Polity and Space: The Coast of Europe

John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

Diploma 4 continues to build on its research into the transformations of the coast of Europe. Continuing its engagement with real-world issues, the work will combine architecture and urbanism to rethink the structures of cohabitation in Europe at a time of profound institutional and economic change. Uncertainty and non-determinism will set out a field of potentials for the transformation of the material spaces of contemporary Europe.

When architecture acts to transform the city, it challenges the relations between individuals and their spaces of operation and questions well-established patterns of perception, calling for a re-evaluation of citizenship, cohabitation, governance and agency. The mental and material spaces of contemporary Europe are a mixture transformed by a multiplicity of agents, where architecture acts as a sectoral rationality amongst other practices.

Architecture today is confronted with a complex condition where the situational analysis of the present cannot be separated or understood independently from a diagnostic bearing on the possibilities of transformation. The unit research investigates two strands of this development: on one side we will consider how new remote-sensing technologies are shaping contemporary spaces of operation as well as individual and state sovereignty; and on the other we will focus on the agency that these new technologies elicit and entail.

Diploma 4 works for integrated and sustained transformations of the contemporary inhabited landscapes of Europe. Student projects will combine the design of precise and contained architectural devices with new forms of assembly and complex visualisations of territorial transformations. Students will achieve a capacity to analyse and strategically design real-world integrated plans, combining remote-sensing with architectural visualisations. These plans will be tested through interaction with the EU and other international institutions. The unit work is accompanied by a Diploma History and Theory seminar that analyses the contemporary relations between polities and space and continues the collaboration with the MA in History & Critical Thinking.

Unit Staff

John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog are architects and urbanists. They have established Territorial Agency, an independent organisation that combines architecture, analysis, advocacy and action for integrated spatial transformation of contemporary territories.

John is Research Advisor at the Design Department of the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He is researching for his PhD at the Research Architecture Centre at Goldsmiths, where he also teaches. He was previously Head of Research at ETH Studio Basel/Contemporary City Institute and co-founder of Multiplicity, an international urban research network.

Ann-Sofi was previously a researcher at ETH Studio Basel and she has studied in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Zurich.