exCHANGE Assemblage project wins award

The 2025 winner of the Matt Carapiet Humanitarian Design Award is Lok Chow Charlotte for her “ex:CHANGE Assemblage. This is a modular architectural system designed to support civil resistance through fast, adaptive deployment across the urban landscape.

It inhabits the overlooked and interstitial spaces of the city - canals, rooftops of existing and vacant buildings - embedding itself as parasitic infrastructure that remains dormant until activated. These modules evade surveillance and centralisation by dispersing through the city, then converging when needed to host protests, provide sanctuary, or facilitate autonomous organising.

Each module is lightweight, reconfigurable, and easily transported - assembled by hand, linked by a shared design language, and adapted to site-specific conditions. Their presence challenges normative boundaries between public and private, legal and illegal, temporary and permanent.

This is an architecture of immediacy and resistance, built not for spectacle but for action.

The project embraces participatory design, critical spatial practice, and the urgency of reimagining civic space in a time of ecological and social crisis.