ADS0: Flow / Sculpting Change in a State of Flux

The studio seeks to reclaim a more direct and physical engagement with space by exploring performance, installation, and scenography as urban spatial practices. The staged installation of objects, bodies, and gestures in space, allied with the performative ‘activation’ of that space, are weaponized as provocative interventions within urban reality. ADS0 develops projects as testimonies of visual culture and a mixture of architectural manifesto, material experimentation, and narrative speculation. The gradual buildup of projects navigates between critical observation, material experimentation, and radical provocation. ADS0 initiates design through acts of staging, installing, and activating, then evolves architectural projects that engage with drawing, model making, image making, ready-made assemblage, and 1:1 design.

This year, our research theme ‘Flow’ seeks to understand how architecture might respond to the city's states of change and transition. This theme installs notions of constant movement, continuous change, and instability at the heart of our work. It invites us to consider architecture as a play with time, impermanence, and unpredictability, and to reframe architecture as a staging of temporal transitions, an impermanent reorganisation of life, and a collective staging of unfolding change.

We will explore how architecture can initiate behavioural and cultural forms of adaptation in space, and how it can cultivate a more dynamic, participatory, and communal approach to space? How can architecture contribute to processes of adaptation within the urban environment? And how can communities participate within these processes? ‘Flow’ also refers to ‘Fluxus’: the international avant garde movement of the 1960s–70s, which embraced the constant states of flux of everyday reality in the city. Artists such as Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik explored ways to interact more directly with everyday urban life through ‘performative actions’, which were activated using ‘event scores’. Following this precedent, this year ADS0 will observe and interact with the ongoing flux of urban reality through observation, intervention, provocation, and speculation. We will observe the City of London as: a construct in time; a collaged city of permanent impermanence; a historical spectacle of urban sedimentation; and as a staged play of relentless drama, through its repetitions of urban transformation, erasure, and renewal. We will study the evolutionary ‘cycles’ of the city and speculate on its states of transition. The world currently faces multiple forces of radical transformation; how does this impact on the reality of London?

ADS0 cultivates a perspective on space that begins in innocence, but which also holds a radical potential to unpack deeper critical narratives within the unfolding of reality. This perspective depends on the unintentional gaze as the first mode of observation. By scanning the unfolding of reality like watching a movie, this gaze observes reality like the unfolding of a narrative plot, which offers the potential triggers for change, drama, tension, or conflict. While this approach has obvious links to photography, cinema, and performance, for ADS0 it is most related to the theatrical device that the ancient Greeks described as the moment of katastrophè, or the overturning of the plot through a sudden change of unexpected events. For the director Alfred Hitchcock this was the 'moment of suspense', and for the photographer Henri Cartier Bresson it was the 'decisive moment'. Within the context of our studio, katastrophè is a moment that embodies a crucial transformation, containing all the elements needed to overturn the plot. With this moment carrying such an importance, it is transformed from a fleeting instant to an image suspended in time.

In response, the studio will instrumentalize katastrophè as a dramaturgical and narrative concept for the staging of space. We are less interested in disaster, than in those everyday events that can lead to change in the unfolding plot of reality. (We only agree with catastrophists in the sense catastrophe can be as evocative of ideas around renewal, as it is of destruction.) Skepticism is useful, however, as it compels us to suspend our beliefs and engage with alternatives to the usual course of things. Through its conflictual and disruptive nature, the outcome of a catastrophe often constitutes the reversal of what was expected. Everyday catastrophes therefore reveal and unpack the borderlines between the normal and abnormal, expected and unexpected, progress and regression, and the acceptable and unacceptable.

In 2026/27, ADS0 will work on two sites of transition in the City of London: Aylesbury Estate and Smithfield Market. The Aylesbury Estate is a postwar modernist housing estate that has suffered years of neglect, public underinvestment, forced vacancies, and scheduled and now–cancelled plans for demolition, phased redevelopment, and tenant displacement. Inhabited by a courageous community of activist tenants, who belong to the collective ‘Fight for Aylesbury’, the Estate lives in a moment of hope about its long-awaited revival. As a site, Aylesbury inspires research about community building, participatory design, reclaiming of the commons, affordable housing, typological shifts in housing, climate adaptation strategies, refurbishment of modernist heritage, self–build renovation schemes, innovative co-ownership models, and housing cooperatives.

Smithfield Market is a historically–complex site for meat–related commerce and distribution, which now coexists with the city's urban culture and nightlife. The market is gradually being vacated due changes in the food distribution sector, rise in real estate prices, and the growing economic pressure of the City of London for redevelopment. While the remaining vendors can operate until 2029, the transformation of the market into the new Museum of the City of London has already started and the gentrification of the area continues apace. As a site, Smithfield inspires research on the civic culture of public markets, vernacular commerce versus gentrification, urban food culture and distribution, reprogramming heritage as public interior, multifunctional land–use, impermanent infrastructures, public space, and climate adaptation.

