Environmental Architecture (MA)

The MA Environmental Architecture is a field-focused programme where students engage in collaborative projects with those on the frontlines of environmental struggles.

This was the last year of the Lithium Triangle Research Studio. For the past four years it had been examining the socio-environmental impacts of lithium extraction in the Atacama Desert in Chile. While the studio’s broader investigation has looked at lithium across local and global scales, the design efforts have focused on how to take back the land from the control of mining corporations or the Chilean state, and place it in the hands of local and Indigenous organisations.

At the same time, the Orang-orang and the Hutan research studio went on its third year of continuous work with activists, scholars, artists and local communities in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Working with communities to legitimise and make visible their claims to land, the studio foreground the micro-organisms that enliven peat soils. Soils that carry histories of deep knowledge and ancestral connection to place, as well as concepts of multi-species kinship that counter colonial systems of land policy and management.

Despite the lingering impacts of COVID this was an immensely successful year: with a depth of research and critical design thinking that was really outstanding, the breath of commitment and creativity I have witnessed leaves me confident that the new generations of designers have both the skills, the intellect and the will to care for our planet in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Image: “Territory and Ways of Knowing” by Antonio del Giudice (asundesweet). RS1: Lithium Triangle Research Studio