Strategic Design for Future Building

From 2016–17, Intermediate Unit 12 explored how architecture and architectural practice can stimulate communities of the future.

The unit pushed students to create radical, beautiful, experimental buildings and communities that envisaged speculative futures and critiqued or enhanced emerging trends. Students sought strategic approaches to architecture that could be deployed to create a lasting legacy, which could challenge and even supplant existing norms. We explored how a clear, future-focused agenda can impact society. We asked: how can built form enable the creation of new societies? And how can the small seeds of emerging ideas that grow in the cracks of culture be nurtured to create the forests and whole ecosystems for cultures of the future?Today, these questions have allowed PHASE3 to develop a framework for staying curious and inspired about the built potential of tomorrow.

The unit was taught alongside long-time friend and collaborator Inigo Minns.