Film by TIAFI volunteers walking through Homs in Syria, August 2025 | Photo-collage by Amalia Katopodis
Global Challenges – Urgent Pedagogy
Studio 10 holds a long history of research and pedagogy around the topic of displacement and engages in collaborative, live-built projects within contexts of social, environmental and civic injustice, that aim to bridge the gap between architectural education, practice and research. Over the years we have designed and built for refugees in Izmir Turkey, engaged in proposition for the reconstruction of Ukraine and imagined a world that is free from the mistakes of its past. Over that same period the number of displaced populations has grown rapidly due to war and the effects of climate change, and this has become an urgent Global Challenge.
Context of Investigation
This year in addition to making your individual projects we will begin by investigating our collective duties and responsibilities as architects in working closely together with our partners on ground in Syria to help re-establish, re-design and re-built the TIAFI Community Center for re-turning populations in the city of Homs.
You will then have the opportunity to zoom-out and apply your ideas and knowledge gained to other contexts and scales. And as you continue to move between the personal and the global, we will help you develop diverse architectural proposals to a high level of conceptual, social, environmental, material and tectonic resolution.
Projects that have a positive impact on the wellbeing and dignity of individuals and populations, and where possible supported by our international network of collaborators to help you locate your project so that it has real life impact.
Studio Agenda and Methodology
The studio will continue to deploy the Global Free Unit methodology of the contract, the gift and project friends to help you define ambitious individual, research-based thesis projects that are impactful, practical, poetic and compassionate, and that can be applied right now. Projects that mean a lot to you and that connect to your own life experiences, beliefs and ambitions as a future architect to some of the greatest challenges facing global society.
This studio is not about mapping, it’s not about abstract research, it’s not inward looking. Rather it’s about good architecture, compassion and being useful to the wider society.
We see the studio as the first part of your future practice not just the last part of your education. Grab it and make it count.
Teaching team: Amalia Katopodis, Maxine Lundström and
Prof. Robert Mull [Founder of the GFU]
Latest update: 2025-09-02