EAAE
EAAE Annual Conference 2026 - European Association for Architectural Education
Keynote Speakers
Mario Abis, Nicolò Galeazzi & Martina Salvaneschi (Associates Architecture), João Ferreira Nunes, Marco Navarra, Loepold Banchini
Session Chairs
Pier Francesco Cherchi, Carla Sechi, Benedetta Rubattu, Marco Lecis, Lavinia Dondi, Silvia Bodei, Marco Moro, Fabrizio Pusceddu, Roberto Sanna, Emanuela Quaquero, Andrea Margagliotti, Francesco Marras, Chiara Cabras, Stefano Mais, Elisa Pilia, Valentina Pintus, Silvia Orione, Dag Boutsen, Sergio Serra, Māra Liepa-Zemeša, Alessio Floris
Technical support
Gavina Piras, Manuela Piras
Graphic Design
Marco Moro, Virginia Onnis, Gabriele Sanna
Web design
Andrea Montaldo
UNICApress
ISBN paper: 9788833122427
eISBN: 9788833122434
DOI: 10.13125/unicapress.9788833122434
European Association for Architectural Education
ISBN: 9789083127187
Published: 2026-08-20
Steering Committe
Roberto Cavallo, Adriano Dessì, Pier Francesco Cherchi, Marco Moro
Scientific Board
Roberto Cavallo, Delft University of Technology
Mia Roth-Čerina, University of Zagreb
Dag Boutsen, KU Leuven
Michela Barosio, Politecnico di Torino
Patrick Flynn, TU Dublin
Māra Liepa-Zemeša, Riga Technical University
Madeleine Maaskant, Amsterdam Academy of Architecture
Claus Peder Pedersen, Aarhus School of Architecture
Nicolas Pham, ENSA Versailles
Massimo Santanicchia, Iceland University of the Arts
Jörg Schröder, Leibniz University Hannover
Published:
2026-08-20
Full Issue
Preface
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On behalf of the European Association for Architectural Education, founded in Brussels in 1975, I am pleased to welcome you to the EAAE Annual Conference and General Meeting 2026, hosted in the inspiring setting of Cagliari, Sardinia, by the School of Architecture celebrating the 20th anniversary of its foundation. As we look ahead to this gathering, environmental challenges, social transformations, and deep geopolitical tensions continue to redefine the contexts in which architecture operates. In response, architectural education has an important role to play: not only in preparing...
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XS-S-M Architecture of the Fitting - Book of Abstracts
EAAE Annual Conference 2026 - European Association for Architectural Education
About the conference
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Thirty years after the proclamation of Bigness, a vision of architecture conceived as a scalar device of urban power, we are now in a position to critically reassess its ambitions and limitations. That moment in architectural discourse, fueled by a strong confidence in growth, large-scale interventions, and the possibility of constructing a boundless urban whole, has progressively fractured under the pressure of the intertwined crises that shape our present. The very idea of global well-being has been unsettled, exposing widespread conditions of vulnerability, precarity, and uncertainty....
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A small school, but perhaps, not a “small” school
The School of Architecture in Cagliari was established in 2000 within the Architecture degree program and officially became a Faculty in 2006. Architectural Chairs, Institutes, and Departments, however, had already been active since the second half of the nineteenth century. These two dates are highly significant: 2000 coincided with the adoption of the European Landscape Convention, while 2006 marked the approval of Italy’s first Piano Paesaggistico Regionale (Regional Landscape Plan). The growing centrality of...
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Aula Magna “Gaetano Cima”
Session 1 – IN-FORMS
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In 1964, reflecting on the “goodness of fit,” Christopher Alexander proposed that form emerges from a dual coherence between the internal logic of its structure and its consistency with the surrounding context. In this sense, it was understood as the result of interacting forces, where the form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. The diagram thus became a key instrument of design knowledge, enabling architects to verify fitting through the interplay...
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Chairs
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In critical contexts, architectural design can be interpreted as a form of knowledge whose operative capacity emerges when consolidated spatial, institutional, and environmental frameworks reveal conditions of crisis and discontinuity. Operating across marginal conditions – peripheral territories, dismissed industrial landscapes, and interstitial urban spaces – the project becomes a critical device for reading, recognising, and transforming complex spatial configurations. The eastern area of Naples constitutes the field of investigation of this paper. During the twentieth century, this...
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Revisiting the notion of “goodness of fit” (Alexander 1964), the contribution examines the relationship betwe- en form and context in fragile, contracting territories, where socio-spatial relations are increasingly weakened by depopulation, infrastructural abandonment, and environmental instability. In such conditions, the “fit” cannot be assumed as a pre-existing equilibrium but emerges as a projective and situated construction.
The contribution towards a selection of design projects developed...
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Pier Paolo Pasolini opened his short film “La forma della città” with a shot that zoomed out from what he called a “foreign body”: a modern building that disrupted the silhouette of the hill town of Orte against its tufa cliff. His discomfort came not from the building itself but from its failure to accord with its surroundings: a failure of ‘fit’.
This article aims to present the work of a design research studio conducted at the University of Florence in the hilly territory of Camaiore, on the...
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Land reclamation—from the Latin bonum facere, meaning “to make good” — can be defined as the activity of adapting land and water for higher production and social coexistence. It is the concept of “integral land reclamation”, theorized and initiated in Italy between the two World Wars, that allowed for the stable occu- pation of new lands by creating self-sufficient, low-density settlements based on sharing and cooperation: the colonial house. Over the last century, the progressive abandonment of the...
