Un/Adapted Conjunctions
Studio Title: Oblique Negotiations
Master Studio 2025–26, sem 2, Brussels
architect Lennart Vandewaetere & dr. visual artist Mira Sanders
Un/Adapted Conjunctions is a continuing design studio series that explores architecture as a situated, un/adaptive, and transgressive practice. Each edition introduces a distinct conceptual lens through which acts of (re)(f)usus and constructive disobedience[1] are investigated. Together, these recurring themes question normative systems of design and building, while fostering architectural knowledge through ambiguity, tension, and mediation. The 2025–26 edition, Oblique Negotiations, frames architecture as a process of positioning—negotiating between competing forces, layered perceptions, and material conditions. Conjunctions are used not simply as connectors, but as conceptual and spatial tools for engaging with complexity, especially in urban contexts where spatial, social, and political tensions are tangible and continually shifting.
This year the studio is developed in close collaboration with RENOVAS in Schaerbeek, around a concrete question and a site near Place de la Reine. The area is approached as an active field of negotiations: between public and private, care and control, informality and regulation, permanence and temporality, visibility and concealment. Rather than treating “public space” as a neutral backdrop, we treat it as a ‘gemeenplaats'[2]: a shared place that is continuously produced, contested, maintained, and re-imagined—where everyday use and minor infrastructures matter. In that sense, the studio aligns with practices of reading the city through inventories, drift, and situated attention (as in Wim Cuyvers’ ways of exploring and questioning public-space conditions beyond official narratives (Etcetera).
Design research unfolds through experimental media and material constructs—1:1 artefacts, performative models, drawing, sound, and film—used not only as representations, but as sites of inquiry and negotiation. The studio will explicitly move beyond speculation: students will think, explore, map and design a public and architectural intervention that will be built within the same semester, in close collaboration with RENOVAS and with the accompaniment of a carpenter/builder (feasibility guidance, material intelligence, fabrication support, and (dis)assembly thinking). The intervention must be mobile and/or modular: it should be transportable, demountable, adaptable, and able to respond to shifting conditions on site (logistically, politically, socially, and materially).
At the heart of the studio lies a shared question: how can an architectural gesture become a way of interposing architecturally in public—not only as a device placed in space, but as a structure for thinking / representing / making / moving / deviating in the city? Oblique Negotiations insists on partial, situated, sometimes contradictory positions. It invites proposals that do not “resolve” the city, but choreograph encounters, thresholds, permissions, and misreadings—where negotiation becomes a productive material.
In the background, the studio carries the figure of the kiosk as a historical (Paris 1930 left image) and contemporary urban device: micro-infrastructure, interface, point of exchange, orientation, shelter, display. We look at what it used to be and how it evolves today—through economies, regulations, maintenance, informality, and care—and use it as a lens to interrogate the public realm. The kiosk functions here as a conjunction: a connector that binds bodies, rules, objects, narratives, and atmospheres. The final intervention may (but does not have to) take the form of a kiosk; what matters is that the design operates as an intelligible public device and can be built as a mobile/modular structure.
Research and design unfold through experimental media and material constructs—1:1 artefacts, performative models, drawing, sound, and film—used not only as representations, but as sites of inquiry and negotiation. A central tool in this studio is drifting: a series of warm-up exercises given throughout the semester. Rooted in détournement, they reference Situationist International thinking and its critique of consumerism and standardization through spatial practices. Drifting is not primarily a method to “cover an area”, but a way to approach design differently: to unlearn automatic responses, to shift attention, to test alternative procedures, and to open transdisciplinary ways of working, thinking, and creating. Drifts choreograph movement and action as design method—a way to generate positions, constraints, scores, and operative ideas that can later be translated into prototypes and built form.
These architectural translations happens through poetic prototypes and a personal Atlas. Poetic prototypes are quick 1:1 tests and small interventions—temporary, reversible, performative—used to ask questions publicly and learn from feedback, failure, and ambiguity. Each student keeps a process Atlas throughout the semester: a curated archive of drift scores, references, mappings, prototypes, decisions, misreadings, and shifts in position. The Atlas functions as both evidence and argument: it makes visible how design choices emerge, how negotiations are staged, and how a proposal learns from reality rather than merely depicting it (a selection of Atlasses from last year > Elena Gruber & Nassim Kouzouz, Ilay Söyüncü & Melle Flachet, Eleni Yapoutzidi Karra & Michael Van Eycken.
The studio is structured to hold three modes of authorship simultaneously: an individual voice, group crystallization, and collective creation. Each student develops a personal line of inquiry and position (anchored in the Atlas). Groups converge around a shared design logic that can be built: material strategy, details, assembly sequence, and spatial intention. Collectively, the cohort produces a public outcome—both the built intervention and an exhibition/scenographic articulation that communicates the research and the making—supported by shared protocols and a common narrative. The ambition is that the individual retains agency, group work produces a clear crystallization, and the collective results in a concrete creation.
Semester outputs (aligned with the rhythm below)
– Individual (continuous): Atlas (field notes + drift scores + mappings + references + prototype log + reflection), plus documentation (photo/video) of drifts and tests.
– Group (towards build): one coherent mobile/modular intervention proposal, including critical 1:1 mock-ups and a production package (dimensions, material list, joints, hardware, assembly/disassembly steps, safety/robustness notes, and—if needed—budget assumptions).
– Collective (public): built intervention + exhibition/scenography + shared narrative (how the work is read/used/misread/negotiated).
Semester rhythm (compact)
- W1 ASSEMBLEA (framing + first site orientation)
- W2–W3 Phase 1: Instruction → drifts + inventories/mappings + first poetic prototypes + Atlas set-up
- W4–W5 Phase 2: Vehicle → kiosk-as-lens, interface/threshold devices, iterative prototyping + first feasibility feedback with builder/carpenter
- W6 Phase 3: Interposition → site placement, modular logic, critical 1:1 detail tests + assembly/disassembly scenario
- W7 exhibition visit and/or workshop (material/joints/public testing)
- W8 external review (Phase 1–3) → decision moment: final direction + production plan
- W9–W13 Phase 4: Interposing con-structure/junction (production + build) → fabrication, on-site testing, adjustments; parallel exhibition development
- W14 exhibition + evaluation conversation (Atlas + built outcome + collective con-structure/junction)
[1] Inspired by the 2022 conference and 2025 book Constructive Disobedience: An Experimental Methodology in Architecture (Blocksdorf et al.)More detailed information about the studio’s program and working environment will be made available during the first semester of 2026, and presented at the Assemblea during the Supersalon in Ghent.
Image left: Kiosk, Paris 1930
Presentation Assemblea 2025_2026 (PDF)
Learn more on the 2024-25 studio.
and with this link a selection of processes and productions of that edition https://youtube.com/shorts/2Vsi08V4FwI