VIRTUAL Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

Increasingly mandated through accreditation bodies such as the ARB, and adapted by institutions with an eye towards the market, pedagogy in architecture is seeing a move towards an optimised, vocational approach. Yet, reducing design education to an attempt to comprehensively problem-solve the obvious in the present day takes a known future as a given. How might we equip nascent architects to be agile in responding to the unforeseen? Through M Arch Studio DS25 at University of Westminster, we put forward the approach of indulging in unabashed, speculative imagination. Taking into account the complexity, vicissitudes, and even absurdities of possible futures. Body, other, and world are interconnected and channeled to think through and beyond present predicaments. In this way, the studio becomes a collective research laboratory, generating an ongoing collection of radical possibilities in divergent futures. Beginning by questioning the human body as an originating agent of architecture, and finding inherent otherness and relationality in narrative-based scenarios, parallel worlds (that of the imagination and that of the ‘real’) are spliced together. The studio suggests that envisioning adventurous architecture entangled in complex world-building ecologies can lead to critical vantage points. This pedagogical approach centres around posing questions without a predetermined outcome. The unknown is engaged by students and teachers alike, embarking on an unfolding iterative process. Clearer understandings of the pitfalls and possibilities of our present and future architectural realities emerge from these diverse perspectives.