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Cities,” Koolhaas declares, are “places of cuteness,” of a whimsicality enabled by the rationality that domina- tes the countryside. Urbanity and countryside are in opposition: “In terms of contrast to the city,” Koolhaas states, the countryside has the “potential to be really its opposite;” against its cuteness, vast rural-industrial sheds are beautiful, “the definition of the sublime.” But the formal changes that Koolhaas observes – which undoubtedly affect the periphery – are driven by urban logics. The...
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In 1964, Christopher Alexander proposed that the quality of an architectural form lay in its capacity to re- spond coherently to the forces generated by its context: the goodness of fit as a measure of adaptation between problem and solution. This conceptual framework, grounded in the legibility of context and the stability of its forces, presupposes conditions that disaster — in its capacity to erase consolidated relations, hierarchies and spatial references — radically undermines.
In territories...
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Is the current preoccupation of architecture with becoming ‘ecological’ by coming up with ever more efficient formal solutions, genuinely ecological materials, focusing on local demands or smarter technologies to stay within CO2 benchmarks is perpetuating architecture’s humanist myth? Despite the agreed upon necessity of “ecologizing” design by focusing on questions of co-existences and shared agency, by calling for “fitting” solutions depending on specific situations and loci, architecture’s fundamental...
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The research is based on the relationship between traditionally dominant and less represented narratives in architectural history. The practices by which architectural knowledge was exported, imported or translated are analysed and evaluated based on the relationship between the cultures of the centre and the cultures of the pe- riphery, whose culturally defined domains are thereby re-examined. Focusing on the architectural experiences of the Global South, it transfigures the local narratives into the...
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In mountain territories marked by demographic and economic contraction, architectural design attains ope- rative efficacy through the dimension of small scale and the “necessary ordinary”. “Measure” is understood not as a quantitative parameter, but as a qualitative device capable of condensing relationships, uses, and local conditions. Within this framework, the detail is no longer subordinate to a larger system but assumes a genera- tive role: it is within the at the smallest scale that design engages...
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The Theban Necropolis on Luxor’s West Bank represents a site of unparalleled world-historical significance. Since 1983, the Hungarian Archaeological Mission in Thebes has conducted systematic field research within the “Tombs of the Nobles,” focusing on the excavation and restoration of a complex funerary ensemble dating primarily to the New Kingdom (16th–11th centuries BC).
The site’s history is a spacial palimpsest of continuous reuse and transformation. Following the Roman era, the tombs faced...
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SESSION 1B IN-FORMS
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Coal extraction shaped several regions in Europe and beyond as a territorial, social, and architectural project tied to technological optimism, welfare ambition, and modernisation. Today, these landscapes reveal the after- life of extraction through conditions of ecological degradation, infrastructural obsolescence, and socio- eco- nomic reduction. This paper examines how post-extractive territories can operate as critical frameworks for architectural design pedagogy. Over the 2025-2026 academic year, the...
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Large-scale architecture has long been associated with logics of autonomy, visibility, and formal assertion. To- day, especially in heritage landscapes – but not only – this position appears increasingly untenable, while visibility itself becomes a problematic condition, often addressed through surface-based and image-oriented strategies.
Within this framework, the paper proposes to interpret an emerging tendency – minor yet significant – as a possible counter-trend: rather than asserting...
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The development of modern cities contributes to the shortage of green spaces within their boundaries. It is necessary to utilize and revitalize undeveloped spaces into small gardens, providing residents with a place for recreation, relaxation, and education. Pocket gardens (or mini-park) strengthen the relationships between peo- ple, places, and their history. These interventions, tailored precisely to a specific location, transform constraints into a resource that generates a new quality of space. Small...
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The following contribution reflects on the design of small and medium scale educational spaces as a situated practice, understanding and interpreting the specificities of context by exploring proximity, in its various for- ms, as a design principle.
This investigation, part of a broader doctoral research project addressing the design of innovative school spaces in relation to their place, identifies and analyzes three virtuous case studies that, on a small scale, reflect different qualitative... -
Symbol, icon, and index are the fundamental categories of signs in semiotics. First theorized by Peirce and later applied to art and architecture by Krauss, the icon is a sign that refers to its object through resemblance; the symbol has a conventional and socially agreed meaning; while the index is the most complex sign, as it is the record of a real process or event, a trace of a past presence. In rural areas, the index can be recognized in elements such as the linear rows, the patterns of the irrigation...
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This paper investigates how small-scale spatial interventions can transform everyday green urban public spaces into adaptive environments that support active and inclusive aging in place. In response to the rapid aging of urban populations, the research positions public space as a critical infrastructure for sustaining health, social engagement, and everyday mobility in later life.
Focusing on key spatial elements- such as seating, lighting, pathways, and signage- the study examines how their...
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In the context of climate change, urban populations are increasingly exposed to abrupt and intense heatwaves, exacerbating the urban heat island effect. While cities worldwide are developing and implementing heat miti- gation strategies such as green infrastructure and large-scale planning frameworks, these approaches require significant time, resources, and coordination, limiting their ability to respond to urgent conditions. Tempo- rary urban interventions have therefore emerged in recent years as an...
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This paper examines how cities are not only constructed through physical form but are continually completed through imagination, perception, and cultural production. Moving beyond conventional frameworks of ur- banism grounded in infrastructure and planning, it proposes that architecture, literature, and music function as parallel modes of urban knowledge. These disciplines operate as “imagined urban interventions,” shaping how the city is experienced, interpreted, and inhabited without necessarily...
