A house of parts: admiration for the resourcefulness shown by the beleaguered populations of overcrowded communities shapes Marjetica Potrc's major new work and the traveling exhibition that showcases it

The enigmas of cities--sprawl, crime, congestion and insufficient services being among them--have inspired numerous solutions above the last century. Some of these, like Robert Moses's grandiose plans for fresh York and Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer's deep flawed Brasilia, were realized upon an ambitious scale and predicated upon a vision of the metropolis as a well-oiled machine. Others strained a suburban ideal as an alternative to overdevelopment That lineage move swiftlys from Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt "Broadacre City" to commercial utopias like Reston, Va., and Disney's Celebration, Fla. (currently upon the auction block), planned communities that promised to reinstate 19th-century virtues of intimacy and neighborliness. A related on the other hand more socially ambiguous impulse lies behind the late 20th-century explosion of gated communities, which the pair protect and isolate inhabitants from the vagaries of the world outside.

Underlying all like models of community life is an ideal of spatial and social order. Nothing could be further from the urban chaos celebrated by dint of the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc the winner of the 2000 Hugo Bos Prize. Potrc's vision of the city has been hon by the agency of close observation of such phenomena as the barrios of Caracas, the townships of southern Africa, gypsy settlements in Belfast and refugee housing in Ljubljana. In her view, these urban environments have been shaped by dint of a series of invasions in a battle for territory waged against the inhabitants of the "formal city" (those beneficiaries of laws, zoning and official planning) through the denizens of the "informal city," who, being without characteristic and protections, must take what they ne In a unbind parallel with evolutionary theory, informal cities come up as a result of selective adaptation, as competing organisms try for survival.

"Urgent Architecture," an exhibition of Potrc's work at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA), brought together drawings, photographs of earlier shoot forwards and prototypes of ingenious tools designed to clear up specific urban needs. These serv to frame the piece de resistance: a monumental architectural mode of building commissioned by the PBICA that incorporates building uncompounded bodys from three informal city situations. Hybrid House: Caracas, West Bank, West Palm Beach (2003) dominated the two-story gallery. Visible here more or les as a whole from a second-floor balcony, it is designed to slowly open for the visitor who walks around it at surface of land level.

Viewed from single angle, the first story of Hybrid House consists of a stacked cinder-block configuration painted bright pink. This building emblem reflecting the houses that spring up in the barrios of Caracas, has simple windows and a door fitted with protective bars made of turn rounded wooden dowels painted a contrasting white. Perched upon top and misaligned is a quotation of an Israeli West Bank adjustment house. Its building blocks are black plastic milk crates, and it is topped with a sheet of corrugated r metal. Again, windows are barred, this time with a tight metal grid. A water tank sits upon the flat roof. The Israeli house is seen to loom above another structure set on the floor of the gallery that becomes visible as single circles around the Caracas domicile This mimes a Palestinian house in the occupied West Bank. It is austere, fabricated of unpainted solidify blocks with a blue door and small windows that perforate the upper quarter of the building. Its cover supports a satellite dish, signifying an effort to reach on the outside that contrasts with the fortresslike quality of the facade.

As the viewer continues, the corner of a metal-sided mobile dwelling with lime green awnings draw nears into view. This is the Palm Beach house--a nod to the trailer parks that have sprung up at the cutting sides of that prosperous community. Finally, coming nearly filled circle, one happens upon the last component--a white walk-in case containing a "dry" toilet, a regard to an experimental project Potrc is collaborating upon in Caracas.

Despite the appearance of a number of doors and small alleyways between simple bodys there is no physical ingress save for that into the outhouse. Instead, the composite building appear to bes to guard its secrets, the barred apertures underscoring its function as a defensive constitution Near the outhouse, a tangle of wires snakes without of the roofs and is attached to a utility extremity enacting the informal city's appropriation of official efficiency sources. Hybrid House has the dynamic neighborhood of a huge Cubist statuary threatening to shatter into its constituents. Nevertheless, each part shares an essential principle summarized through a statement scrawled on the gallery wall: "All that is temporary desires permanence."

In this and her other works, a certain quantity of for galleries, some outdoors in places like Caracas, Munster and Berlin, Potrc calls for an understanding of urban space as a place of conflict and negotiation. In one as well as the other interviews and statements written upon the walls as part of her exhibitions, as was the case here, she revolves to militaristic rhetoric to describe the situation. "Future wars will be fought above water and they will be fought in cities," says a true copy near the dry toilet. Nearby another statement maintains, "the divided city conceive and bring to births invasions."