ADS Themes 2023/24

This year ADSO will focus on the development of “installative spatial environments”, systematically narrating about ongoing change. These environments or installations will act as as a pictorial stage or as a speculative scenography for the particular themes of change we individually engage with. In 2023/24, ADS0 will operate on the theme of ‘AGENCY.’ This theme reflects the core objective of the studio– to develop unique and personal spatial practices capable of transforming the autobiographical into actual agency. Agency generally refers to a person's capacity to impact things that are both internal and external to the self. More specifically, within the context of ADSO, AGENCY becomes the individual's potential and ability to affect change within particular themes of interest through a consciously developed material spatial practice.

Read the full ADS0 brief

What does it mean to design for pleasure in the context of climate breakdown?Is luxury antithetical to a sustainable society? 

Questions of pleasure and comfort can be overlooked when architecture’s success is increasingly determined by empirical measure, be it decarbonisation, material provenance, or thermal performance. When it comes to reuse, the excesses of past generations have of course become the fuel of creative possibility in the present, but perhaps there is a new extravagance to be found in contemporary architecture – a new bohemianism, a delight of little means. This year, ADS1 will seek an architecture that both embraces re-use and upcycling, whilst pursuing new aesthetic clarity, learning from direct physical, embodied, experience. In the overlap between the provisional and hedonistic, we will search for a new idea of 'the good life' and the small pleasures of life. This year we will explore new arts of living on a damaged planet, finding comfort where it never seemed possible.

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ADS2 examines the multi–temporal and trans–border interactions that shape the life of our global cities. The global city has become the central node of the time–bound network of global finance. It regulates temporal disparities and links geographically disparate localities across the planet through extractive logistical infrastructures and the actions of the financialized machine of global capital. In response to this chrono–spatial condition, ADS2 will craft hypothetical, yet restorative, architectural interventions that will serve as destabilising and regenerative forces within the global city. The studio will foster students to develop spatial propositions that disentangle and reconfigure these assemblages of time, power, and geography.

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Wetlands, swamps, bogs, and marshes are all incredibly rich habitats. For centuries they have been drained to ‘improve’ land for farming and real estate, displace people avoiding state control, or eradicate mosquito-borne diseases within settler–colonial regimes. In 2023/24, ADS3 will look at the legacies of desiccated lands that are struggling to fluctuate between wet and dry. Through the lens of CLIMAVORE – a framework that explores how to eat in the era of human–driven climate change – ADS3 will use architectural tools to map ecological and legal struggles in landscapes trying to stay afloat and in place.

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In 2023/24, ADS4 will built on our previous work on the misrepresentation of land and landscape by considering what lessons architecture could learn from different types of ‘plant’? Entities which, in their own way, tend to exist in the background. Advocating for the background – or for a more peripheral existence – is often framed as a sort of retreat. Solutions to the challenges we face will never, it is assumed, be found away from the action. Yet it is exactly in these areas ADS4 believes we must look for more radical modes of existence. The background has always been a testbed for society. A place to explore the plausibility of our psychological and sociological intuitions, and to calibrate beliefs, desires, and intentions.

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ADS5 are obsessed with the poetry of architectural details, the narratives from which they stem, and the narratives that they form. In 2023/24, the starting point of the studio will be the architectural figure of the enclosure. Throughout the year, we will design, draw, and model buildings at all scales, exploring the poetic and communicative potential of materials and tectonics. We will consider and operate within the complex ethical frameworks we must negotiate as architects. Students will be challenged to weave history and fiction, narrative and poetry, negative embodied carbon design, and a deeper understanding of craft in their design projects, which will also propose nuanced reassessments of societal values.

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Local Adaptation can happen anywhere. Local Adaptation considers the architectural relationship with nature (sun, wind, rain, etc.) as the driving force in a design process that allows specific design outcomes to emerge in response to location. Our ADS6 approach will explore the consequences of taking a highly contextual, highly sensitive approach to investigating and intervening in a place. We believe by looking at something closely enough, valuable information will appear. How can a project emerge from detailed and systematic examination? How can we look closely? How do we keep track of the larger context while looking closely? How far is close enough?

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In 2023/24, ADS7 will continue to practise forms of conviviality. We will use these convivialisms as tools to challenge all of the possibilities of coexistence. In particular, this year the studio will investigate what it means to 'live together with difference' within the super-diverse settings and migration-driven processes of our contemporary world. Our cities are now defined by inhabitants of different origins, or faiths, with different economic, legal, or social status. Negotiating difference is therefore a natural part of meeting, negotiating, and living in public spaces, which often become spaces of 'visibility and encounter between strangers.' Under what circumstances might these encounters be considered convivial? And what forms of design can originate from these encounters?

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As we continue to build on ADS8’s investigations into anatomies of Empires, this year we will examine the continuum of extractivism through the lens of afterlives: the continuum of toxic climates. ADS8 is envisioned as a migratory studio that situates itself between colony and metropole, and between historically and culturally entangled territories. While chapter one 22/23 focused on Portugal and its colonial counterparts, this second iteration opens with the possibility of students situating themselves in a geography – a sacrifice zone along the colonial continuum – of their own choosing. Drawing from the spectral, the speculative, and the political, we will generate spatial propositions pushing for microclimates against the afterlives of toxicity, prompting us to imagine reparative justice at different scales.

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At sea level, the density of air is 1.222 kilograms per m3. Imagine a space with an area of 10,000 m2. A space with a living breath comprising 36,660 kg of air flowing freely within it, energy passing from one particle to another on contact. How much mass would you add or subtract to this space to make it a piece of architecture? Would you add the collective presence of our physical bodies? The beep-beeps of technology? Additional air to increase the barometer of the environment? ADS9 asks how little material do we need to compose space and design architecture?

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ADS10 explores the idea of a Savage Architecture, an architecture that is not just shelter or comfort, nor display and reproduction of wealth, but rather the basis of our urge to come together and engage in collective rituals. In 2023/24, ADS10 will explore the potential of the atrium archetype to illuminate the contradictions of capital and provide a platform for emancipation. We believe the architecture of the atrium can become an instrument to allow workers and communities to collectively control and direct labour and its products. An architecture that is conceived, built, and used as a way to foster solidarity, collective action, in order to commit to a more inclusive, equitable, and just society.

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ADS11 follow the Locument methodology of using architecture and film as analytical, critical, and subversive tools to dissect contemporary issues. We will combine research with documentary and design proposals, engaging with communities, organisations, institutions and private entities. The studio aims to investigate the dynamics of non-degradable chemicals in soil, water, human and other–than–human bodies, and the built environment. This investigation will enable an understanding of political ecologies and land regulatory ownership regimes through the lenses of fluid contamination, informing the basis for the design project. We will encounter the perverse unequal triangular relationship between: the polluter, the chemical, the affected (human & other–than–human).

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ADS12 'Glass-Friends'' surveys the spatial and social scenarios of multispecies friendship in a time of companion networks with artificial entities and diminishing haptic experiences. Will the sudden collapse of friendship into the bonds of a fibre-optic cable be the lens through which to look for new architecture? One of the core interests of Glass-Friends will be to investigate how materials that can be considered ‘strangers’ can be united. To inform and make these unions, we will explore a variety of techniques. From horticulture, we will explore techniques such as grafting (joining part of plants), ikebana (balance), ikenobo (seasonal awareness), and shun (binding methods). The techniques of collective practices such as quilting – ie. chain stitches, whipstitches, basting – will be transferred to other mediums such as film. And material details – ie. complex joinery assemblages – and alloys – new materials formed from alliances with two or more metals – will be explored in the digital realm.

Read the full ADS12 brief