ADS Themes 2024/25

In 2024/25, ADS0 will operate under the rubric of ‘Zero Objective’. Using this strategy, we will interrogate how architecture is preoccupied with a positivist interpretation of the building industry. The studio title is a provocation that pursues this objective by freely exploring new agencies for spatial practice which lie on the fringes between art and architecture, subjectivity and objectivity, and personal and collective agendas. This year we will develop a clear scope of design by focussing on the prototype, or 1:1 object, as a key component within larger speculative forms of scenography, installation, and performance. This focus explores the object's spatial and narrative capacities as a staging device, while also examining the staging of space as a practice that questions how to affect, or mediate, the relationship between the staged and the ongoing spectacle of reality.

Read the full ADS0 brief

In 2024/25 ADS1 will explore new approaches to collective housing. In response to contemporary threats of material scarcity and social precarity, architecture has been increasingly framed in terms of preparedness, resilience, and relief. Indeed, the mounting catastrophes we now face have eroded the idea of architecture as an aesthetic, cultural practice, to reveal a discipline that is rooted more in mere survivalism. The lives we lead now, and the spaces we live them in, are the product of decades of architectural experiments, although these experiments have by and large led to unsatisfactory results. It is clearly time for new experiments in living together.

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ADS 2 looks at the multi-temporal and trans–border implications that shape the life of our global cities. London is the site of imperial, colonial, and financial conquests where myriad time systems play out simultaneously, sometimes on repeat. The global city has become the central node of the time-binding network of global finance, regulating temporal disparities and linking geographically–disparate localities across the planet through extractive, logistical, and economic infrastructures. In response to this chrono–spatial condition, ADS2 crafts hypothetical, yet restorative, architectural interventions that serve as destabilising and regenerative forces within the global city.

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Since the privatisation of England’s water services in 1989, control over this vital resource for human and agricultural use has intensified. The financialisation of the water industry and the resulting inadequate infrastructure has exacerbated the impact of droughts, sewage pollution, and flash floods. These challenges, alongside post-Brexit agricultural strains, have raised critical concerns about the future of the UK's agrobiodiversity and food security. In 2024/25, ADS3 will delve into arid spaces and the creation of water scarcities across multiple scales: from the architecture of the seed to the gut; from refrigeration chambers to shipping containers; and from pipelines and ports to the planetary flows of water and edible commodities. The studio uses a research-led design methodology to chart how these forces scar the built environment, tracing human-engineered species and spaces, from genetic modification labs to fertiliser mines and settler-colonial regimes. Guided by queer entanglements and resistance to extractivism, ADS3 fosters forms of practice that advance spatial justice, while metabolising climate breakdown.

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The days are long, but the years are short.

In July, it was announced that the largest, most pervasive threat to our planet’s future – human-induced climate change – is even altering the nature of time. The polar ice melt caused by global warming is redistributing mass closer to the equator, thereby slowing the speed of Earth’s rotation. This trend is set to accelerate over this century. In short, our days are getting longer.

While the climate impacts time, our conceptions of time also fundamentally impacts the climate. It is this relationship between the environment and temporality, captured in French by the dual meaning of le temps, which ADS4 will investigate this year. Taking time as a core consideration in the design, construction, and critique of the built environment, we will search for new forms of (con)temporary architecture.

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ADS5 are interested in the measurement of ethics in architecture. How can we define and negotiate such ethical frameworks? And what are the architectural manifestations of these decisions?

Our discussions of ethics will be framed through the challenge of designing zero carbon buildings. We are interested in measuring how to achieve this through the BRE’s Global Embodied Carbon Life Cycle Assessment (EN 15978), which is divided into five sections: Product; Construction; Use; End of Life; and Re-use/Recovery. We will use this document and these ‘sections’ as a framework against which to measure decisions in architectural practice through various ethical lenses, including carbon, cost, land use, employment, eco-systems, social, cultural, and poetic.

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Rain, drizzle, hail, graupel, snow, mist, fog, frost, particulate haze, sunlight, dust, daylight, primary wind, polar easterlies, monsoon, mountain breeze, halos, coronas, sun dogs, and mirages. These terms all describe our climate, but what if that they also informed our architecture?

Local adaptation is both an idea and a methodology. In biology, local adaptation refers to when a population of organisms has evolved to be more well–suited to their environment than other members of the same species. ADS6 asks the question if this principle was applied to architecture what would be the outcome? What is an architecture of local adaptation to climate, culture and context? ADS6 will continue to explore this question by taking a highly contextual and sensitive approach to investigating and intervening in a place, which we examine through the lens of hands–on physical making and material investigations.

