Master Dissertation studio
Tutor: Rachel Armstrong
2025-26
Ghent
In a world struggling with environmental damage, how can architecture reclaim craft as a dialogue between human, machine, material, and environment? Technologies such as digital fabrication, maker practices, and rapid prototyping, are reimagined through the lens of distributed making—where 3D printing and robotic arms paradoxically demand greater human creative agency, exemplifying John Naisbitt’s ‘high touch’ principle, as a counterbalance to technological alienation.
Through hands-on experiments, you’ll transform materials like clay, modified concretes, and organic polymers into life-bearing, or ‘bioreceptive’ surfaces using advanced fabrication techniques. Through design-led practical work, this studio explores Naisbitt’s duality—can “high-tech” tools, when guided by “high-touch” craftsmanship, revive ornament as ecological performance rather than mere decoration? Your dissertation will examine what kinds of synthesis can: restore material vitality to architecture, promote equitable human-machine creative partnerships, and develop an aesthetic language for regenerative design.
By integrating workshops on digital fabrication with new materialist discourse, the studio positions making as an act of ecological mediation. Could distributed, bioelectrically powered micro-factories—operating at the intersection of computation and care—redefine architectural production? This is an invitation to expand craft beyond tradition, creating architectures that actively contribute to the life of the ecosystems they inhabit.
Image left: Bioreceptive panels produced by rapid manufacturing techniques by Marie Melcore, Anna Vershinina and Isil Yucel for the SPIKA installation by Rachel Armstrong at the Milan Triennale, 2025.
The Future of Craft: A Collaborative Ecology
This studio addresses urgent ecological challenges by reimagining architectural craft as an interdependent system of humans, technologies, materials, and ecologies. You will explore this through a creative dialogue between human intuition, computational tools, material behaviour, and environmental dynamics.
Contrary to the ideal of full automation, digital fabrication today often requires more, not less, human engagement. This paradox aligns with John Naisbitt’s concept of “high-touch” craftsmanship, where digital precision is enriched through manual adaptability and sensory feedback.
Informed by new materialist and posthumanist philosophies, this dissertation studio treats materials and technical systems not as passive tools but as co-agents in the design process. Rosi Braidotti’s work on distributed subjectivity challenges binary thinking (human/machine, nature/culture) and invites us to regard design as a process entangled across organic and inorganic actors. In this context, bioreceptivity—the capacity of designed surfaces to promote life—emerges as a principle of regenerative architecture. Bioreceptive materials shaped through advanced fabrication become both medium and message: enhancing performance while actively supporting ecosystems. Within this expanded framework, craft mediates between technology, ecology, and human creativity.
This reorientation challenges the desire to dominate materials. What if the curing rate of concrete or the crystalline memory of clay became collaborators rather than obstacles? By co-creating with matter and machines, architecture makes a transition from many acts of extraction to cultivating its surroundings.
Such entanglement raises key questions of authorship and agency. When a 3D printer forms clay under human-set parameters, who is the maker? The designer, the machine, or the material? Karen Barad’s agential realism suggests that agency arises in relations, not individuals. Similarly, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) regards all elements as actors within dynamic networks, while Tim Ingold reframes making as correspondence—a mutual responsiveness to the material world.
In this view, design is not authored solely by the human, but negotiated between people, tools, and materials. The outcome is a hybrid form—a distributed choreography of intention, constraint, and emergence.
To work this way requires material literacy: understanding how clay metabolises, mycelium grows, and concrete weathers in dialogue with their environment. This alters architectural programs from the intention to the control of matter to taking care of many kinds of others—for example, where surfaces provide living interfaces that increase biodiversity.
The studio is positioned at a turning point: from ancient traditions that respected material constraints, through industrial overreach and the myth of limitless energy, toward a third path—where human intuition, ecological awareness, and technological capability are deeply entangled.
This studio neither rejects the past nor fetishises the future. Instead, we explore how to collaborate with machines, materials, and microbes through crafted dialogue—where 3D-printed forms carry the traces of algorithms, organisms, and the human hand. Craft here becomes negotiation: not control, but a shared agency across systems. This biopositive approach calls for fluency in computation and ecology alike, seeking equity both among people and with the ecosystems we craft.
Your task in this studio is to experience this synthesis through prototyping a unique bioreceptive panel and critically explore its implications—where making is no longer an act of domination but one of orchestration and mutuality among many interdependent actors.
Methodology
The project unfolds in three interconnected phases:
- Material Experiments
Prototype bioreceptive materials using techniques such as robotic clay extrusion, 3D printing with organic polymers, or mycelium biocomposites. Explore how surface properties (texture, porosity, surface roughness, chemistry) promote colonisation by microbes, lichens, or plants. - Site-Specific Interventions
Propose ecologically engaged architectural strategies for a real site (e.g., Ghent’s Vooruit building). Analyse microclimatic factors (solar exposure, moisture, microbial ecosystems) and integrate bioreceptive elements into regenerative design proposals. - Critical Framework
Develop your work into a written dissertation that critiques post-industrial craft and explores distributed making as ecological care. Reframe ornament as a performative, life-sustaining interface.
Key Questions
- Can “high-touch” fabrication reconcile aesthetic expression with ecological function?
- How does craft redistribute agency among humans, machines, and living materials?
- What new aesthetic languages emerge when surfaces become active agents in ecosystems?
Deliverables
- Bioreceptive Prototype: A full-scale or scaled model (e.g., mycelium-biocomposite, 3D-printed clay, responsive concrete) demonstrating life-supporting capacity.
- Written Thesis: A 5,000–8,000-word illustrated dissertation (max 40 pages), articulating ecological, technical, and theoretical insights with formal academic introduction, methodology, results, referencing and bibliography etc.
- Process Documentation: Studio journal, material tests, fabrication logs, and design iterations.
Outcomes
- A physical bioreceptive panel prototype
- A thesis on human-machine-material-environment relationships (5-8,000 words with images, 40 pages maximum)
- Optional: site-specific design proposals (drawings, models, diagrams)
Studio Support
- Workshops on robotic fabrication, bioreceptive materials, and computational methods
- Guest lectures from biodesign and post-industrial craft experts
- Access to KU Leuven’s digital fabrication labs (LUCA)
Learning Goals
In alignment with KU Leuven’s 30 ECTS thesis framework, students will:
- Develop independent design-research strategies through iterative prototyping
- Critically engage with ecological and ethical material practices
- Communicate findings across textual, visual, and oral formats
- Cultivate intercultural perspectives on technology and craft
Key References
- Armstrong, R. (2020) Soft Living Architecture: An Alternative View of Bio-informed Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Armstrong, R. (2015) Vibrant Architecture: Matter as a Codesigner of Living Structures. Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
- Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- McKendrick, J. (2021) “High-tech/high-touch: The more we rely on machines, the more we need humans”, Forbes, 29 December.
- Naisbitt, J. (1982) Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. New York: Warner Books.
- Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Tsing, A.L., Swanson, H.A., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (Eds.) (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Image: Bioreceptive panels produced by rapid manufacturing techniques by Marie Melcore, Anna Vershinina and Isil Yucel for the SPIKA installation by Rachel Armstrong at the Milan Triennale, 2025.