This year we will travel to Berlin. A fully integrated part of the studio program, EXODUS will strategically connect our work in London to the city of Berlin by revisiting the 1972 manifesto, Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, produced by Elia Zenghelis in collaboration with Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoé Zenghelis, and Rem Koolhaas. This manifesto will guide us through its observations about the Berlin Wall, consideration of the ‘wall’ as a central object of architectural study, and provocative proposition in the City of London. The field trip reverses the manifesto's trajectory by moving back again, projecting the studio's work in London onto Berlin. During the field trip, we will question the current geo-political climate by revisiting old forces of polarisation and conflict, including the development of the nineteenth–century metropolis, impact of WW2 and its aftermath (on both Berlin and London), residual sites of fascist and communist memory, iconic 1980s architectural projects, major cultural institutions, contemporary art galleries, and vibrant techno club scene.

In 2026/27, we will work with the activist community of Aylesbury Estate and the estate itself as a site of imminent transition. Aylesbury is still populated by a community who are deeply rooted in the collective memory of the neighbourhood, while also facing an uncertain future with imminent eviction and displacement. Urban renewal projects take time and tend to be delayed for long periods of time, during which the hopes of the resident community are held in stasis. Our live project, Zero Hope will address this general state of uncertainty; not by actively fighting it, but by acknowledging and amplifying its reality as an urban condition. Within this ongoing flux, Zero Hope will constitute a moment of halt, connecting with those who are often neglected within processes of transformation. The project will comprise an onsite 1:1 scenography that is a communal event, and a space for non-outcome-focused exchanges with the community of ‘FIGHT 4 AYLESBURY’.

Steve Salembier

Steve Salembier (1976, Belgium) is an architect, stage director, performance artist & educator. He studied architecture at the Henry van de Velde Institute in Antwerp Belgium, before working at Stéphane Beel & Lieven Achtergael architects (1998-2012) while also teaching at UA (2002-2012). Steve gradually developed his personal spatial practice exploring the medium of space through performance, scenography & installation. He founded Atelier Bildraum in 2014. He was awarded the Big in Belgium Award in 2015, the Total Theater Award at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh in 2016 and was nominated to present his work at major festivals such as Avignon, Fast Forward, Next, IETC, Rewire & Sonica. Since 2015 he has been an artist in residence at LOD; an internationally renowned Belgian production house. He develops projects which are currently being staged in major art institutions across Europe: Bildraum (2015), In Between Violet & Green (2017), Reflector (2018), Icon (2019) , Babel (2020), Umwelt (2022), Cycles (2025) and Afterimages (2026). Steve has been teaching at RCA since 2019 where he runs ADS0 and also coordinates the elective-program of SOA MarchDP. Since 2020 Steve also teaches media studies at KUL.

Isabel Pietri

Isabel Pietri (1980, Venezuela) has worked across major residential-led urban regeneration projects in London, Milan and San Francisco as a consultant on design strategy & innovation. Since completing her studies at the Architectural Association in 2007 she has developed her practice through various lenses- as an Architect at a variety of renowned architectural practices, as Design & Product Director for a multi-national developer and through her ongoing involvement in academia as a guest critic at leading universities including the AA, Cambridge and the RCA. Isabel has been a visiting lecturer at the RCA with Dyvik Kahlen (ADS5 2018 to 2021), with whom she also collaborated in practice. Prior to that she was an Associate at dRMM Architects and worked at international practices in London and Berlin. In parallel with her time in practice she participated in traditional construction workshops in Japan, Portugal and the UK. In 2022 Isabel joined Steve Salembier and Louis Philippe Van Eeckhoutte as a visiting lecturer with ADS0.

Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte

Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte (1985, Belgium) is a Brussels-based curator and cultural advisor whose practice spans contemporary art, institutional strategy and artistic research. Since 2018, he has served as curatorial advisor for Art Brussels’ ’68 Forward section, while developing exhibitions and projects with artists and institutions. From 2022 to 2026, he was director of dépendance in Brussels, following his tenure as director of Office Baroque between 2011 and 2018. Earlier, he worked in New York with David Zwirner, Algus Greenspon and the Swiss Institute. In 2018, he was curator of the inaugural Generation Brussels exhibition. In 2020, he co-curated Currents #7 at Z33. He has lectured at the University of Oregon, KU Leuven, HISK and the Misk Art Institute. Alongside his curatorial work, he moderates talks and also contributes to art publications and advises public bodies on contemporary art.