STUDIO GLITCH
Architecture Master’s Studio 2025–26
Sint-Lucas Ghent Campus
Manou Van den Eynde
In this studio we will challenge how the body is positioned within architecture’s visual culture, treating the architect’s body as something that can glitch—leak, shimmer or resist definition. We will be guided by Legacy Russel’s manifesto ‘Glitch Feminism’, cyberfeminist perspectives, and chimaera. From Greek mythology, a chimaera is a hybrid creature made of different animals. Today, the term describes any composite form, a mix of diverse elements fused into one body, unsettling in its resistance to purity and order. We will create avatars, wearables and chimaeric landscapes to reimagine how bodies in architecture can perform, escaping representation.
CONTEXT & PROBLEM:
In architecture’s visual culture, bodies are often flattened, reduced to neutral silhouettes, scale figures, or generic placeholders. This becomes visible in architectural images such as renderings, where figures are carefully curated and commodified to project desirable lifestyles. Yet this flattening also extends to the architect’s own body. With the growing reliance on digital tools, architects spend much of their time operating software, navigating screens, and refining digital models. The architect’s body becomes mediated in the process, its movements translated into clicks, commands, and parameters. As digital tools increasingly shape architectural design processes, both the technologies used and the media they produce are far from neutral; they are embedded within specific societal, technical, and political frameworks.
In this context, the human body is no longer understood as solely physical. It becomes chimaeric(1): scanned, rendered, and mediated across both material space and digital interfaces, simultaneously constructed by and through technological systems.
In this studio, we will explore how the body in architecture can be reactivated as a site of knowledge, imagination, play and performance. What happens when architects bring their own bodies back into the design process; probing, embodying, and glitching the operations that usually remain trapped behind the screen?
1= Also referring to Donna Haraways definition of the cyborg: “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.” Haraway, D. J. (1991). A cyborg manifesto. Routledge.
GLITCHING:
A glitch is often associated with machinic anxiety, understood as “an error, a mistake, a failure to function.” Legacy Russell, however, reclaims the glitch as a deliberate form of resistance. As she writes: “Within glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of non-performance.”(2) The first weeks of the studio will focus on an in-depth reading of Glitch Feminism, developed collectively through discussion and annotation.
In parallel, we will study visual works and texts by cyberfeminist artists and thinkers. Their practices show how reclaiming the body’s visual reproduction can uncover pre-existing codes that contribute to the oppression or glorification of specific bodies. For us, this becomes a way to ask: how might architects “speak corporeal” in their own visual culture? And, how do emerging technologies both constrain and expand the relationship between architecture and the body?
2= Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). London: Verso.
SOME ALLIES <3
- Donna Haraway (cyborgs, situated knowledge, interdependence)
- Marshall McLuhan (the mediated and extended body)
- Stelarc (the post-body and machinic interfaces)
- Arakawa & Gins (the architectural body)
EXCHANGE (KTH (Stockholm)& Piercing The Rendering):
An important part of this studio is the exchange of ideas and practices with others. Throughout the semester we will connect our work with parallel studios in Brussels and Stockholm, creating a shared environment that goes beyond our own classroom.
We will collaborate with Brady Burroughs and her seminar at KTH Stockholm, which also engages with Glitch Feminism. Together we will set up a digital environment on Discord, where each week students will upload fragments of their work. This shared archive will not only document our process but also serve as a space for ongoing dialogue and feedback with the KTH group.
Later in the semester we will organize an AFK (Away From Keyboard) day together with the students from Pieterjan Ginckels’ studio Piercing the Rendering. On this day, we will combine our work into a physical encounter and simultaneously open a video-call with the KTH students, a chimaera of the three classrooms and studios.
EXPECTED OUTPUT:
Individual: Avatars and Wearables
Each student will develop a personal avatar by asking: What kind of architect am I willing to play? And, what rituals of architecture could your avatar invent or glitch? To give shape to these avatars, you will design and construct a wearable, understood as a temporary extension, augmentation, or prosthetic, that mediates between body and space. By ‘changing skins,’ you will transform not only your own body but also the way you perform as an architect, creating fluid, playful, and performative design agents.
Collective: Glitching and Chimaeras
Together we will work with a shared site in Brussels, that can both be digitally consumed and physically encountered. Grounded in our collective readings of Glitch Feminism, our avatars and wearables will question and destabilize this site. In the studio, these wearables will assemble into chimeric landscapes, activated through media and performance. In doing so, the architectural site itself is rethought through glitch and bodily friction.
Fanzine: Russell for Architecture Students
Part of the studio’s work will be published in a fanzine, as the next volume in the series ‘Feminist Thinkers for Architecture Students.’ This issue will focus on Legacy Russell and is developed in collaboration with Brady Burroughs at KTH Stockholm, who is editor in chief of the fanzine series. The fanzine will collect annotated readings, visual experiments, and documentation from the studio.