ADS Themes 2025/26

ADS0 is a studio with a focus on performance, scenography, and installation. The studio's program fundamentally interrogates agency in architecture and explores how the unfolding spectacle of reality can be shaped through staged interventions in space. ADS0 pushes architectural practice beyond the comfort zone of speculative simulation and, instead, urges more intuitive and immediate ways of intervening directly within the ongoing continuum of reality.

Read the full ADS0 brief

“You have to understand that Milton Keynes was designed one wet weekend in Camden by a bunch of hippie architects stoned out of their heads.”

It’s hard not to believe this account from the late Christopher Woodward, who had worked for the MK Development Corporation in the 1960’s and 70’s. This year ADS1 will look at visionary collective housing in the context of the “new town” as a newly relevant topic in both the design studio and in contemporary practice. Milton Keynes will be our initial site of study and experimentation. 

Read the full ADS1 brief

ADS2 designs for life in unlivable environments. Working at the intersection of socio-environmental justice and architecture, the studio fosters systemic and reparative projects that support the emergence of liberatory futures from the ruins of empire.

Occupation, contamination, displacement, and ecological collapse are spatial conditions that constrain life and living across bodies, species, and generations. Emerging at the intersection of global extractive infrastructures and the systemic dispossession of local ecologies and communities, unlivability is where “the most extreme point of human [and non-human] suffering and injustice” occurs. It is not simply a consequence of capitalist development but a designed condition that ensures its continuity and expansion.

Read the full ADS2 brief

Donkeys graze on invasive grasses in abandoned quarries. Boar reclaim suffocated bogs along borderlands and coal mines. Shrimp take over demilitarised zones. Pigeons proliferate in abandoned factories. Water buffalo trample flooded mine pits. In 2025/26, ADS3 examines how animals struggle and thrive in post-industrial sites, forming new relations and alliances with humans across damaged terrains.

Read the full ADS3 brief

This year, ADS4 will start at the end.

Endings surround us. The world is saturated with them. Some people, places, and things experience them more acutely than others, and these asymmetries are critical to knowing why endings matter. In the face of ecological, humanitarian, and geopolitical catastrophe, asking where things end (up) is more urgent than ever.

Read the full ADS4 brief

‘Silly with purpose’, ‘form fools function’, or ‘virtue wears whimsy’. Follies have accompanied architecture for millennia, using and subverting received conventional vocabularies to challenge our constructed orthodoxies. The writer Rose Macaulay, artists Jose Davila and Julia Romano, historian Gottfried Semper, architect Luigi Moretti, and engineer Ove Arup span five hundred years and diverse cultures, yet each reminds us that what we make is rarely born of the realms of utility alone.

Read the full ADS5 brief

"Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of materials." — Anni Albers

Building has an enormous and lasting impact, shaping social relations, economies, and access to resources. Each act of making is local, partial, and specific, tied to the conditions, histories, and ecologies that give it form. Before we make, what questions of responsibility, legacy, and long-term impact must we confront?

Read the full ADS6 brief

“The truth is, of course, that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time” - David Bowie

“Route” is simultaneously a verb and a noun: it indicates a way or course taken in getting from a starting point to a destination, but also the act of directing someone along that specific course.

A “route” imbues a space with directionality and physical movement. For ADS7, architecture lies exactly there, between place(s) and action(s).

Read the full ADS7 brief

Both spectacle and practice, sports capture global attention and resources more than almost any other activity, while also permeating everyday life in streets, parks, squares, and beaches. Sport is thus a societal mirror, reflecting class, racial, gender, and ableist biases, at the same time that it offers glimpses of more inclusive, intersectional futures.

Sports are never neutral: they are a contested, ideological terrain.

Read the full ADS8 brief

ADS9 focuses on land by challenging architecture’s indifferent relationship with the land. The studio’s investigation centres on a simply stated but complex design question: How does architecture touch the ground?

Wild is not nature. Nature wears gloves. Wild bares its teeth. Architects tried to tame it, with boulevards, bylaws, and Bauhaus. But even glass remembers sand, and concrete mourns the quarry. Wild is feral, it is a word that escapes boundaries. Wild ruptures and rebels.

Read the full ADS9 brief

Within and against a world where every thought and action is exploited for its economic value, a constellation of collective subjects – workers cooperatives, indigenous communities, collaborative organisations, etc. – is struggling to preserve, develop and practise ways to reclaim the wealth of resources created by capitalism for the common good.

Read the full ADS10 brief

ADS11 conducts research on artificially generated toxicity and its effects on humans, other-than-humans, and the environment. This year’s iteration of ADS 11 will focus on water and soil’s absorption of toxic materials. The contamination of soils, rivers, groundwater, and marine waters by toxic assemblages burdens our bodies and the environment in forms that remain unknown.

Read the full ADS11 brief

Room-spring treats the home as a spring: source, coil, and seasonal surge, where bodies can shed, re-calibrate, and “flower” through Telepeautic Living: attunement at a distance carried by scent, heat, voice, breath and information, choreographing spring-tendril dynamics. Presence is felt rather than seen: programmable atmospheres replace images; timed olfactory chords, dark-listening fields, and thermal gradients invite risk and repair without clinic or crowd.

Read the full ADS12 brief

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is quite clearly Ocean.”

- Arthur C Clarke

Saltwater covers 70% of our planet’s surface. The intricate physical mechanics of the ocean enable habitable terrestrial climates and a breathable atmosphere; it is the reason life (as we know it) is possible.

Read the full ADS13 brief