Sint-Lucas Ghent Campus (semester 2, 2026)
Engagement: Urban Cultures
Tutor: Jeanne Autran-Edorh – Studio NEiDA (Co-Founder & Principal Architect)
Language: EN
There Is Not One Architecture!
A Research-Driven Design Studio
Broadening Architectural References Through Research and Making
METHODOLOGY
Architecture Begins With Knowledge
Architecture begins with knowledge.
Knowledge of materials. Knowledge of places. Knowledge of how architecture has been made, by whom, and under which conditions.
Research as a Design Act
This applied architecture studio is built around research as a design act. It adopts a research-driven and craft-oriented approach, positioning research not as a preparatory step, but as the core of the architectural process.
There Is Not One Architecture
There is not one architecture to learn, but many architectures.
Architectural history is plural, incomplete, and unevenly represented. The studio starts from the necessity to broaden architectural references by engaging with diverse construction cultures, building techniques, and material practices across geographies and time. It explicitly seeks to include forms of architecture that have been historically overlooked, marginalized, or excluded from dominant narratives, notably traditional and vernacular architectures from the Global South. In doing so, the studio positions itself as a decolonial effort to re-read and expand architectural history.
Learning From Architecture Without Architects
Vernacular, historical, and contemporary low-tech architectures without architects are approached not as precedents to imitate, but as sources of knowledge to be understood, questioned, and reactivated.
Research As Practice
The first and central phase of the semester is dedicated to research. Students chose an often overlooked/dismissed/marginalised material, construction technique or resource system and studied it beyond its physical properties. Material is studied as a carrier of social, ecological, economic, and political realities. Research is active. It involves drawing, mapping, writing, testing, documenting, and engaging with knowledge beyond architecture alone, from craft practices to environmental systems.
A Collective Data Base
The outcome of this phase is the collective production of a shared database. Conceived as a glossary of architectural solutions, the database documents material logics, construction principles, spatial strategies, and modes of building from the past, present, and possible futures. It is a tool to make architectural knowledge visible, accessible, and transferable. The database is participatory and open-ended, designed to grow across semesters and to challenge the idea of a pre-determined architectural canon.
Design Emerges From this shared Knowledge
In the second phase, students work in groups to develop an architectural project that directly builds upon their research and the collective database. Architectural form is not imposed but derived from material transformation, construction logic, and feasibility. Architecture is here approached as a process, grounded in experimentation, collaboration, and making.
Learning Through Making
Model making and material experimentation are central tools to test hypotheses, confront constraints, and translate research into built form. Through manual transformation and assembly, students engage architecture as a tangible and situated practice.
Architecture Is Never Neutral
To design today requires asking if, how, for whom, and by whom architecture is produced. This studio positions architecture as a contextual, climate-compatible, and participatory practice, rooted in material realities and informed by a broadened and evolving architectural knowledge base.
SEMESTER STRUCTURE
Research
Research is the core of the studio. Students investigate materials and construction techniques to broaden architectural references.
Database
Research is collectively assembled into a shared database. A glossary of architectural solutions from past, present, and possible futures. (format to be defined by the studio, website, publication…)
Project
Students work in groups. Projects emerge directly from research and shared knowledge.
Making
Design is tested through models and material experimentation. Learnings and design decisions happen through making. (models, prototypes etc )
Final Output
Projects, research, and database contributions are presented together as a continuity.
REFERENCES
Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky, exhibition catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 1964.
Toute architecture est vernaculaire, André Ravéreau, Éditions Parenthèses, 2015.