Paolo Novak

Buildings communicate. They reflect architectural intent and function, but also their transformations and reuses over time. Their spatial organization and interfaces with the outside world structure and reproduce gendered and racialized social relations. As markers of social landscapes, buildings embody intersecting development trajectories and host life projects. This project investigates what is communicated by buildings repurposed as migration infrastructure—places where migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are housed, often against their will. It explores the institutional mechanisms that have turned them into shelters, listens to the stories of those housed within, and unearths the histories of the communities that surround them. By examining how these layers come together in everyday life, Paolo Novak shows how migration infrastructure operates through temporal discontinuities, historical entanglements, and daily improvisations. It posits that such infrastructure is a house of mirrors—reflecting, refracting, and distorting the field of forces that shape it in contingent and unpredictable ways.