The emanation of the commons – Anti-bodies
Constructing Urban Cultures
Semester 2, Brussels, English spoken
Master of Architecture engagement Urban Cultures, Campus Sint Lucas Brussels
Academic year 2025 2026
Tutor: Patrick Moyersoen
The starting points of the studio are twofold:
Can architecture be the agency installing a contemporary common?
Can, through thoughtful investigation and experimentation, materiality provide a renewed significance in our dematerializing society?
In an era of growing tensions in and between our communities, when on the one hand we are getting detached from our physical condition, while on the same time the climate crisis reminds us of a deep interdependency between the living and the physical, in this multilayered and intertwined crisis, the studio will investigate the agency of architecture and a possible position.
The studio locates itself in the multitude of Brussels, as a revealing context where the fraction lines of our societies encounter, where the global and the local overlap, where the urban chaos can be productive, or not, and maybe new futures can germinate.
The studio is investigating the longer time, looking for a space/time interstice, where the poetics of architecture can root and propulse a power to heal or to requestion the human condition.
The studio focuses on the architectural embodiment of these commons, by designing a public interior into a significant detail, to become tangible architectural proposals. Architectural dialectics need to be developed to be able to give form to an actual urban culture(s) and able to address the urban complexity.
In parallel, we will look deeply into materiality, as a potent vector of meaning and as a starting point for an architecture. Through experimentation and research, we will accumulate knowledge and tectonic possibilities, building blocks for a shared space to be developed.
To do so, the studio departs from an honest relation to making, often overlooked in architecture as a performative way of addressing the matter. Seeking for the emancipatory and or poetic agency of matter, through the act of making – drawings, plans, models, images – the design takes form. This work is the driving force of our exchanges, challenged week by week, allowing you to go into the depth of your design.
See the studio as a place where you will be pushed to position yourself as an architect, through an architectural proposition, in the dawn of the Anthropocene.
Ways of the studio:
- Individual work in close interaction with peers
- Design driven, by trial and error, in search of a personal architectural proposal
- Expect hands-on analog approach, with models and other crafted documents
- Targeted scoops with a limited number of imposed formats
- A site on a seismic fracture line in Brussels, providing very different contexts
- An open exchange about the potential of architecture
More info and samples of studio work here