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This paper examines a structured method for selecting small-scale spatial interventions in complex, meaning-la- den urban environments. Using the heterogeneous, spatially complex landscapes of the Berlin Wall corridor as a testing ground, it focuses on identifying and interpreting recurring spatial and social typologies and on translating fieldwork evidence and analytical findings into site-specific urban acupuncture proposals. Situated within the EAAE 2026 theme XS–S–M: Architecture of the Fitting, the...
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Thirty years after the proclamation of Bigness, architectural practice is shaped by conditions of instability, displacement, and uneven resource distribution. Relationships between form and social life no longer hold as stable or coherent, but must be negotiated. Territories are defined less by growth than by fragmentation, incompleteness, and what can be described as permanent temporariness. Rather than assuming alignment, architecture must operate through processes that are partial and adaptive. Within...
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SESSION 1C IN-FORMS
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This paper examines the use of Christopher Alexander’s “Pattern Language” within an undergraduate architectural design studio as an operative framework for spatial inquiry. Rather than treating patterns as repeatable solutions, the studio challenges their fixed interpretation by repositioning them as instruments for analysis, comparison, and transformation. In the initial phase, students identify and deconstruct patterns found in a list of case studies, focusing on how spatial relationships, such as...
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Calabria, now primarily traversed along its longitudinal axis, preserves a layered palimpsest of connections that testify to its historical role as a Mediterranean crossroads. During Greek colonization and later Basilian mona- sticism, settlement patterns developed along transversal routes. Though now fragmented, they once enabled exchanges among diverse cultures, connecting settlements like beads on a rosary across a landscape that offers both refuge and isolation.
The isthmic route between...
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Air is continuous and recognises no borders. The air we share is multi-scalar and extends from the human scale of our breath and lungs to the atmosphere that hovers above the earth. Air is invisible in its default state and this ‘invisibility has led us to take air for granted’ (Abram, 2014) and misuse it as a dumping ground, despite being named as a global concern by the United Nations. Air is a shared fragility, that is central to climate chan- ge, to the experience of place, to health and well-being,...
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This contribution examines filmic mapping as a method for interpreting open public spaces in metropolitan landscapes. Informed by HERITAGESCAPES, a research project on Madrid’s heritage ecology developed within the Cultural Landscape Research Group (GIPC) at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, it argues that moving images cultivate a critical visuality essential for contemporary architectural discourse. This approach enables students to register socio-ecological processes, ranging from river corridors to...
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In an era defined by the rapid generation of images, ideas, and architectural proposals through artificial in- telligence, the act of drawing by hand emerges as a radical pedagogical counterproposal. This article presents an educational experience at the School of Architecture of Valencia: a travel workshop with first-year stu- dents whose sole purpose is drawing. The proposal departs from a fundamental distinction: drawing not as a medium of project representation, but as a mode of slow, embodied...
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From the vedute acquired by travellers on the Grand Tour to the disposable-camera photographs taken during cruise excursions, images –in a wide range of formats– have long operating as instruments for representing the tourist destination. Objective as they might seem, these images are not an accurate depiction of reality, but rather mythifications of the tourist site. Through processes of capture, framing, and dissemination, rather than depicting reality, they produce mythified versions of the site. Over...
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If shrinkage and smallness can be a design choice dictated by territorial and resource constraints – today more than ever –, they are also inherent to architecture exhibitions. This paper argues that exhibitions should not be understood as mere representations of architecture, but as architectural productions in their own right. Contrary to the literal meaning of the word ‘exhibere’, which suggests an outward movement, the exhibition practice fits full-scale projects into curated environments rooted...
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As digital technologies become increasingly integrated into architectural education, understanding how they influence students’ design thinking and construction strategies has become an important pedagogical question. Rooted in longstanding construction logics of stacking, repetition, and modular aggregation, this research investigates the relationship between prior learning experiences, specifically inherited construction logics...
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In the context of Slovakia, marked by deepening spatial inequalities and demographic decline, peripheral re- gions can become key environments for exploring new models of social service provision (elderly care homes, facilities for people with mental disabilities, children’s homes, and services for the homeless people). This pa- per examines how architecture and planning can redefine social care facilities in sparsely populated areas - from residential homes and community centres to hybrid care typologies...
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The contribution investigates the concept of “fitting” in architectural design, interpreting it not as a passive adaptation to context, but as the active construction of a situated measure. Within a framework marked by territorial fragility and the progressive contraction of resources, the research proposes to understand the rela- tionship between architecture and landscape as the outcome of specific design decisions, capable of operating through precise and calibrated interventions. Through a practice of...
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SESSION 1D IN-FORMS
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In the context of the growing need for architecture to ‘fit’ diverse social practices and spatial conditions, this paper examines the importance of physical play in public space as a fundamental method of creating spatial experience and learning for all age groups. In contemporary society, such forms of engagement are increasingly threatened by the lack of accessible public spaces and by the shift of play and exploration into the digital realm. The paper considers the role of architects as mediators who,...
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Within the framework of the research agreement between the Department of Civil, Environmental and Archi- tectural Engineering at the University of Cagliari and the Municipal Administration of Villacidro, the research group “Architecture, City, Landscape,” coordinated by the author, has initiated a study aimed at the archi- tectural and urban regeneration of the eastern edges of the town. This scientific consultancy stems from the profound crisis affecting the Villacidro area and the progressive...
