IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

Across architecture and design education, the studio is positioned as central to learning, yet its material and spatial conditions are increasingly unstable. Expanding student numbers, hybrid delivery models, reduced workshop access and post-pandemic spatial reconfigurations have reshaped how studio environments are occupied and experienced. Within increasingly rationalised and metric-driven higher education systems (Giroux, 2014), the studio risks becoming a transitional teaching space rather than a sustained site of practice. This paper argues that the studio is not simply a space of delivery, but an active pedagogic agent that structures participation and belonging. Learning is understood here as situated and relational, formed through co-presence, material engagement and shared activity rather than solely through curriculum design (Dewey, 1938; Lave and Wenger, 1991). The paper examines how different spatial conditions produce distinct patterns of participation and identification through two contrasting case studies: a foundation design studio organised around permanence and continuity and a one-day collective making intervention within a rotational higher education design studio. In the foundation context, residential desks and visible traces of process supported identity formation through sustained inhabitation, fostering autonomy and intrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci, 2000). By contrast, a one-day collective making intervention reorganised spatial hierarchies through temporary occupation, intensifying participation and distributing authorship (Dewey, 1938; Kolb, 1984). Rather than positioning permanence and intervention as oppositional, the paper explores two distinct modes of inhabiting studio space and the forms of belonging they enable. Belonging emerges here not as a by-product of studio culture, but as an active spatial condition influencing participation, confidence and learning experience.