Design Studio 25 Master of Architecture (MArch RIBA Part 2)
TUTORS: Alessandro Ayuso & Mary Konstantopoulou
Ensembles
Through cinematic world-building, DS25 explores the architectural possibilities arising from the agency of extended embodiments.
This year, our studio started with the premise that architecture is not a stand-alone object. Buildings are enmeshed in places, inhabited and built by people, appropriated and impacted by nature. Similarly, bodies are never in isolation; they are part of a dynamic milieu and inseparable from it.
Approaching the tangled relationship between beings and things, we imagined more-than-human bodies as aggregates of human, inorganic nature, animal and technology. We asked: How would architecture change if the bodies of architecture – occupants, builders, and even buildings themselves – were considered as part of entangled ensembles?
Working in selected sites around Somers Town, near Camden, the students’ proposals tugged at threads beneath the surface, finding potential in unexpected corners.
For example, narrated through a series of stop-motion films, Khushi’s project questioned how architecture might emerge as a collaboration between artificial intelligence and human authorship by intervening in unused pockets of the existing urban fabric. In another project, Suha critiqued architecture’s role in corporate fun-washing in the workplace with a proposal which extended out of the existing Meta offices. Her project imagined how technology, nature, and human habitation could be reconfigured for alternate cultures of pleasure and labour.
Archive of DS25’s work from previous years:
