“the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”

William Gibson

Architecture is really very much a form of storytelling. The studio stressed out the possibility of using it as a fictional discipline in order to speculate on and imagine new forms of futures. First we studied and analyzed the different ways within which architects have generated fictions about the future, as well as the past and the present. Yet, architecture has most obviously—and more often—fictionalized the present and the past. Since ever, architects have used representation to imbed stories and narratives in their projects. So it was for the modern avant-garde and its relationship with the “machine”, with the post-moderns and their use of the past, for the fictionalization of digital culture, so it was—and it is—for each architect who wants to produce something that is more than just a simply functional space.

Differently, and more obviously, other media (such as movies) have more capacity to speculate on the future. This is the case of the Sci-fi genre (from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, to by Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049). It is not in fact by chance that some architects have referred to this medium in order to create fictions. Le Corbusier did so in order to define the house as a “machine for living”. Rem Koolhaas has done a similar operation when, in the 1970s, he re-imagined virtual space by inventing virtual characters replacing real actors in movies.

As already done by these architects (and many others), we challenged the fictional and narrative aspect of architecture, by toying with different media. The research was based on the course’s topic and its main output was a book. Yet, students where asked to take a step forward and transform their research in a proper speculative product. Therefor the Studio Archificture also resulted in videos, comics and collages, using all potential skills for their realization.