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Surrender Resistance

SURRENDER RESISTANCE 2026-2027

(re-)Source(s) & their Transactional Matrix


Tutor(s): Thierry Berlemont and Guests
Semester: 1
Engagement: Mediating Tactics
Language: English
Campus: Brussels

//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 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, which suggests that there are always multiple answers that can be — and hopefully are— contradictory. The first (methodological) couple is joined by a conceptual partner that provides topical support and a means for thematic orientation. This year it will be the concept ‘re-SOURCE(s)’(plural), associated with a conceptual marker that frames an architectural situation and/or artefact as a ‘TRANSACTIONAL MATRIX’, that is, a network of reservoirs, buffers, filters, condensers, valves, pipes, ducts and conduits for regulating and capacitating fluxes of matter and energy. Finally, for this year’s edition we will collaborate with ‘HER-BRONNEN / RE(S)SOURCES’, a Brussels-based non-profit association that is engaged in a quest to reimagine the way we deal with the 220 known natural water sources in the Brussels region that have either been shut off, or redirected towards (and therefore) lost to the sewage system.

All of the above constitutes the reference for the development, calibration and balancing of your 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 root, grow, shape, transform and mature within a process of questioning guided by design and making. A key challenge is how to proceed with and 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 can it 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? Can we, as architects, play a role or take responsibility 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? You are invited to look at it as an opportunity for finding new sources, and r(e-) orient personal fields of interest or commitment towards architecture and society.

//PROCEDURE – process AND production (not one or the other)

On a weekly basis you will generate and implement architectural topics, speculations and strategies by means of tangible material installations that reorganise and/or reshape the studio-space, and that provide a changing scenography for the dynamically evolving content (the 7th principle of SurrenderResistance). This actual and recursive production will be used as a means for staging the conversation and for the assessment of ideas and proposals. All production needs to be articulated by using multiple modes of expression and materialisation, implemented alongside each other (the 6th principle of SurrenderResistance), because another mode provides a different way of accessing the subject and always leads to increment of information and understanding.

The studio provides both a material and social space —including cooking and sharing the table— for a process-based 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 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, 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.

Stated in other terms, the first half of the semester (until and including the first studio week) will be dedicated to speculative ‘source’-finding and the pin-pointing of subjects/objects for investigation and their corresponding sets of (speculative and critical) questions. During this stage your position is one of anticipation and tentatieve project-setting. 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 What you need to produce in the end is all the material that your project needs in order for it to be intelligible and communicable to others outside of the studio space. What is certain though, is that outcomes will have to be articulated materially, and be multi-modal (see above), i.e. making use of the plethora of expressive possibilities that is available in the world of architecture (together/combined). The specifics will be defined together during the process of project-development
  • Work and projects can be either individual or collective, but will be collaborative in any
  • During both dedicated studio weeks the process will be intensified by means of multiple full day
  • At the end of the process, the outcome of the studio will open up to an exterior world and go into conversation with it by participating in the framework of the cross-master-environment SuperSalon-event.
  • At some intermediate points in space and time during the semester, the studio SurrenderResistance will connect with the master thesis studio ‘Fixing the Flow’, in order to create opportunities for exchange on the issues at hand in both studio environments.

//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. Applying for this studio requires that you fully subscribe to, honour and apply these basic propositions and the more extensive set of principles of SurrenderResistance consistently and continuously. They also form the basis upon which your performance will be judged, besides the quality of the content of your work.

Read the full studio description here.