Studios

Architecture is not a profession on the margins. We have agency.

We can work toward a celebration of the extraordinary in the ordinary. (Or, just celebrate the ordinary.)

We are part of a cultural shift here and now. The 20^th century was about serving, if not actually helping, masses of people, who were the same, a constituent community in the best sense. This notion gave rise to functional design aspirations. Now, a generation after Thatcher and Reagan, no one wants to be the same as anyone else. Our aspirations, for better or worse, are not about keeping up with our neighbors; they are about becoming singular. We need to embrace this in the hopes of making change in a diverse world. We do not all need the same (better) toaster. We must now grasp the agency afforded by our profession to think about different points of view and different ways of life. We need to address the particular and hopefully discover that the search is universally resonant.

We will not have all the answers. We will be looking to new people with new points of view and new places with different needs. We are going to need artists, politicians and thinkers to help us understand the word as it is and to imagine how it might be different.

We are weighing cultural perception along with metric tons of concrete or timber. We are considering the nature, shape, size of consumption in our lives and by extension the life of things. Architecture and design tell a story about a life and vice versa.

To be clear we are making physical things. We are designing propositions while researching the existing. Those things, interventions and buildings will be about people (and their impact on the environment) from a meal to the table, to the house, to the community, to the neighborhood and so on.

Studio Space Popular is focused on Transmedia Architecture through design and theory. Transmedia Architecture defines the experience of space through multiple means: physical and virtual. We develop architecture that considers physical bodies and virtual beings equally.

Studio Space Popular works at the intersection of the built and the virtual environments. We imagine alternatives towards responsibility and solidarity in the ways we design, build and inhabit our buildings, cities, towns and villages, enabled by media.

Studio Space Popular is concerned with the civic implications of media in the built environment. Our social lives occur across media – in transmedia spaces whose design and regulation nobody takes responsibility for. Meanwhile our community ties online are becoming as valuable and consequential as those offline. In the same way that we fight for the safeguarding of social housing, public space, civic infrastructures, and overall public services, we must take care of the civic dimension of our virtual environments.

The studio briefs are organized under four key themes: virtual craft, spatial data libraries, transmedia gatherings, and virtual civic infrastructure. These topics involve architectural design of both physical and virtual spaces, introducing a variety of tools and methods that bridge the digital and analog in architecture.

During the three year MArch program students will have the opportunity of exploring these four key topics during semesters 1 to 4, leaving semesters 5 and 6 for pre-thesis and thesis work. Each semester starts with three to four weeks of collective work in the form of workshops and seminars that contribute to an ongoing research archive. Students are encouraged to shape their thesis around individual interests and draw from the collective research archive.

The studio alternates annually between two types of design and research: practical and speculative. Semesters dedicated to practical work involve: experimental research, local community engagement, and prototyping design projects; while semesters that are dedicated to speculative work involve: historical and descriptive research, disciplinary community engagement, and speculative design projects.

Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg lead the practice Space Popular; an architectural studio that explores the relationships between media and the built environment through research, design and artworks. The studio has realized buildings, exhibitions, public artworks, furniture collections, and interiors in Asia and Europe, as well as virtual architecture for the immersive web. Lesmes and Hellberg have previously held academic positions at UCLA AUD in Los Angeles, the Architectural Association in London, the University of Toronto, and INDA Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Clients, collaborators and commissioners include national institutions such as MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, MAXXI — National Museum of 21^st Century Art, Rome, Italy, the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design ArkDes, Stockholm, Sweden, the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, UK, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea, as well as independent galleries such as MAGAZIN, Vienna, Austria, and Sto Workshop, London, UK.

Studio Jacob explores architecture as representation. For architecture, representation is simultaneously a technical, cultural and political question. It raises questions about: 1. Who is represented (publics, communities, civicness etc.) 2. What is represented (narratives, symbolism, histories, content etc) and 3. How things are represented (techniques, material, construction methods etc).

We are interested in the medium of architecture itself. We think making is a good way to think and use working through design processes as ways of developing ideas and proposals. We understand ways of drawing, for example, are not only ways to depict the world, but systems that themselves organise the world.

We like drawings and models, we like materials and different ways of making, we like to organise space. We like combinations: History and speculation, the everyday and the fantastical, figures and abstraction. 

We are interested in the kind of architectural meanings these combinations and processes might create. What kind of social proposals might they generate. What kinds of ecologies they might manifest. What kind of cultures they might address.

Through this we explore how architecture can be relevant and imaginative, responsive to culture and context, ideas that are also things (and vice versa).

Studio Jacob acts as a framework that supports ideas developing into projects, finding ways to turn progressive architectural ideas into propositions.

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