AR 2025-2026 Studio Descriptions ED4

This studio proposes a paradigm shift in architectural thinking, moving from the design of static objects to the orchestration of living processes. We begin with a fundamental premise: conventional systems are entropic, tending towards chaos and failure when stressed. In contrast, this studio explores negentropic systems, what we term Behaviour-Active Systems (BAS), which self-organize and move towards emergent design precisely because of stress. We see this principle mirrored in society, where concentrated pressures give rise to short-lived, dynamic, and searching voices, temporary communities organizing to meet urgent cultural and social needs. Our task is to develop a sympathetic, animate, and engaged architecture that can support these fleeting moments of collective life.

Our central project is the Anti-Pavilion. This is an architecture against the narrow strictures of form finding in service of only optimization and permanence. Instead of designing for idealized material behavior, we will embrace material behavior as an expression of distinct bias that offers the gift of a collaborative partner rooted in the view of materials as possessing abundant animacy. In this studio, we seek to create "spatial and programmatic misfits". Our take will consider temporary structures as emergent vessels docking in the tenuous harbors of urban life and latent ecologies. These are not buildings with a story imposed upon them, but constructions whose tectonic and inhabited narratives lead to their unique provocations and obsessions.

The design process for this studio is inverted from convention. We do not begin with site or program, but with play. Each student will select a "Behaviour-Active System", wet, flexible, or otherwise dynamic, and build a physical "sandbox" to engage with it directly. This is a research studio in the truest sense, dedicated to learning through making and experimentation. Here, we design from animacy, not artifact; from behavior, not typology. Form becomes an expression of how the system distributes stress through geometric deformation. Our role shifts from director to collaborator, co-imagining through the emergent tendencies of the material. As Professor Lambros Malafouris states, "Handmaking is at the heart of human becoming," and it is through this direct material engagement that we will discover our system's potential.

“The significance of the process of making by hand cannot be overstated. Handmaking is at the heart of human becoming. This is not a statement just about the past; it is also about our future: It applies to the modern digital designer as it applies to the Palaeolithic tool maker.”
- Professor Lambros Malafouris

Only after deeply understanding the system's behavior can we ask: "What architecture could this system be good for?" You will find a context and a temporary purpose within the urban environment that allows your system to be explored to its fullest potential. We will reference ingenuity in the vernacular, infrastructures of protest, eruptions of programmatic necessity, and the staging of aspirational futures; not as aesthetic artifacts, but as models of spatial and structural urgency where indeterminacy and unstable grounds are the genesis of design logic. Our projects will promote both practical and radical economies including: material sourcing, labor cultures, programmatic/energetic/material life-cycles, social biases, politics, cultural rooting, and our obligation to address the urgent and often ignored more-than-human ecologies.

The project must be demonstrably buildable. Through careful drawings and "full-scale" performative models, students will explore the entire assembly, from structure and envelope to foundation and furniture. But beyond technical resolution, we must dream deeply into the world these structures could create. Our representations, inspired by the work of Mark West, must explore the cultural implications of your intervention and consider your design as a proposal for a new way of living, however temporary. We are not seeking the hermetic biodome or the generic housing box, but a third way: a material-guided, human-engaged architecture that embraces impermanence and creates a framework for the negentropic city to emerge.
 

Buildings are often designed to last decades or centuries, and their decay is usually seen as a sign of failure. Most designers assume that architecture is meant to be permanent and unchangeable. This studio will challenge that view and invite students to rethink architecture’s relationship with time, embracing transformation, impermanence, and the life cycles of materials as factors that can positively influence our designs. The BIOM_Studio will look at architecture as a temporary entity that welcomes entropy as a partner and recognizes that every beginning contains its end.

