This design studio invites you to explore four different ways of thinking and making architecture – Grown – Sewn – Blown – Hewn – as strategies for reimagining how we live together in the city, creating new forms of inhabitation.

Whether it’s the modular expansion inspired by living systems, the delicate play of lightness and transparency that shapes spaces, the dynamic, ever-shifting forms created by air, pressure, and movement or the grounded solidity of carved stones – each approach offers a unique lens on how architecture can emerge through process, material behaviour, and environmental interaction.

Grown explores how architecture can develop through processes of expansion, evolution, and self-organisation. This approach invites you to think about natural growth patterns, modularity, adaptability, and time-based transformation, as well as biological applications in architecture.

expansion | transformation | adaptation | resilience

Sewn draws from textile logic – light, flexible, layered, and assembled. It explores softness, tension, and movement, where architecture can fold, stretch, wrap, and adapt to its context like fabric. Think weaving, stitching, or lacing materials and elements to create lightweight, responsive spaces that can be rigid or soft, lasting or ephemeral, still or alive with motion.

lightness | flexibility | assemblage | craft | impermanence

Blown is shaped by atmospheric forces – wind, air pressure, and change. It invites you to explore volatility, ephemerality, reversibility, and structures that are always in flux. You might experiment with membranes, bubbles, or inflatable forms that can appear, disappear, or shift with their environment.

reversibility | temporality | volatility | contrast

Hewn is about carving, grounding, and presence. It explores how architecture can emerge from the land – solid, and tied to place and time. Working with local, enduring materials, this strategy investigates mass and form-memory, creating structures that feel formed with the site rather than simply placed on it.

permanence | form memory | site-specificity | solidity