The architecture of exception within and counter to

The permeating phenomenon of the zones – as an extraterritorial enclave and state of exception – produces variegated forms of sovereignty that, despite their heterogeneous and camouflaging languages, become manifest throughout their architecture. Mostly investigated due to their economic and geopolitical role, recently zones emerged beyond the overwhelming logistics-oriented process of urbanization whence they’re spreading. Acting as a topology of enclaves and urban templates, sometimes these spatial devices endorse space of representation, that remarks their cultural role within urban imagination and its fulfillment. This paper traces a trajectory comparing two controversial episodes, where these phenomena materialize in architecture. The first examines the spatial establishment of Khorgos (Kazakhstan), where the monumental CH-KZ border settles a stage for spectacular scenes and hosts an ambivalent kind of ideology. The second addresses the instant rise and fall – but still expected – of the new city of Lazika (Anaklia, Georgia), where the municipality building is standing as a landmark for the society that leads to the Rose Revolution but it has never existed on-site, so beyond it. Although Lazika and Khorgos display some similarities, it is possible to question how their architecture embodies these processes and exception apparatuses through its form, as specific sovereign expression. It reveals respectively a certain degree of heteronomy, in the first instance, and autonomy, for the second. In fact, in some cases the exception becomes the norm, once absorbed by the vast network; in other, it becomes partis of an archipelago of fragments. Therefore, whereas zones usually challenge the space of sovereignty by virtue of economic and political re-scaling under deregulation, on the other hand they represent a political mean that elicit contestation and criticism, even by the construction of two opposing city images: the city as an object produced, distributed and consumed; or the city as a project.