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This paper reflects on the theoretical basis of the architectural discipline and its teaching, specifically regarding site response and a project’s appropriateness. Addressing the theme of Session #1, this work questions and reinterprets the concept of context.
The work comments on several key texts investigating the topic (from the genius loci in the writings of Pope to Norbeg-Schulz, through to Alexander, Venturi and Scott Brown, Rowe, Rossi, Koolhaas and others). Rather than a fixed definition,... -
This paper presents results from a consumer-neuroscience (neuromarketing) study developed alongside the Erasmus+ AI:nterior workshop on universal design (UD) (RISEBA FAD, Riga). It examines “scale” in the de- sign process by tracking how hand sketches—an embodied, “XS” mode of thinking—translate into AI-gene- rated interior visuals, and whether this translation preserves design intent. Treating “fitting” as the measurable alignment between design intention and received perception, the study asks whether...
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How can we teach, plan and design to preserve architecture identity in AI Age?This could be the most impor- tant question facing architecture today. Architects are pressured to design and develop a project very quickly and simply to keep pace with the timelines of funds (edge funds mainly), investors, stakeholders, local councils and government regulations. All these actors and obligations seek to simplify the design process and reduce it to AI-generated renderings and images.
These factors do not...
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In the millennium, architectural education, faced with multiple global crises and inequalities, is obliged to adapt its traditional frameworks and rigid institutional methods to local realities. This study discusses the re-imagining of architectural education not merely as a pedagogy that transmits knowledge, but as one that seeks a “fitting” in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In the process of transfor- ming site-specific interventions at the micro, meso, and macro scales amid...
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Thirty years after Bigness normalized architectural thinking around industrial scalability, architectural educa- tion continues to reproduce a material hierarchy shaped by large, standardized systems. Concrete, steel, and prefabricated assemblies remain the dominant technological languages through which building production is taught, while low-carbon local materials such as earth, straw, or stone occupy only a marginal place within architectural training in Türkiye. This reflects a deeper mismatch between...
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The growing disuse of religious heritage, linked to the progressive loss of its liturgical function, is leading to a widespread process of abandonment of ecclesiastical buildings. This phenomenon affects both urban centers and peripheral areas, emerging as a pervasive and transversal condition of the contemporary territory. In this context, Sardinia, with its vast open spaces and low settlement density, represents a privileged field of analysis for understanding the phenomenon at a territorial scale,...
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Contemporary territories are increasingly mediated through digital systems that do not simply represent space, but actively structure its visibility. Within these systems, certain areas remain partially or entirely absent. These absences (manifesting as missing, obscured, or inaccessible data) are not neutral omissions, but are produced through uneven development, infrastructural disparities, and political decisions that regulate access, represen- tation, and knowledge. As such, no-data zones reveal how...
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Architectural design education produces an abundance of material output—drawings, models, prototypes, installations—while simultaneously generating significant amounts of waste. Leftover, discarded, or partially used materials accumulate across campuses and educational settings, often treated as expendable byproducts of learning. This paper presents a pedagogical experiment designed to cultivate awareness of material value, lifespan, and circularity in developing contextually responsive design...
Session 2 – UN-BUILD
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Conference Session 2 UN-BUILD
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SESSION 2A UN-BUILD
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The Architecture, Construction, and Engineering (ACE) sector is currently grappling with a “regression cri- sis” precipitated by the unsustainability of extractive “cradle-to-grave” capitalist models. This paper interrogates the pedagogical potential of the Fabrication & Structure (VS3) studio at [university redacted], positioned as an “inquiry-based biotope” that destabilizes the traditional primacy of site and program. By prioritizing the inherent material traits of timber offcuts as the primary...
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While contemporary architectural research continuously evolves to address climate crises through expanding 5R to comprehensive 10R and 15R strategies, first-cycle architectural education severely lags this theoretical progression. Instead, environmental performance is treated as an isolated theoretical package introduced into the design process as a late-stage add-on, rather than a core design driver. Consequently, students frequently rely on initial, intuitive starting concepts where massing is applied...
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Built environment professions play a critical role in climate mitigation and adaptation. This paper investigates how future practitioners are being prepared for this challenge, focusing on the potential of co-design experiences, or live projects, to equip students for socially engaged climate action. It argues that student-stakeholder co-design processes foster innovative, sustainable solutions, while benefiting the learning outcomes. Transformative pedagogies adopting co-design and experiential learning...
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While Artificial Intelligence demonstrates broad efficacy in the early stages of design conceptualisation and visual representation, it often generates generic solutions that struggle to align with specific design intentions and site peculiarities, operating through abstraction processes driven by global databases.
This contribution investigates the role of AI in the transition toward small and medium scales, highlighting a significant operational gap in the intermediate phase of the design process.... -
The paper reflects on the concept of “mining” as a generative principle of construction, examining the role that abandoned architectural objects can play within a process of material resource reuse and recycling. The process of dismantling and extracting materials or components from an existing artifact to be reused in the construction of a new architectural object is deeply rooted in the history of building cultures. This is evident in the historical reuse of ashlar blocks and structural elements adapted...
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How can architectural practice engage in remote rural settlements shaped by abandonment and infrastructural scarcity, and what forms of spatial and material engagement do such conditions enable? What if we could reframe marginal rural contexts not as sites of deficit, but as productive environments for alternative archi- tectural approaches, generating distinct ways of making, inhabiting, and maintaining? This question is explored through a project in the small inland village of Dol on the Croatian island...