Throughout the term, we will apply biomimetic design methods to thoughtfully draw lessons from nature on decay and to address the societal and technological needs of our field. In nature, decomposition is not just an endpoint, but a regenerative process that feeds new growth, and so forest floors, coral reefs, and intertidal zones are sustained by the breakdown of organic matter, with fungi, bacteria, and decomposers managing complex nutrient cycles. Exploring these processes can guide the development of architectural systems designed for controlled disassembly, material recovery, and ecological integration. Nature’s decaying structures demonstrate resilience through transformation, and their gradual breakdown creates microhabitats, supports biodiversity, and redistributes resources. By applying these principles to architecture, we can imagine buildings whose decay creates opportunities: walls that become seedbeds, facades that erode to reveal new functions, or structural components that serve as habitat once their primary use has ended. This approach advances beyond biomimetic design toward creating buildings that actively contribute to ecological regeneration.

This studio will challenge students to integrate decay as both a technical and narrative subject. Projects will explore bio-based and biodegradable materials, reversible and modular construction techniques, and the embedding of decomposition pathways in the design process. Precedents will be drawn not only from cutting-edge architectural experiments, but from ecological systems themselves, using biomimetic methods to translate natural cycles into spatial and material strategies. By learning from nature’s ability to transform breakdown into renewal we can move toward a practice of architecture that is regenerative, temporal, and deeply entangled with the living systems of our planet.

URB&POLIS is an architecture and urban design studio that emphasizes the role and regenerative potential of infill architectural projects for making of good city form and living. It explores the conceptual and concrete dimensions of the concepts of URBS (Latin term which refers to the infrastructural or built dimension of cities) and POLIS (Greek term which refers to the idea of life in community). The studio elaborates on the techné-politike of architecture in the pursue of a better urban and civic life. Conceptually, URB&POLIS finds inspiration in ideas advanced by Pier Vittorio Aureli’s The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Of particular interest to our formative objectives is the consideration of a mutual or reciprocal relationship between the material and formal qualities of building―the making of the built environment, or URBS―and civic life, or CIVITAS. Inherent in URBS, CIVITAS intertwines with, and refers to the Greek idea of the POLIS, from which the city obtains holistic, physical and political, structure.

Architecturally—in terms of generative processes of architectural design—the studio elaborates on the inherent tension between the autonomy of architectural form and the collective, civic, and ultimately political, forces that shape the vast territory (or ecology of the larger physical, cultural and socioeconomic entity) that constitutes the city. In addition to the Studio’s thematic concentration on the possibilities of urban architecture to contribute to good city making and living, other meaningful ideas permeate our studio’s educational objectives. Those relate to generative processes―or questions of creative method. We will explore the notion and use of embodied architectural images (poetic ones) and metaphorical―or metamorphic―processes of poetic imagination as they translate into strategies of trope and composition in architectural design.

Up until field trip week (Oct 20-24), Winnipeg will be the place and subject of our analysis and design explorations; then after, our site and focus move to Montreal. The term begins gaining collective understanding of the singularities of our city, with a toolkit that includes readings, site visits, drawing and graphic analysis, and the study of documentary and fictional material. Our first project will take place in the interstices of our local context, reshaping and sensibly re-densifying existing urban residential environments, considering ethical and aesthetic aspects of urban and architectural design, interpreting existing physical, cultural and historical conditions, while creatively referring to meaningful ‘precedents’ from modern and contemporary architectural traditions. As a question of creative method, ‘precedents’ will be treated as poetic images metaphorically reimagined and metamorphosed as re-creations of new environments, in the vein of Gaston Bachelard’s “poetics of Imagination” and JuhaniPallasmaa’s translations to architecture via the notion of embodied image. Individually, you will conceive two buildings suited to ‘house’ contemporary life, offering open inhabitation within small scale limitations: small, contemporary mixed-use buildings intended for a pluralistic and inclusive society. You will develop awareness and in-progress competencies of comprehensiveness in architectural design, considering the complex articulation of structure, envelope building systems, environmentally friendly techniques, and equally complex cultural programmatic aspects.

The students will benefit from the opportunity to join a field trip to Montreal, study and experience, first-hand, meaningful settings and buildings that relate to the core studio theme. Studio field trips are not mandatory; therefore, special accommodation will be granted to any student who cannot visit Montreal in direct personal experience.