Read the full ADS6 brief

Over the last two years, ADS7 has explored conviviality as a design tool to capture the often-subtle processes and differences between ordinary cohabitation and complex human interactions. In 2024/25 we will keep on employing conviviality as a gentle, playful form of resistance, while focussing on the mutual relationships between spatial and pedagogical frameworks. For ADS7, conviviality has always been simultaneously: the subject of study; the methodological approach; and the expected outcome. This year the studio will become a place to teach and learn about how to build places for teaching and learning. We are convinced that education, when nurtured within convivial settings, is the most important basis on which to establish new and conscious socio-political mechanisms.

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As an ever–evolving palimpsest of undone horizons, circulations, capital, and extraction, the Mediterranean Basin occupies a central place in the modern constitution of ‘geographies of domination’. The rhythms that have transmitted through its historical and present reconfigurations reveal entangled histories of political conflict, climate change, and movement – whether forced or dreamt – which straddle the lifeworlds resting at its feet.

In this third instalment of ADS8, the studio will journey with and through the Mediterranean Basin to explore the myriad protocols that reveal how relations, separations, and tensions continue to shape the Mediterranean imaginary. In view of the ever-intensifying climate crisis, which is turning the Mediterranean Basin into one of the world’s climatic ‘hot spots’, further exacerbating the conditions of its already deeply fractured worlds, ADS8 will (re)envisage the Basin as a site for rehearsal; a site where various potential futurities will compete and collide. Equally, our investigations will seek to chart the potential linkages that (re)connect the Basin with its multiple elsewhere(s), spanning lands and waters across the Atlantic Archipelago, Sahara Desert, Southern and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Students are invited to think through, conceive of, and rehearse these potential futurities through the framework of the Mediterranean Basin, while firmly grounding their visions in practices and models of repair, abolition, and justice.

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In an act of indifference, architecture is typically created by levelling land to create a limitless zero-degree flat line. The conventional seven-layered concrete ground slab, the beginning of most contemporary architecture, requires a compacted ground that rejects any presence of water and organic matter. In architectural representation, land is abstracted in plan as a thick orthographic line that denotes ownership and political boundaries. In section, a smooth 0.7mm baseline represents an idealised ground plane that separates architecture from the blank space of the paper sheet. Land is abstracted to a generic entity that is devoid of physical properties and an ability to illustrate the transformations of the ground. From this year onward, ADS9 will focus on land by challenging architecture’s indifferent relationship with the land. The studio’s investigation centres on a simply stated, but complex design question: How does architecture touch the ground?

Read the full ADS9 brief

ADS10 explores design methods and practices that challenge the discipline as a means to concentrate and exert power. Operating at the intersection of design and curatorial practices, anthropological gazes and political thought, ecological strategies and construction techniques, ADS10 pursues architecture as a platform of emancipation; as a means to enact the radical political change demanded by the unfolding social and environmental crisis. We search for built forms, protocols of use, and construction processes that can empower collective subjects who are struggling against increasingly commodified relationships and unequal territories.

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ADS11 conducts research on artificially generated toxicity and its effects on human and other–than–human bodies. This research is intended to generate an understanding of the narratives that surround toxic landscapes, together with the regulatory and ownership regimes that enable them, and the fluidity of contamination and its effects on the surrounding landscapes, architectures, and ecologies. The studio uses film as a methodological tool for investigative architectural research and a medium for revealing the speculative narratives that encompass the world we inhabit.

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GRANDEZA STUDIO & LOCUMENT, “STRATA INCOGNITA” commission for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Spanish Pavilion FOODSCAPES, 2023

ADS12 have been exploring the growing stresses on our mental lives through the estrangements of technology, emphasising the importance of architecture in addressing our well-being. Last year in ‘Glass-friends’ (2023–24) we surveyed spatial scenarios of multispecial companionship with artificial entities and diminishing haptic experiences. In 2024/25, ‘Personals’ will explore how we characterise and broadcast ourselves and our spaces in a new era of personal and virtual empowerment. We are at a moment where recording devices and public platforms for self-expression are more accessible as ever. The confluence of more affordable technologies of capture and the free use of broadcasting platforms has come at the expense of our privacy and data, resulting in public processes of self-development and personal characterisation. This year in ADS12 we want to map the therapeutics of self-actualisation as it is aided by technology, together with the ways individualism might help produce supportive spaces and community.

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It is now likely that the Earth will warm by +3°C at some point between 2060 and the end of this century [Civic Square & Dark Matter Labs, 2024]. A climate this warm has not been experienced since the Pliocene era, 3 million years ago [Rahmstorf, 2024].

Resisting both nihilism, or overly idealised solutions, ADS13: Entangled Earth is a studio concerned with envisaging worlds that could yet be. In her book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (2016) urges us to ‘learn to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’. In Entangled Earth, we will acknowledge these troubles, dwelling with the predictions for a +3°C world and hypothesising how we might adapt – technologically, ecologically, politically, and culturally – for living with a world of greater climate extremes.

Read the full ADS13 brief