Master dissertation studio 2025-’26
Supervisors: Johannes Berry and Johan Nielsen
Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels
English
Description of the project:
The studio turns unfamiliarity and strangeness into positive and operative notions. It explores the figure of the architect who doesn’t know, the architect as an unexpected guest who can bring fresh perspectives into a determined situation. That also means an architect who accepts to work in delicate and uncomfortable conditions. Here we can
refer to the traits of the stranger described by Georg Simmel (Simmel 1999). The foreign architect reorganizes nearness and remoteness, generating tensions because the architect has in common with locals what is quite general, while the architect stresses that which is not common. As an invited, the stranger receives openness and confidence from the community, which the architect tends to be a member of. However, the stranger’s status provides an objectivity, made of both detachment and engagement.
With this objectivity, things have equal value, because the stranger is aware of the risks of a preconceived perspective. Like the items left behind after a picnic, might seem ordinary to those humans who left it behind, but incomprehensible to the animals who find them (Strugatsky 1977). In this way materials, whether it be gold, plastic or wood have equal interest, as the focus shifts to their potential. So too we can look at the environment around us as a
stranger and find new perspectives and potentials in things (Dick 1985). A balcony can become a bedroom or a kitchen, or a single-story modernist patio dwelling can become a self-built four-story apartment building, with a commercial function on the ground level (Avermaete 2010) (fig.6.), and so on.
In finding new potential in things, the stranger develops the capacity to design in situations with a scarcity of resources, restricted means, and careful consideration of what is existing. Besides, thanks to the stranger’s peculiar position, the stranger can demonstrate generosity and participate in the blossoming of the community. In this way, the stranger is better prepared to face the challenges we currently face, be it in the social, cultural, or technical fields.