ADS Themes 2026/27

The core of the programme is a series of project-based activities taught in the first-and second-year design studio units. These are conducted through a vertically integrated system of Architectural Design Studios (ADS) with diverse and innovative positions on contemporary architectural practice that constantly inspire, challenge, motivate, and support each student's individual approach.

Each ADS has two to three dedicated tutors and offers a unique outlook on architecture, thematic interests, and corresponding skill sets that together establish a pedagogical framework articulated through the ADS brief. In their own ways, each studio challenges the role of the architect and considers how architectural design can embody creative responses in an experimental and practical way. The interests of the respective studios span major theoretical and practice-based aspects of architecture today.

Important to the ADS structure is peer learning, with first- and second-year students working alongside one another. The community of students in each ADS is itself an essential structure of the learning environment. The student desks and working spaces are arranged loosely according to ADS to foster collective work and engagement.

Tutors: Steve Salembier, Isabel Pietri & Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte

ADS0 explores agency in architecture. The studio challenges architecture's modes of production and initiates design through intervention in the city. ADS0 pushes design beyond the comfort zone of mere simulation to cultivate more immediate and intuitive ways to intervene directly within the ongoing continuum of reality.

Read the full ADS0 brief

Tutors: Matthew Blunderfield & Cathy Hawley

This year ADS1 will work at the scale of the room, developing housing projects around a common space for public life. We are interested in rooms as instruments of sociability. Every room sets conditions for its occupants: how they enter; whether they can see and hear one another; how it warms them on a wet autumn day or keeps them cool in a heatwave; whether they stay for a moment or an afternoon. A room is an argument for how to be together, and how to be alone.

Read the full ADS1 brief

Tutors: Merve Anil, Lodovica Guarnieri & Mhamad Safa

ADS2 designs for life in unlivable waters. Working at the intersection of socio-environmental justice and architecture, the studio explores the hostile conditions caused by capitalist hydropolitics, developing architectural responses that mobilise water as a site of struggle for repair, sovereignty, and care.

Read the full ADS2 brief

Tutors: Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe (Cooking Sections)

Is the Thames a river? Its meanders barely meander. Its tributaries are buried underground. Its banks are largely built up. People cannot swim, or dare to drink, pollution floats around. The Office of Thames Studies (OTS) will investigate England's longest watercourse and rehearse alternative futures for its watershed.

Read the full ADS3 brief

Tutors: Tom Greenall, Matteo Mastrandrea & Nicola Koller

This year ADS4 will explore the concept of petro-masculinity’ to examine the intersection of environmentalism and masculinity, and the historic role of fossil fuel systems in promoting white patriarchal rule.

Read the full ADS4 brief

Tutors: Nerissa Yeung, Alex Cotterill & Amin Taha (GROUPWORK)

‘A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier’. Mies van der Rohe was not being modest. A chair has no site to hide behind, no programme to excuse it, and no façade to distract from the joint. It can be picked up, turned over, sat on, and judged by a body within seconds. Every decision – where the load goes, how two materials meet, what is shown, and what is concealed – is exposed at arm’s length. It is architecture without the alibi.

In 2026/27, ADS5 begins with these difficult objects.

Read the full ADS5 brief

Tutors: Guan Lee, Kate Darby & Marco Campardo

How key to being human is some friction in our lives? Friction-Maxxing is the intentional practice of choosing less convenient, more hands-on options in our daily life to resist ultra-convenience, build tolerance for discomfort, and create more meaningful experiences. This year ADS6 are exploring the idea of friction as a material, economic, social, or psychological force.

Read the full ADS6 brief

Tutors: Sabrina Morreale & Lorenzo Perri (Lemonot)

ADS7 deploys conviviality as a tool of gentle, socio-political resistance. We reject passive interactions in favour of active bodily engagement, exuberant performances, and nuanced everyday rituals. For us, conviviality is connected to subtle quotidian practices; existing in a balance between daily habits and creative acts of improvisation.

Read the full ADS7 brief

Tutors: Ippolito Pestellini & Erica Petrillo (2050+) & Marisa Musing

ADS8 Sport Stories explores the spaces of sport as a critical lens to investigate emerging zones of environmental, social and political tensions, as well as the opportunities they generate. The underlying thesis of ADS8 is that the spatial dimensions of sport unfold across scales from the body to the city and the environment. These scales bring collective life into contact with a series of critical thresholds – cultural, urban, environmental, and technological – that each represent a liminal condition. A space in between that resists precise definitions, allows tensions to be negotiated, and other forms of collective life to take shape.

Read the full ADS8 brief

Tutors: John Ng & Michela Falcone

‘Uno, una pala, una duna, una imagen. Quinientos unos, una pala cada uno, una duna, una línea, una imagen, una voz, quinientas acciones, quinientas acciones quinientas veces, una cima, el otro lado, quinientas voces, mil pisadas, quinientos descienden, quinientos palean... la arena cede, la duna se mueve, el viento sopla, una nube de polvo... y la duna sigue ahí.’

Read the full ADS9 brief

Tutors: Davide Sacconi, Gianfranco Bombaci & Olivia Neves Marra

In 2026/27 ADS10 considers the baroque condition of ecology. Every act of production rearranges bodies and resources, soils and waters, infrastructures, species and climates; every form of cooperation depends upon a material world that it transforms. Baroque Ecologies are plural, impure and contested: fields in which capitalist and non-capitalist logics, human and more-than-human lives, extraction and care remain entangled without reconciliation.

Read the full ADS10 brief

Tutors: Francisco Lobo & Romea Muryń (LOCUMENT)

ADS11 challenges how architecture can respond to the deep geological, ecological, metabolic, social, and political systems to reflect and situate intergenerational stewardship of the environment we live in.

Read the full ADS11 brief

Tutors: Benjamin Reynolds & Valle Medina (Pa.LaC.E)

ADS12 is an experimental architecture studio. An exhalation is the thing you cannot take back. Biology now murmurs in datasets: breath, pulse, sleep, gait, temperature, and attention are captured, priced, and recombined. Every exhalation trains a model. Recorded behaviour establishes probability. In 2026/27 we will seek to resist such predictive probabilities.

Read the full ADS12 brief

Tutors: Bethany Edgoose & Nathan Su (Inferstudio)

ADS13 is a studio that investigates adaptation to the climate crisis through scenario making. This year, we turn our attention to the cities and their edgelands: looking for sites on the cusp of phase change. At these urgent junctures, shifts to how and why we design are needed to help steer these changes into futures we want, rather than futures that happen to us.

Read the full ADS13 brief

Tutors: Yufei He, James Horkulak & Pan Hu (dorsa)

ADS 14 confronts the monsters of our time and employs whichever medium necessary to tell optimistic stories from within. We call them unicorns.

Read the full ADS14 brief

Tutors: Freya Bolton, Freya Spencer–Wood & Rosa Whiteley

ADS15 uses architectural and fabrication methods to develop forms of resistance to policies that force through (a certain kind of) green transition at any cost. We understand prototyping as a political and research method. Prototype design is not the illustration of research. It is the means through which research becomes public, testable and consequential.

Read the full ADS15 brief