brussels area code, the participants in the BUILTNOTHING studio will choose and investigate a number of ‘irrational’ odd lots within the 1030 Brussels District. This will include recording plot dimensions, density, daylighting, address, context, demographics, morphology, …,…
They will then design a collective, inhabited structure, taking cognisance of tectonic and spatial planning requirements. They must turn the unviable into the tenable.
The lost into the found. 

1030
The Schaarbeek 1030 postcode covers an area of 7.8km2 and an urban population of over 130,000. In the last 40 years this area has seen a 75% population increase, in contrast the population of Belgium increased by 15%. Correspondingly, the population density of this district is more than 17,000 inhabitants/km2. This is three times higher than the general figure for the city of Brussels, and 40 times higher than Belgium as a whole.
The viability of alternative building morphologies and typologies is therefore (arguably) keener here than in urban/suburban areas with much lower densities and with a much higher ratio of usable public space