Engagements

CRAFTSMANSHIP

The engagement ‘Craftsmanship’ explores the design of architecture from a critical perspective on building (noun & verb) by means of engaging with “the act of making”.

The engagement brings together design studios, theoretical courses and research that all consider architectural craftsmanship as the driving force behind design. The focus is on how different “forms of making” can address complex and pressing spatial-social issues. To this end, architectural craftsmanship merges thinking, producing, and making in an interchangeable way.

In this mindset, making is approached as a method of better understanding the world, with the manner and process of making being central. The topics and themes within the engagement enable one to (re)consider how the knowledge provided by architectural craftsmanship can contribute to this. Craftsmanship is thereby present throughout the design-thinking process and fuels architectural discourse and criticism around three strands: understanding and contextualising craftsmanship, craftsmanship as methodology, and craftsmanship in materiality, detail and construction.

Tomas Ooms
Curator Craftsmanship 2023-2024, Faculty of Architecture KU Leuven
August 2023

 

MEDIATING TACTICS

Architecture is the discipline of transformative thinking and acting.

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

 

URBAN CULTURES

The engagement will confront students with the challenges of the urban context: communality, climate crisis and inequality, cultural diversity, decolonising, gender-related issues, demographic shifts, infrastructural needs, technical and economic disruptions…
Design-driven and based on an understanding of the specific cultural, social, infrastructural, political and spatial structures that makes up a city, students will operate in a wide variety of urban contexts, starting from the two urban campuses of the faculty: Ghent, an intriguing historic European city with strong ambitions, and on the other side, Brussels, a  laboratory as a fast-evolving global city with still a manageable scale.

Studios are rooted in specific practices of design in an urban context and invest in the urban fabric, whether it’s public space, urban buildings, infrastructures, neighborhoods, small and larger towns, metropolitan areas, or the outskirts of the city …

Architecture has to reinvent and prove its relevance in the midst of the complex context of our contemporary cities, addressing local and global challenges. The act of designing in the city is therefore critical in many ways and offers students challenging opportunities.

Patrick Moyersoen
Curator Urban Cultures 2023-2024, Faculty of Architecture KU Leuven
August 2023