Design is inherently an act of speculation. Beginning with the provocation that the design process necessitates the suspension of disbelief, these projects accept the premise that fiction is an effective device to deliver a project that conjoins architectural design and broader cultural, social, and political contexts. The distance between a near-future fiction and present-day realities creates just enough room for speculation and scenario planning, positioning architecture as the protagonist in a constructed narrative. These projects range from surgical operations on an existing artifact to the conception of new forms and environments for living. In demonstrating the value of architectural design, projects in this Advisory Group:

  1. Embrace the overlap between culture and form;
  2. Capture the public imagination by engaging pressing global issues;
  3. Privilege form-making over form-finding;
  4. Avoid cliché at all costs;
  5. Privilege speculation over solution (problematize rather than problem solve); and
  6. Explore latent architectural implications of cultural, environmental, and technological phenomena.

May 7, 9:00 AM 

  • Nashwah Ahmed & Prerit Gupta
    Hidden Realities: The Politics of Aesthetics
  • Daniel Hogan    
    Planned Obsolescence: Intentionally Unsustainable Forms for Crisis Design  
  • Genevieve Dominiak & Hannah Michaelson
    The Hive: Coexisting with Unlikely Companions  
  • Umut Caglar Guney    
    The Personal Data Initiative: We the Captives of the Cloud    

Additional Reviewers:

  • Ted Brown
  • Fei Wang  
  • Mollie Claypool, Bartlett School of Architecture UCL and AUAR

  • Ulrika Karlsson, KTH School of Architecture, Brrum and servo stockholm

  • Lydia Kallipoliti, Cooper Union and ANAcycle
  • Rosalyne Shieh, MIT and SCHAUM/SHIEH

May 7, 1:00 PM                    

  • Razan Bairagdar & Emily Yuen    
    Reimagined Retail Environments: Redefining Shopping in Contemporary Culture
  • Karisma Dev & Felix D. Samo    
    Learning from Fine Dining: Latent Frameworks for Human Behavior  
  • Ecenur Menki  
    Afterlife of Gobeklitepe: House of God without Sacred Architecture
  • Isabella Calidonio Stechmann & Tanvi Marina Rao   
    Do(NATION): An Afterlife of “Waste”  

Additional Reviewers:

  • Anne Munly
  • Jiong Abingo Wu

  • McLain Clutter, University of Michigan and EXTENTS

  • Mira Henry, SCI-Arc and Current Interests

  • Whitney Moon, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

  • Kristy Balliet, SCI-Arc and Bair Balliet

  • Ivi Diamantopoulou, Princeton University and New Affiliates