Architecture, in recent years, has come back down to earth. In the logic of culture’s pendulum we’ve swung away from the unbridled expenditures of postmodernism and the digital turn, and towards a pragmatism rooted in humble efficiency and an economy of means. We are slowly correcting course, as it were, to address the many precarities of this present moment – rising inflation, resource scarcity, social and political unrest – all of which unfold beneath the broader and existential threat of environmental collapse.

"To be born is to be shipwrecked in nature,” as the historian Irenée Scalbert explains, “and our happiness, our existence even, depends on the wisdom of our ecology." And so it is this studio’s aim to engage with this wisdom.

This year we will work from the basis that the architectural and environmental project are one and of the same, and that the disciplinary boundaries drawn between ‘landscape’ and ‘architecture’ ought to be softened, if not dissolved entirely. We will draw from a consortium of experts in the reuse of buildings, their structural and mechanical challenges, as well as the adaptation of the territory surrounding them, learning from hydrologists, building scientists and landscape architects. We will develop new strategies both for transforming existing buildings, and unsealing the urban surface on which they stand.

More now than ever we are aware of a symbiosis of architecture and landscape – of building and environment. As we come to grips with architecture’s destructive capacity, so too we become aware of its potential to restore and repair.

As found

The studio this year will focus once again on the transformation of existing buildings. In a context of scarcity, the obvious aim is to avoid wasting precious resources although we are of course seeking more than mere efficiency: existing buildings, far from impediments, become valuable resources towards the fulfilment of the architectural project. Every building is both a site of archeology and a register of anthropology. A sensitivity to reading context is needed.

The architect has to be able to analyse layers of structure and surface, to discern their value, to read the design intentions of their known or anonymous creators, and to understand the subsequent modifications to the original set of forms. A broad formal knowledge is certainly needed, as well as an understanding of the cultural and material conditions which produced those pieces and might produce the new ones.

Not everything is valued the same. Every project is first of all an act of judgement; what do we keep? What do we alter? What should be erased? These are preconditions of any project that reconfigures as-found environments.

Commune

There's no architecture without a client; there's no client without desires, needs, expectations, and a budget. The client acts as a sort of catalyst, which is able to activate the design process. Of course architecture, especially the one seriously involved in the idea of lasting, has to overcome the client and to aspire to a generous generality. Every building operation requires energy and resources, therefore every project has to be specific enough to satisfy the client while being generic enough to tolerate future appropriations and be able to survive. On the contrary, even architectures gracefully dying are legitimate and interesting.

So, a client we need, a scenario, a pitch. We sense that the kind of architecture we are looking for will embody ways of living that skew radical and collective. Perhaps a commune is emergent, blurring the boundaries between work, domestic labour, continuous learning and leisure; a community which aspires to a certain degree of autonomy in terms of food and energy production, largely constructing its own environments and tools of fabrication. Hints of utopia become unavoidable, as it is accepting that only a deep adaptation would do the job. We might be wrong here and we certainly are open to discuss it with you.

The well tempered environment

Abbé Laugier was wrong. According to him, primitive man has needs but no companions, and he possesses utilitarian logic but not a language. According to Laugier, architecture is born in isolation, without words, without lies, and is just a matter of shelter. Functionalism is the logical consequence of these (quite surreal) assumptions. Houses come before temples. And so private architecture is the model for public architecture. Pragmatism comes before ritual. Structure comes before space. Against all evidence, engineering precedes rhetoric.

Nevertheless for humans, being unfit to permanently live in the wild, if not in the mildest climate, a well tempered environment remains crucial. Overall, modernity defined and legislated a sharp boundary between the exterior and the sheltered space, within which temperature and humidity are expected to remain consistent. Fossil fuel exploitation, and to an extent the technology of the envelope, made this possible. To save energy, we now have to deconstruct this boundary, to dissolve it into a range of conditions, spanning from the mere rain or wind protection to the warm cocoon of the studio. A dynamic and more personally tailored relation between human bodies and interior spaces has to be investigated. What is the tolerance of climatic comfort, and how do we challenge and bend regulations? How are modern HVAC systems applied to existing buildings? What is the architectural language of climatic control?

Scale

Architecture is made through frames of scale, from the urban plan to the technical detail. In turn we encounter the world through scale, from the very close to the very far. In this way, architecture becomes a form of focused looking or sensing; architecture in effect, could be thought of as a technology of attention.

There is a special capacity, in any design studio, to take control of this attention, this ability to sense, and to create what the philosopher Jaques Ranciere describes as a ”redistribution of the sensible.” In fact architecture has the capacity to reorganise sensations, with an indifference to presumed hierarchies of significance. What was once insignificant – the palimpsest of history in a soon to be demolished building, or the movement of water from a roof’s gutter to the sewer – has the potential to become full of splendour and rich with meaning and value.

Through architecture’s re-framing of the sensible, we can begin to scrutinise and indeed take pleasure in realigning certain relationships which we tend to take as given: be it between nature and culture, between individual and collective experience, between the domestic interior and the anonymity of the city, or between the allocation of disgust and delight, comfort and discomfort.

It is through the extremity of scale that we can begin to crack open and reveal the vivid undercurrents of seemingly normal life.