Architecture is an intrinsically hopeful act, carrying with it a burden of responsibility not unlike politics or parenting. To build, after all, is to express belief in a tomorrow and represents a material commitment to address present needs and desires. It is at once a social register and catalyst, rooting us in time and place while simultaneously propelling us forward! Even the most prosaic examples reveal our desires for tomorrow. A hotel anticipates guests. A theatre needs an audience. Public squares demand protests. In every case, the built environment is a register of optimism.

In this studio we take the opposite approach: the lens through which we will view the world of the studio is one of our own making, a series of speculative realities that extend both established and familiar phenomena as well as incorporate the emergent and unfamiliar. Our intent is to trigger an iterative process whereby the result of one line of questions will describe the problem of the next, ultimately yielding a set of scaled architectural responses to the realities we develop as a studio.