Two decades ago, in 2006, Filipino architecture student Vincent Ocasla began designing a city intended to fulfil a single wish: to endure while accommodating as many people as possible. He used SimCity 3000, a city-building game that places a virtual city in the player’s hands and grants them almost unlimited power over its development. A few years later, the experiment took the form of Magnasanti – a radically regular megastructure in which space and infrastructure were subordinated to an overarching logic of optimisation.

From above, Magnasanti may look like the fulfilment of more than one urban wish: a compact, efficient, perfectly organised city, capable of accommodating millions of residents and functioning almost indefinitely. Repetitive modules form an ornamental pattern, and chaos gives way to order. Yet the efficiency of the system comes at a price. What appears rational and effective from the perspective of the plan turns out, from the standpoint of an individual resident, to be far removed from a good life.

Our wishes for cities tend to sound reasonable enough. We want them to be better connected, more accessible and safer. In reality, each of these desires comes up against other needs, interests and constraints. A virtual city allows us to suspend some of them for a moment and test radical ideas in something approaching laboratory conditions. It does not reproduce the city faithfully – paradoxically, this is precisely what allows it to reveal more clearly the consequences of subordinating urban complexity to a single principle. All it takes is for a well-intentioned wish to be taken too literally for utopia and dystopia to begin to look surprisingly alike.

The game’s simplified mechanics also encourage us to fill in the blank spaces of the world it creates for ourselves – to ask questions about what remains unsaid and to imagine what lies beyond the screen. In the exhibition, this attempt to fill in the gaps leads to a shift in perspective and scale: the exhibition space becomes the speculative interior of one of Magnasanti’s millions of living units. Instead of looking down on the city from the privileged perspective of a player who sees the whole and controls its parameters, we try to see it from within – from a place where virtual urbanism, and the system behind it, would have to become someone’s everyday reality.

How does our idea of the ideal city change when, instead of looking at its plan, we try to live in it?

Curator: Kuba Żary

• What More Could You Wish For. Magnasanti
• 02.10 - 06.11.2026

• Museum of Architecture in Wrocław

• Artists: Ksenia Makała, BREDNIE Collective (Zuzanna Wanowicz, Gabi Wolska, Kalina Radomska and Michał Miśków) featuring: John Wilson

• Inspired by a project by: Vincent Ocasla
• Production: Agnieszka Smutek, Wiktoria Litwinowicz
• Promotion: Marta Czyż, Kalina Soska, Iga Bałchanowska, Kajetan Buturlak
• Technical production: Piotr Szyszkowski, Grzegorz Hoja, Dariusz Solawa
• Visuals: Marcin Rosiński, Marta Januszewska