Studio

"Constructing the Not-Yet”

The AA Interprofessional Studio enters the new academic year with a renewed commitment to the politics of imagination, spatial practice and embodied speculation. Drawing from Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, this year we ask: how can spatial and performative design anticipate realities not yet born? Bloch’s conception of the not-yet-conscious underpins our investigations, situating the studio as a site where critical desire meets spatial articulation, and performance functions as a rehearsal for radical forms of life.Hope, in Bloch’s materialist philosophy, is not passive longing but active construction. It is the substance of future thinking, tethered to a critique of the present. This year, the Interprofessional Studio will function as both laboratory and rehearsal space, engaging the architectural imagination as a mode of refusal and projection. We will explore architectures that speak, listen, move and resist; scenographies that anticipate transformed social contracts; and collective practices that remain in process, unfinished, contingent, like hope itself.This speculative and political impulse is grounded in a longer cultural and environmental lineage. From Thomas More’s Utopia, which imagined spatial and social structures as interwoven forms of critique, to Bruno Latour’s calls for new modes of terrestrial attachment, we recognise that future worlds are never detached from the material limits and ecological urgencies of the present. More’s island republic was both a spatial fiction and a political demand, shaped by a world undergoing displacement and enclosure. Latour, in contrast, asks us to compose without the comfort of detachment, to make alliances with what is already here. These positions sharpen our task: to create spatial practices that resist abstraction, remain grounded and build imaginative traction in the thick of crisis.The year will be structured around a series of studio projects, performances, seminars and workshops with invited guests from performance, critical theory, radical pedagogy, spatial politics and sound. These will support students in developing original work that operates across disciplines while remaining materially and politically grounded. Through design, performance and critical writing, students will construct spatial acts that press toward the utopian, the incomplete, the subversively possible.

Our approach remains collaborative, experimental and fundamentally hopeful. Against the closure of political imagination and the instrumentalisation of design, we continue to develop practices that are interprofessional, improvisational and in perpetual rehearsal.