Architecture as a field is larger than the canon that claims to define it. Through spatial practices that engage buildings and the worlds that surround, extend and reshape them, in this course we address the disciplinary transformation and expansion architecture is going through today. We pursue alternatives towards responsibility and solidarity in the ways we design, build and inhabit our buildings, cities, towns and villages, enabled by media.

The course engages students across the 6 semesters of their Master studies. On semesters 1 to 4 students follow a studio brief that sets both a topic and a methodology. These briefs are organised under four key themes: virtual craft, spatial data libraries, transmedia gatherings, and virtual civic infrastructure, introducing a variety of tools and methods that bridge the digital and analog in architecture. The studio alternates yearly between two types of design and research: practical and speculative. Semesters dedicated to practical work involve experimental research, local community engagement, and the prototyping of design projects, while semesters dedicated to speculative work involve historical and descriptive research, disciplinary community engagement, and speculative design projects.

In semesters 5 and 6, students turn to their thesis: an independently chosen topic carried out with the support of the studio team as well as other professors from the institute. Deliverables for thesis students are project-specific, though in semester 5 students are also asked to submit a research book, which becomes part of the studio library for future students to consult and build upon.

Studio Space Popular approaches architecture as a transmedia practice, studying how spatial knowledge emerges from both mediated and built environments. Through this lens students imagine counter-models to current socio-political systems supported by architectural practice: from how distributed communities and diasporic cultures shape the infrastructures of collective life, to new forms of ownership, governance, gathering and belonging.