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Materials have long been designated to fulfill predefined functional and formal requirements in architectural design, leaving existing materials underutilized in the design process. This paper examines how reuse-based practices reconfigure this assumption. It argues that material reuse operates as a fundamental input that acti- vely shapes design decisions. Accordingly, design unfolds through the reciprocal relationship between programmatic needs and available materials as each continuously informs and...
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Ex-Mercati Generali in Turin is a place shaped by several lives. Built in the early twentieth century as a whole- sale market, later transformed for the 2006 Winter Olympics, and today marked by uncertain uses and unfi- nished regeneration, the complex raises a question that is central to sustainable architecture: how can existing buildings be adapted without erasing the material, spatial, and historical value they already contain?
This paper examines Ex-Mercati Generali as a case of adaptive reuse...
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Adaptive reuse consists of assigning a new use to existing buildings without destroying their essential structure or their historical, cultural, or material value. This type of intervention in heritage industrial spaces poses specific challenges for architectural design, especially in the realm of interior spaces, where the new programmatic transformation must operate with precision, restraint, and sensitivity toward what already exists. In this context, the present study examines the role of...
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This contribution discusses knowledge on circularity in a perspective of urban transformation, as inherent urban dynamic and as construction of desirable futures. Circularity and circular economy are understood not only as important factor to achieve resource saving and climate neutrality in all processes regarding the built environment but also as factor towards social and economic resilience in increasing global uncertainties. With this backdrop, knowledge on circularity will be discussed in two...
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SESSION 2B UN-BUILD
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ScaleKabin is a 1:1 mobile fabrication hub, collectively designed and built by architecture students in an electi- ve course. The project began from a concrete spatial problem: a crowded studio with newly acquired 3D prin- ters and no space to house them. This made mobility a design parameter and positioned material and spatial limitation as the primary condition for research. Students surveyed university storage spaces and assembled a stock of salvaged structural and sheet components, each with its own...
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This paper reflects on architectural design in the context of the enhancement and enjoyment of archaeological landscapes, emphasising the need to adopt a cross-disciplinary perspective on the subject – one that remains unclear and largely unexplored in contemporary debate, particularly from an operational standpoint – partly due to a series of complexities arising from the fragmented disciplinary approach to the relationship between architecture and archaeology, the interaction between ancient and...
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This paper examines an experiential educational project that adopts renovation, reuse, and minimal interven- tion as pedagogical strategies underpinning the 8th iteration of Lakni Kell (“We All Need a Home”) initiative at the University of Pécs.
The intervention aims to address increasing housing precarity with ecological responsiblity: demanding a shift in innovation towards transforming what’s already existing. The in-process transformation of a vacant 33 m2 municipal apartment to house a family at... -
If in recent years reuse has progressively established itself as one of the central references of contemporary architectural design, the question today no longer concerns only how to reuse, but how to teach design when buildingisnolongeranecessarypremise. ThispaperreinterpretstheteachingactivityofFrancescoVenezia— developed between 1986 and 2014 across several Italian and international universities—as an early articulation of the categories Remind, Reuse, Renounce, Reduce. Taking Venezia’s pedagogy as a...
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What if we are to reinvent the aesthetics of architecture in marginal places? How would it look like? And what could be our contribution as designers - in terms of professional ethic and formal aesthetic - to this incremental process of building, layer above layer, on what is already there? How can heritage become a reference for new strata to come, without constraining the creativity and regenerative capacity of...
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Excessively high comfort standard, rigid building regulations, and the widespread outsourcing of ecological performance to technological systems—often hidden within walls—result in a generic architectural language, strict spatial categorizations, and increasing construction costs. Addressing the themes of remind, renounce, and reduce, the paper examines how architecture can be conceived as a site-specific ecological device, defined through a process of fitting to climate and context. This approach informs...
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The transition towards sustainable architecture requires a shift in focus from new construction to transfor- ming the existing built environment. Although there is extensive knowledge on sustainable building, practical methods for transforming existing structures are underdeveloped.
The teaching and research project ReLAB (Real World Laboratories for Sustainable Building) at the School of Architecture Bremen, Germany, addresses this gap through an experimental, hands-on learning format with Master’s... -
The proposed contribution reflects on three consecutive design-research studios that address the transforma- tion of educational spaces within dense urban contexts. Framed within challenges of urban cores, these studios explore adaptive reuse as a critical design approach grounded in existing spatial, social, and material conditions. The first case, The Dispersed School, investigates the renunciation of the conventional, monolithic school building by proposing a distributed system of educational spaces...
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The architectural profession is undergoing a structural crisis whose nature it has not yet fully grasped. Artificial intelligence has exposed a core vulnerability: what architecture schools teach today is increasingly reproduced by an algorithm faster and at lower cost. But there is one dimension the algorithm cannot assume. That dimension is ethical: who bears responsibility for what happens to a building after the keys have been handed over? Who ensures that the next generation understands what it...
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Across Europe, ongoing secularisation has led to a growing number of underused or abandoned church buildings. In the Czech Republic, this condition is particularly pronounced in rural and border regions affected by depopulation and declining religious practice. While numerous examples from countries such as the Netherlands demonstrate the potential of adaptive reuse as a strategy for preserving these structures and reactivating them as community assets, such approaches cannot be universally applied. In...
