SURRENDER RESISTANCE 2025-26
What Is Missing? / What Is To Be Done?
Thierry Berlemont and Guests
Semester: 1
Engagement: Mediating Tactics
Language: English
Campus: Brussels
Photo: HER-BRONNEN / RE(S)SOURCES Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode ©EC/BRUZZ
//MAINFRAME
SurrenderResistance is a design studio centred on experiment and speculation. It proposes an extended moment of re-orientation or re-set at a critical hinge-moment in your learning process and aims at a reflection on critical points of architectural interest. The core of the studio’s approach is the relation of the student with an architectural phenomenon, problem or experience, and its associated critical point(s) and/or singularity(ies).
This is expressed by the twin-concept SURRENDER*RESISTANCE that signifies an apprehension of issues from the perspective of ambivalence and paradox, and suggests that there are always multiple and often contradictory answers. It is joined by a partner-concept that provides topical support and a means for orientation. This year it will be a double question ‘What Is Missing?’ – What Is To Be Done?, which will be complemented with a number of additional thematic markers during the first studio session to narrow down the field of possibilities.
These constitute the reference for the development, calibration and balancing of your own position with regard to architecture. This position is not pre-defined or pre-supposed and not static but dynamic, i.e. susceptible to recursive change. The studio aims at providing the space to let architectural stance take shape, grow, transform and mature within a process of questioning guided by design and making. A key challenge is how to give shape to something that is not yet know or understood, but that supposedly is critical and highly space-time oriented? How does this development affect our perception of existing concepts and relationships, and how it can lead to new ones? How can we, by means of this process, reveal something crucial, necessary, helpful, inspriring or otherwise relevant about and for architecture and architectural practice? Do we, as architects, have a role to play or responsibility to take regarding the issues under scrutiny, and if so, how can we contribute to them? Do we enthusiastically join a given movement or tendency, or do we interrupt it, build an opposition and join the resistance? It is an opportunity for finding new sources, and r(e-)orient personal fields of interest or commitment towards architecture and society.
//PROCEDURE
On a weekly basis you will generate and implement architectural topics, speculations and strategies by means tangible material installations that reorganise and/or reshape the studio-space and that provide a scenography for the content. This actual recursive production will be used as means of staging the conversation and assessment of ideas and proposals. The studio provides both a material and social space – including cooking and sharing the table – for a process-oriented development that is organised in following chapters:
– REVELATION: The excavation of themes
– IMMERSION: The intensive examination of the theme and the mapping of the field
– EXTRACTION: The extraction of sub-themes, existing or untouched, that show the potential to be developed more in depth. This is named “X”. The extraction-phase leads to a first viewing halfway the semester to which external participants will be invited.
– PRODUCTION: The speculative process of defining and developing the X
– RELEASE: This is the process of making public, i.e. delivery, disclosure and transmission of the newly projected
and constructed architectural substance in a spatial form still unknown and to be created by you.
Simply stated, the first half of the semester (until and including the first studio week) will be dedicated to speculative problem/issue finding and the pin-pointing of subjects and their corresponding sets of (speculative and critical) questions. During this stage your position is one of anticipation and agenda-setting for a future project.
The second half of the semester (including the second studio week in January) will be focused on the development of responses to these previously defined questions/topics/problems and you will have to develop them in accordance with the needs of the problems/projects.
//OUTPUT
– The expectations regarding outcomes are open and undefined (for now), quite simply because the landscape of conceivable questions and responses is as yet unknown and will have to take shape during the process. What is certain though, is that outcomes will have to be articulated materially, and be multi-modal, i.e. making use of the plethora of expressive possibilities that is available in the world of architecture (together/combined).
– Work and projects can be both individual or collective, but will be collaborative in any case.
– During both dedicated studio weeks the process will be intensified by means of multiple-day/full days workshops.
– At the end of the process, the outcome of the studio will open up to an exterior world and go into conversation with it. This will be done in the framework of the SuperSalon-event organised in Ghent.
//ASSUMPTIONS
The studio is demanding and participation requires dedication and willfulness, besides mastery of multiple media, technology, architectural construction and theory/philosophy. It also demands an open inquisitive mind, curiosity, a fearless experimental attitude, a capacity to put yourself at risk somehow by leaving behind the usually trodden paths. Design and making must be used as primary tools. It also expects a genuine dedication towards others and to learning. This means that you will be asked to share the invaluable knowledge and (life-)experience you already acquired and to actively put it at the disposal of everyone else involved in the studio.
Full studio description (pdf)