Design Studios

NEW ECOLOGIES is a new studio series at the Architecture of Territory, dedicated to the practice of architecture for the post-anthropocentric era. Throughout the twentieth century, the anthropocentric and city-centric paradigms have locked architecture into binary thinking, which separated man from nature, building from landscape, and city from countryside. Through the perspective of ecology, such unproductive divisions can be rethought to allow architectural discipline to broaden its agenda and take on new themes and approaches.

European territory has become completely urbanised. The countrysides in the traditional sense have disappeared; the distinctions between the town and the country have been blurred. In contrast to the unambiguous urban transformations of cities, the processes of urban change in the countryside are massive, yet often unnoticed. Away from the public eye and professional scrutiny, these processes have created new urban identities and configurations in the formerly rural realm of Europe. The studio series EUROPEAN COUNTRYSIDE explored the terra incognita of the countryside, and its radical mutations. The project aims to reinvent contemporary countrysides as legitimate and critical subject of architecture profession.

The series of metropolitan investigations and projects which started in spring 2018 addressed a particular metropolitan theme or phenomenon, by means of design. After Belgrade and public landscape, we worked in different cities on projects concerning infrastructure and mobility, housing, urban resources, among other things. Each studio represented a collective project, where individual students worked together towards building a metropolitan vision.

Throughout history, cities have functioned as centres of political and economic power, from which the agricultural and resource-rich hinterlands were controlled. From the nineteenth century onward, new technologies, transportation modes and the opening of new trade routes have introduced a widening of distances and a remarkable complexity to the relationship between cities and their productive hinterlands—hinterlands have continued to expand, globalise and “disintegrate”, both as distinct territorial entities and as legible objects of governance or study.