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The current ecological crisis calls for a rethinking of our relation to natural resources, particularly the soil— which architecture has long regarded as merely a volume to be excavated or a surface to be built upon. Nevertheless, today, ordinance for inward densification, recent European directive on “zero net land take”, refusal to construct new buildings in favor of renovating existing building stock and moratoriums on demolitions, all point toward limiting excessive land consumption. Yet these...
Session 3 – HER(M)ITAGE
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The title of the session, by recalling the term heritage, proposes a critical re- reading through the insertion of the “(M),” which both expands and problematizes the very notion of heritage. The “M” refers to memory, acknowledging heritage as a site for the construction and transmission of collective memory; it recalls the human and communal dimension upon which it is grounded; it evokes maintenance as an ongoing practice of care; and, finally, it suggests modification as an...
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SESSION 3A HER(M)ITAGE
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Memory settles into things and the forms of architecture.
The way cities, buildings, interiors and equipment are constructed conveys a unique shared idea of life and a view of the world. Architecture speaks to us and makes us feel at home in a space.
What does the passage of time entail? What meaning does it convey? This contribution explores the relation- ship between the meaning embodied in architectural forms and the inevitable changes that affect them. Considering examples from diffused heritage,... -
What if heritage were something continuously kept in play?
Across the large housing landscapes of post-socialist Europe, continuity takes shape as a dispersed field of ordinary, largely independent actions - repairs, appropriations, minor adjustments, acts of resistance - which renegotiate urban forms over time. In New Belgrade’s Blocks 61–64, the afterlife of modernism unfolds as a condition of stratification, in which fragments of the past persist through processes of selection and reinter- pretation,... -
Within the framework of Europe’s ecological transition, a disconnect is emerging between supranational cli- mate goals and local implementation tools. Although the European Green Deal and the European Climate Law set binding targets for carbon neutrality by 2050, their morphological translation follows timelines and approaches that diverge from those of General Urban Development Plans (PRG). The latter, historically de- signed to govern urban expansion, are now inadequate for managing the complexity of...
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By moving away from the mandate of perpetual novelty and innovation, architecture can reaffirm itself as a cultural and artistic discipline, deeply engaged with the enduring questions of beauty, sustainability, and the collective human experience.
Central to this reframing is the concept of ‘Fitting’. In a world defined by limits to consumption—of energy, land, materials—”Fitting” replaces the aggressive imposition of form. It is a paradigm for a more modest, yet more precise, architectural response. In... -
The 20th century witnessed numerous modernist avant-gardes in exile who present diverse narratives of adoption and adaptation, of fitting and adjustment. Whereas the most renowned cases have been the Bauhaus masters who moved in to the United States, this paper focuses on a lesser cited German architect, who did not move westward but to the East; Bruno Taut. Leaving Germany initially for the Soviet Russia and then passing on to Japan, to land on eventually in the young Republic of Turkey, Taut’s story...
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This contribution investigates fitting as an operative paradigm through the regeneration of abandoned intra muros areas, focusing on former military complexes of monastic origin. Rather than addressing the building itself as the primary object of intervention, the research shifts attention to the enclosed open spaces that often characterize these sites. Due to their scale, location, and physical enclosure, these spaces frequently assume the spatial and symbolic qualities of the Hortus Conclusus:...
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This paper examines the mountain settlements as an example of architectural and historical “fit” that gradually evolved into a contemporary condition of “MisFit”. In this context, the term “MisFit” describes the phenome- non whereby historically adapted settlement forms no longer correspond to contemporary requirements of accessibility and inclusive habitation.
Located in the region of Epirus in north-western Greece, the forty-six traditional villages of Zagori (Zagorochoria) serve as the main case...
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This contribution proposes a reinterpretation of heritage in minor settlements through the lens of the energy question, understood as both a critical and operational device for contemporary design. Within the framework of environmental, economic, and demographic crises, Mediterranean inland areas — often considered marginal — emerge as anticipatory contexts capable of activating new relationships between space, society, and resources.
Adopting the paradigm of her(M)itage, heritage is interpreted...
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The restoration of historic buildings often requires approaches that move beyond purely fabric-centered conservation toward more integrated and context-sensitive practice. This conference contribution examines the restoration of the House of Wonders in Stone Town, Zanzibar, to understand how restoration methodologies are shaped in practice under conditions of incomplete documentation, material uncertainty, local regulatory oversight, limited resources, and uneven availability of specialized conservation...
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Background.Modern infrastructure often prioritize functional efficiency at the expense of cultural resonance, engendering urban “non-places.” However, the Naha Port Ventilation Towers (2012) represent a critical counter-narrative to this technocratic standard. Situated at Naha’s historic gateway—a liminal space where contemporary transit intersects with the memory of the Ryukyu Kingdom—these structures occupy the si- tes once guarded by the Miegusuku and Yarazamori-gusuku fortresses. Historically significant as defensive bastions, their contemporary counterparts adopt Gusuku-inspired...
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SESSION 3B HER(M)ITAGE
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This paper presents the results of the international workshop entitled MURAA+, held at the Higher Technical School of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. The workshop aims to explore the building of social value at the Térmas de Mura archaeological park in Llíria, a site containing Roman remains from the 1st century AD located in the town centre. This initiative stems from a project launched a year earlier by the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture...
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This paper presents a comparative ground through two hippodrome structures designed by Italian architect Paolo Vietti-Violi, in Milan and Ankara, both conceived in the early twentieth century as instruments and symbols of modernization. While originating from a shared architectural authorship and typological logic, the two cases reveal radically divergent urban conditions today: the Milan hippodrome persists as an active, institutional, and culturally embedded entity, whereas the Ankara...
