Instructions and Thematic Tracks

Architecture operates across shifting latitudes: geographical, epistemological, material, embodied, and political. In a time of planetary crisis, displacement, and epistemic transformation, architectural knowledge must respond by grounding itself in experience, territory, and care. This symposium proposes a collective inquiry into practices that are responsive, critical, and situated — practices that emerge from the ground, from the body, from the local context, and from shared pedagogical experiments. EURAU26 aims at reaching a trans-latitude knowledge production in contemporary architectural education and research.

Contributions are welcome in the form of extended abstracts, including but not limited to scientific outcomes, research by design, pedagogical experiments, artistic contributions, and practice-based explorations. Submissions must align with one of the four thematic tracks and may be framed within the three categories of Education, Research, or Architectural Practice.

Three Categories & Four Thematic Tracks

The symposium invites contributions at the intersection of three categories and four thematic tracks. Contributions should underline how the topic proposed relates to or challenges the notion of latitude/s and indicate the specificity of the point of view.

Categories:

• Education — curriculum experiments, pedagogical methods, learning environments.
• Research — theoretical frameworks, historical studies, spatial investigations, experimental studies.
• Architectural Practice — built projects, spatial installations, speculative and process-based design.

Thematic tracks:

1. Embodies Practicies

Body / Embodied experience / Display / Mediation / Neurodiversity / Somatics / Body-As-Tool / Phenomenology / Sensory knowledge / Ritual / Perception / Ephemeral / Transformative / Site-Specific / Spatial / Installations / Situated

This track explores the body as an architectural instrument — as both the subject and the site of spatial knowledge production. It invites investigations rooted in somatic methodologies, phenomenological approaches, ritual, and performance. Contributions may focus on the epistemic role of the body in processes of transformation, resistance, healing, or displacement, taking into account the specific point of view of the latitude/s explored in the proposal.

Themes:

• Embodied knowledge and perceptual space 
• Corporeal methodologies and spatial intelligence
• Temporality, ritual, and transformation
• Site-specific and durational architectural gestures

Research Questions:

• How does the sensing body produce spatial knowledge?
• What forms of architecture emerge through somatic and performative methodologies?
• How do embodied practices challenge normative representations of space, identity, or ability?
• In what ways can body-aware design resist abstraction and standardization?

2. Urban and Contextual Practices

Context / Sense of Place / Heritage / Re-use / Urban Commons / Community Resilience / Marginality / Housing / Care / Identity / Displacement / Translation / Process / Temporary / Transitory

This track focuses on architecture’s capacity to act as a social, cultural, and political translator. It invites reflections on urban and architectural interventions rooted in specific places, communities, and histories. Emphasis is placed on displacement, memory, care, and re-use as frameworks for alternative forms of spatial agency, in relation to the specific latitude/s explored in the proposal.

Themes:

• Situated urban design and re-use strategies
• Displacement, identity, and housing
• Participatory processes, activism and care practices
• Rituals, Urban commons, and collective memory

Research Questions:

• How can architecture operate as a translator across cultural, political, and historical contexts?
• What impact regulations and policies have on the way cities are designed and structured and how specific context/s act as a reference for the inhabitants? What spatial tools and design strategies address displacement (of cities, towns, communities), and social fragmentation and what concerns are affecting the way architecture adapts to the need when thinking of a specific latitude or moving from one latitude to another?
• How do re-use, heritage, and memory in relation to a specific condition (for example: overturism, density, green transition, etc.) reshape our understanding of sustainability and temporality - cases and examples of methods and their specificity with the context - at different latitudes?
• What role does the notion of care play in contextual architectural practices and how this is related to specific contexts in terms of regulation, rituals, habits and culture?

3. Environmental and Landscape Practices

Territorial Design / Interstitial Ecologies / Nature / Climate / Infrastructure / Scale / Socio-ecology, Landscape / Infrastructure / Scale / Posthumanism / Naturecultures / Resilience / Responsibility / Ecosystemic Design / Climate Adaptation / Planetary Care.

This track invites territorial and socio-ecological readings of architecture, foregrounding planetary entanglement and human and more-than-human agencies. It welcomes contributions that explore architecture as an infrastructural, environmental, and ethical act — attentive to scale, biome, and climate where landscape is understood as an all-encompassing situated, living system, in relation to the specificity of latitude.

Themes:

• Nature-based design and territorial logics
• Architecture within climate and socio-ecological systems
• Post-anthropocentric and more-than-human approaches
• Infrastructures of care and nature cultures
• Systemic repair, territorial metabolism and bioregional planning
• Evidentiary cartography and environmental truth practices

Research Questions:

• How can architecture engage with ecological processes at territorial and infrastructural scales?
• What alternative spatial imaginaries emerge from post-anthropocentric design thinking?
• How do climate, water, and terrain act as agents in shaping architectural form and method?
• In what ways can the design of the built environment take responsibility for more-than-human futures? How can regenerative and adaptive design practices support long-term ecological resilience?

4. Material and Tectonic Practices

Situated Computation / Digital + Physical Structures / Artifacts / Tectonics, Resilient construction, Digital Fabrication / Local Materials + Resources / Material agency / Building Systems / Hybrid Methods / Climate-adaptive design.

This track investigates the material and constructive dimensions of situated architecture, from vernacular building systems to adaptive digital fabrication. It calls for reflections on craft, computation, and resilience as intertwined modes of practice — where matter, place, and knowledge converge. Contributions are invited to underline the specificity of these aspects according to latitude/s.

Themes:

• Climate-sensitive architecture: vernacular, low-tech, low impact
• Situated computation and digital craft
• Material intelligence and tectonic adaptability
• Building and fabrication methods rooted in local practices

Research Questions:

• How can material practices respond to local resources, climates, and traditions?
• What new forms of knowledge are produced through the convergence of computation and craft?
• How do tectonic systems express ecological, ethical, or cultural values?
• In what ways can architecture embody resilience and adaptability through material agency?