Metamorphoses: An online studio for the DigitalFutures World workshop event toward living architecture

Abstract

An urgent paradigm shift is needed for the production of architecture but when this new worldview has not yet emerged, then how can we prepare students for this change? This paper highlights the anthropocentric perspectives that have led to environmental disequilibrium, and are being experienced by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In keeping with the move to online studio teaching the METAMORPHOSES studio, a week-long workshop for Inclusive Futures organised by the Experimental Architecture Group and run by Digital Futures World, is outlined both thematically in terms of exploring disruptive paradigms and instrumentally using home as a radical studio space. The paper concludes that in the absence of a formal solution to modern architecture and its environmentally pernicious tropes, pedagogical concerns must turn to challenging concepts and use design-led experimentation to explore the limits of existing practice and establish possibilities beyond them.