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Post-industrial mining landscapes - quarries, extraction pits, spoil heaps, tailings ponds and infrastructural voids - constitute difficult forms of heritage. Neither monumental landmarks nor neutral voids, they are stratified urban-industrial landscapes in which memory, labour, environmental transformation, minor infrastructures and public access overlap. This architectural essay reads such burdened grounds through an expanded notion of heritage: memory as collective construction, maintenance as ongoing...
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Perceptions of conservation as an evolving practice that is agile and adaptive to broader values and interpretations support the premise that architects work as part of a continuum. With diminishing resources globally, architects have a responsibility to value and care for the built heritage and connected urban ecosystems.
A training in conservation prepares an architect for a specialised engagement with historic buildings and sites, but in this time of radical urban change and uncertainty, such skills... -
Via XX Settembre in Genoa, constructed between the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, emerges within a phase of social transition linked to industrial revolutions. The street can be understood as a site of experimentation, where new materials and construction techniques were introduced into the urban fabric. The resulting ensemble represents a major urban intervention and a deliberate act of discontinuity with the pre-existing city architecture, expressing the cultural aspirations of an...
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This paper investigates Cistercian settlements in medieval Sardinia as agents of territorial fitting within extra-urban and low-density environments. Rather than considering monasteries as isolated architectural complexes, the research interprets them as nodes within wider networks linking water control, agricultural organization, granges, sacred sites, and small settlements. Through a crossreading of landscape history and architectural history, the paper explores how Cistercian presence rearticulated...
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Cities have always taken shape alongside major expansion or redevelopment projects through smaller-scale interventions repeated over time, forming a recognisable network within the urban fabric. This practice has only recently regained importance, engaging local authorities and influencing design culture. Rather than large-scale services, we are thinking of smaller-scale initiatives, amongst which covered municipal markets play a strategic role.
Developing from a long-standing tradition of periodic...
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In vernacular architecture, the concept of “fitting” emerges from the tension between the permanence of historical fabric and the evolving demands of contemporary habitation. Within current heritage debates – which frame heritage as a dynamic condition shaped by memory, maintenance, and modification – adaptive interven- tions are essential tools for sustaining the continuity of inhabited historic environments. This paper explores this “fitting” process through a case study of a traditional masonry house in Ağırnas, Kayseri, located within the UNESCO Tentative World Heritage site of the...
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The network of youth buildings during the Fascist era constitutes a layered heritage of “minor architecture” that shaped the identity of Italian provinces. Not monumental, these structures operated at an intermediate scale: compact to integrate into the urban fabric, yet incisive to define public space. Today, many survive through adaptive reuse, raising questions about how “difficult memory” persists beyond original ideological programs. This contribution examines the Casa del Balilla (GIL) in Piacenza,...
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Tatabánya–Felsőgalla; Komárom–Szőny; Gyöngyös–Zsellérköz
Through cooperation agreements, settlements and urban districts that had fallen behind socially and technically came into contact with the Department of Residentialbuilding Design at the Faculty of Architecture of BME.
Recognizing the problems, and thanks to the sensitivity of the participants, areas were selected for the semester-long design tasks of the design courses where, alongside improving social aspects, there was also an...
Session 4 – EX-URBAN
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Conference Session 4 EX-URBAN
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SESSION 4A EX-URBAN
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Kashan, a historic city on the edge of Iran’s central desert, is often approached through its merchant houses, bazaar, and Fin Garden. This paper proposes a different reading. It examines Kashan through a set of small and medium-scale infrastructures that regulated water, movement, rest, and production in a hot-arid environment: ab-anbars, caravanserais, and peri-urban watermills. Rather than treating these elements as isolated building types, the paper reads them as a dispersed architecture of territorial...
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The rise of mobile populations signals a structural transformation in how territories are inhabited and produced. Contemporary mobile inhabitants —such as international students, migrants, long-term visitors, and digital nomads— are no longer marginal figures but integral to spatial and socio-economic systems. Their mobility challenges planning paradigms historically grounded in sedentary populations, permanence, and stable spatial organization.
This paper examines the impact of mobile inhabitation...
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Territorial transformations are widely recognized as being characterized by long temporal horizons and by an irreducible dimension of uncertainty. The duration of these processes implies that intermediate stages— namely transitional phases—are often as significant as, if not more significant than, the final outcome. The uncertainty surrounding the eventual outcome is closely tied to political, economic, social, and cultural conditions, whose shifts are directly reflected—albeit with varying temporalities...
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In an era of accelerating climate emergency, the built environment requires a paradigm shift from top-down expert-led solutions toward inclusive, democratic transformations. This paper explores Dundrum by Design (DbD), a “live project” partnership between UCD, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council (DLRCoCo), and the local community. By immersing Year 2 architecture students in a real-world urban transformation, the initiative tests how innovative pedagogies equip future architects with social and...
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Understanding the recent transformations of human settlements requires acknowledging that energy and space have historically operated as inseparable forces in shaping infrastructures, resource distribution, and territorial hierarchies. Planned industrial areas, however, consolidated a rationality grounded in productive centralisation, infrastructural concentration, and rigid separation between areas of production, consumption, and dwelling, thereby deepening the dichotomy between urban centres and marginal...
