Faking it or Making it
Scarcity and Abundance – Making Architecture with What Is at Hand
Brussel, EN, Tomas Ooms
Scarcity and Abundance: Making Architecture with What Is at Hand
Imagine stepping into a circular material depot to source components for your design. But the windows you need are gone. Worse, there are no windows left at all. What now?
Circularity in architecture is often a “business of promises,” premised on the idea that today’s designs will naturally be reused tomorrow. Yet urban mining and reclamation rarely offer straightforward solutions. Salvaged materials come with their own challenges: fluctuating availability, inconsistent quality, and unanticipated limitations.
This studio invites you to navigate the blurred lines between “faking it” and “making it.” Rooted in the interplay of scarcity and abundance, you’ll explore how constraints—whether material, environmental, or conceptual—can inspire innovation and lead to unexpected architecture. Through resourceful reuse, imaginative fabrication, or provocative simulation, you will chart your own architectural stance and engage with “making” as your primary tool of inquiry.
In Scarcity and Abundance you will work with an ongoing construction site as your site of interest. You will be examining what happens when the materials originally planned are no longer available. You will explore alternative material choices, analyse their impact on the design and spatial qualities, and propose innovative adaptations to respond to these real-world challenges.
Faking it? Or, making it!
More info below the image.
Scarcity (of material) and Abundance (of possibilities)
In a world defined by shifting boundaries between the real and the constructed, the authentic and the simulated, this studio challenges you to explore the blurred lines between “faking it” and “making it.” Rooted in the themes of scarcity and abundance, the studio invites you to investigate the creative potential of material, environmental, and conceptual constraints. Whether through resourceful reuse, imaginative fabrication, or provocative imitation, you will define your own architectural stance within this spectrum, using the act of “making” as your primary means of inquiry.
This is a studio about agency. You will be tasked with developing your own exploration of making—embracing resourcefulness, experimentation with the aim to craft a pertinent and unexpected design response. Through this lens, scarcity becomes not a limitation, but a springboard for architectural innovation. Abundance, meanwhile, is redefined as the wealth of possibility contained in what is already at hand.
In this studio, you will explore how constraints—material, environmental, and logistical—can spark architectural innovation. Focusing on the unpredictable flows of materials, energy, and information, you will engage with the practice of re-use, reclamation, and urban mining, embracing the questions posed by fluctuating quantities, variable qualities, and unexpected dimensions. As you will work with reclaimed materials and local resources, you will discover how scarcity can foster creativity and adaptability.
Re-imagining materials sourced from demolition sites or salvaged structures, you’ll experiment with flexible design processes that allow for the uncertainty inherent in re-use. You will explore how architects can work within this flux—balancing the availability of materials with evolving design needs, and embracing imperfections, irregularities, and serendipitous discoveries.
Through models, drawings, you will develop strategies and prototypes, actual interventions on a construction site… that incorporate these dynamic materials, focusing on how flows of resources can inform new spatial and unexpected practices.
The studio centers on the fragment and the architectural detail as pivotal sites of exploration, revealing their transformative potential to drive meaningful change within the larger architectural whole. By the end of the semester, you will have gained a profound understanding of how adaptive reuse can serve as a catalyst for innovation, enabling architects to navigate and thrive in spaces of uncertainty. Through this process, you will embrace imperfection and resilience as guiding principles, discovering new ways to approach design in a world of fluctuating resources and shifting constraints.
This studio invites you to rethink what it means to “make” architecture in a world of resource constraints, ecological challenges, and shifting perceptions of authenticity. By engaging with the spectrum of “faking it” and “making it,” you will gain agency to define your own approach to design, discovering how architecture can thrive in the interplay between scarcity and abundance, honesty and illusion, imagination and material reality.
Please contact me if you have some questions: tomas.ooms@kuleuven.be