My ‘discovery’ of Grafton Architects occurred in Venice, 2012, near the Atrium of the Biennale’s Main Building or in one of its rambling and always crowded passageways. The corpus delicti was a color photograph of a balsa wood model showing a coral bank-like, semi-transparent megastructure in front of (or somehow juxtaposed to) the Machu Picchu. I had no idea what it was all about. Irritatingly primordial, yet also clearly modern, the configuration evoked the idea of a city. Fundamental while being curiously at odds with the ‘Common Ground’ as framed by David Chipperfield’s Biennale – not to mention Koolhaas’ ‘Fundamentals’ of the subsequent one – it stuck to my mind like a shorthand note of a building that I had been dreaming of without having any idea of it actual make-up...[+]