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This paper examines the neighbourhood of Fontaínhas as a critical case for rethinking the conventional dichotomy between ‘urban’ and ‘extra-urban’ within contemporary territorial studies. Although centrally located in Porto, Fontaínhas displays characteristics typically associated with ‘inner areas’, including socio-economic fragility, demographic ageing, and uneven access to services. Such conditions challenge rigid spatial classifications and instead support a network-oriented conception of territory,...
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This paper examines how certain agricultural processes are becoming legible as heritage within the metropolitan landscape of Madrid. It does so at a moment when the metropolis is being rethought through green infrastructure and new socioecological imaginaries. Rather than treating metropolitan agriculture as a unified field, the paper traces the dispersed connections through which it persists across research, production, public action, and cultural practice, and through which it acquires new heritage...
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This contribution is developed within the framework of a research grant funded by the Marche Region and engages with the debate on the extra-urban, proposing a reflection centered on the role of architecture as the minimum unit of intervention in the redefinition of territorial hierarchies. From this perspective, rural architectures can be understood as active nodes within a multiscalar territorial network, capable of activating alternative forms of “glocal” development.
Starting from an...
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In recent years, countermeasures against flooding caused by intense rainfall in short-duration—as part of strategies toward climate change adaptation—has been identified as a key issue in the fields of architecture and urban design. To advance these efforts, it is becoming increasingly important to adopt a watershed-based approach—one grounded in topographical features rather than administrative boundaries tied to the modern planning—and to strengthen the resilience of inhabited areas by evoking behavioral...
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This contribution presents the methodology, outcomes, and potential impacts of the design studio Urban Morphology, Architectural Typology, Contemporary Settlement Patterns, led by Professors Bao Li and Marco Trisciuoglio at the School of Architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing. The 2026 edition, titled URBAN ANAMNESIS AND URBAN SURGERY. Urban Design and Spatial Morphology in the Zhen Xiang Area, Nanjing, investigates how operational readings of urban form can inform design as a process of...
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SESSION 4B EX-URBAN
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The Bosco di Aci, a residual forest grown on the lava flows of Mount Etna, is approached here as a troubled fragment of an ecological relic, rather than as a space to be restored or reinterpreted. Embedded within a fragmented suburban condition, the site expresses an unstable coexistence between vegetal succession, anthropogenic pressures, and geological substrate, where lava continues to exert a specific agency in shaping ecological processes and spatial configurations.
Drawing on the notion of...
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Contemporary port cities are complex entities that embody the dichotomy between the urban and extra-urban reality. By its very nature, the port is part of the city, yet is separate from it in physical, spatial, administrative and governmental terms at the same time.
In small and medium-sized Mediterranean port cities, this condition is especially pronounced. On one hand ports are embedded within dense, fine-grained historic fabrics, where everyday urban life unfolds in proximity with large-scale... -
Many contemporary authors have already proposed an interpretation of rural-urban interaction in terms of spatial configurations that are neither properly urban nor rural. On this basis, it is time to definitively overcome the entrenched, but now obsolete, dichotomy between urban and the ‘rest of the world’.
Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that the processes of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid) generally exhibit a deficit of ‘urbanity’, that is, the capacity to embed both... -
The growing polarization between urban centers and rural areas is accompanied by a profound restructuring of access to services of general interest in rural areas, driven by digitalization and dematerialization. The reduction of physical meeting points (post offices, train stations, local shops, etc.) exposes rural communities to two major consequences: first, the accumulation of underused or abandoned buildings, and second, the weakening of their social and economic infrastructure.
In response to...
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In recent years, Alpine architectural discourse has shifted from large-scale applications to more site-specific, context-sensitive interventions. It has been observed that most of these transformations occur in fragile mountainous regions, where they are facing depopulation, reduced services, and the fragmentation and dispersion of social life, which challenge inherited models of public space. In this context, architecture is no longer tasked with portraying the idea of growth, but rather functioning under...
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In the context of large-scale internal displacement caused by the war in Ukraine, western cities have absorbed a significant influx of population, leading to infrastructural overload and an intensified housing crisis. This condition prompts a fundamental question: can living and working be reorganized outside the city, not as a temporary escape, but as a sustained spatial condition?
This paper presents a design studio developed within an architectural design program in Ukraine, based on a real...
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Kashan, a historic city on the edge of Iran’s central desert, is often approached through its merchant houses, bazaar, and Fin Garden. This paper proposes a different reading. It examines Kashan through a set of small and medium-scale infrastructures that regulated water, movement, rest, and production in a hot-arid environment: ab-anbars, caravanserais, and peri-urban watermills. Rather than treating these elements as isolated building types, the paper reads them as a dispersed architecture of territorial...
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Across Europe, climate change, social exclusion, and demographic transitions are reshaping demands on public space beyond metropolitan cores, especially in marginal territories. Urban and landscape design increasingly relies on digital, data-rich, and AI-supported workflows to assess, visualize, and implement climate-adaptive strategies; yet when deployed in participatory settings, these tools also reconfigure how knowledge is produced, negotiated, and materialized. This paper addresses these dynamics...
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In the wake of rapid coastal urbanization in the Mediterranean, rural hinterlands often face a paradox of demographic decline versus untapped potential. This paper investigates the “100 Villages” project in Albania—a strategic cooperation plan between national agencies and academic institutions — focusing on the village of Mursi and its neighboring. Situated as the cultural backbone to the high-density tourism of Saranda, these villages offer a unique case study in “Architecture of the Fitting” across XS...
Exhibitions, Roundtables & Workshops
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Friday 28. 08. 2026
Conference Tours
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Conference Floorplans & Tours
