Mediating tactics

The engagement Mediating Tactics brings together design studios, theoretical subjects, and research with a focus on relevant alternative forms of architectural practice that address and speculate on the ever-changing and expanding role of architects and architecture. Changing contexts require adapting modes of thinking and ways of operating to calibrate spatial intelligence, enabling an appropriate response to contemporary urgencies.

We nurture what spatial imagination can give rise to by encouraging students to develop highly individual approaches to design potentials in pursuit of design-led projects in response to real or hypothetical problems.

The design studios in Mediating Tactics expose students to modes and aspects of architectural practice that foster the development and deployment of (radical) strategies for architecture’s capacity to shape and integrate design, performance and media with architectural theory and criticism. In this pursuit, the doctrines and practice of architecture -its purpose, modes, and means- can be challenged based on critical observation of current society with an awareness of precedents and past contexts.

The sites of investigation are situated in the broad field of architecture, intersecting between the built environment, the landscape, the interior, the drawing, installation design, curation, with performative agency, with multimedia, in digital environments, through graphic inquiry. With every such hybrid intersection, students explore and articulate disciplinary conditions of this transformative practice called Architecture.

Riet Eeckhout

Curator Mediating Tactics 2023-2024, Faculty of Architecture KU Leuven

August 2023