Research group Architecture stands at a crossroad. Humanity's dream of prosperity collides with socio-economic injustice and environmental breakdown. We need a paradigm shift—one that invests in the arts of coexistence between humans and more-than-human. Our focus is directed to how spatial and aesthetic polity can move beyond simple adversity and contribute to lives of sustained well-being, solidarity, and joy through an architecture of resonance as core attribute of a potential more-than-human future.
This group brings together researchers and teachers that investigate how a future architecture can contribute to lives of sustained optimal wellbeing, solidarity and joy through a radical openness of co-habitation, co-existence, intersectionality, multivocalty and inclusivity as core attributes of our future human and more than human environment. Such an architecture of resonance attunes people to social and ecological cycles through architecture as performance, turning environmental processes into sensory, social encounters of relational equality.
Instead of advancing a worldview of b/orders between people, nature and other lifeforms of disconnection, war and fortification in reaction to cosmopolitisation, our research group explores – by welcoming the global other and more-than-human – how architecture, ecologies and cities can contribute to a new humanism and more-than-human environment and their situated cultures, as border-crossers; at best as a visionaries and practicioners capable of transforming a space of restriction into one of radical openess where we can live well with each other in a thick and complex present of multi-racial, multi-species, and multi-kinded realities.
To make architecture politically, our research group focuses, on the one hand, how the discipline of architecture, landscape and urban design can be rethought when it starts to contribute to diversity and heterogenous conjunctions through resonance. We adopt a totally different model that shows another vision of migration, nature and culture: not a conventional one that sees migration just as the outgrowth of some sort of problem (such as poverty, population growth, war, or environmental disaster), but one that considers migration as an intrinsic part of a broader development process building a civilization and its more-than-human environment.
Furthermore, we investigate how architecture can welcome the global other by the power of gentleness. Gentleness is about another way to relate to the world; it enables forms of hospitality by redistribution of the sensible, it enables narratives and experiences, to be lavished and received with experiment and dolce vita. Gentleness resists a utilitarian ideology in which pleasures, beauties, the uncontrollable and imaginative are seen as counter-revolutionary, just bourgeois, decadent, indulgent, and that the desire for them should be eradicated and scorned.
Our research group is embedded in architecture theory, history, design education, and practice. As members we work on research at Ba, Ma, PhD level, and conduct funded research in collaboration with other institutes. We organize conferences, lectures, seminars, exhibitions and publications. The spatial, material and aesthetic polity of architecture stands at the core of our research. We champion architecture as cultural endeavour. In addition to fields such as philosphy, sociology, geography, and political science, our architecture is inspired by the theory, history and practice of art, film, photography, literature, and music.
