Mediating tactics
The engagement Mediating Tactics offers a stimulating studio environment where architectural design transcends conventional boundaries. Its approach integrates artistic exploration, media and method experimentation, and immersive real-world projects, positioning architecture not just as construction, but as a creative, critically engaged, and experimental discipline. — Architecture is a discipline of inquiry.
In what ways can the changing role of architects and expanding scope of architecture open up new forms of practice? Mediating Tactics engages design studios, theoretical subjects, and research to address these questions. Changing contexts require new ways of thinking and operating in architecture. These recalibrate spatial intelligence, enabling agile responses to contemporary urgencies.
The design studios in Mediating Tactics expose students to modes and methods of architectural practice that foster the development of (radical) strategies for architecture’s capacity to shape and integrate design, performance, and media, with architectural theory and criticism. In this pursuit, architecture’s ability to question norms and materialise as a form of critique is practiced with an awareness of precedents, through critical observation of both past contexts and present society.
We nurture the possibilities of spatial imagination by encouraging students to develop highly individual approaches, in response to real conditions and speculative potentials.
The sites of investigation in our design studios extend across the broad field of architecture, exploring the relationships of the built environment with other determining actors: the landscape, the interior, the drawing, installation design, curation, and with performative agency, with multi-media, in digital environments, and through graphic inquiry. Through these hybrid intersections, students articulate and expand the disciplinary conditions of this transformative practice called Architecture.
Riet Eeckhout
Curator Mediating Tactics 2025-2026, Faculty of Architecture KU Leuven
August 2025
