STUDIO SKÅTAR: cultural sustainability
in shared places

Addressing sustainability is unavoidable, but what does it mean for architecture and the everyday lives of communities, people, and their shared places? Architects should ideally think beyond technological sustainability and design places for sustainable well-being that are artistically appealing and meaningful for people’s identity and sense of belonging. For this discussion, we can use the overarching term cultural sustainability, encompassing both technological solutions and architectural complexities.

In this studio, we hypothesise that cultural sustainability is four-tiered: cultural heritage conservation, cultural diversity and identity, community engagement and participation, and adaptive reuse and revitalisation.

These four parameters are the studio’s initial guiding framework, arguing that architecture can make people adopt a sustainable lifestyle if they feel well and identify with a place and its community. So, cultural sustainability is about creating shared places that connect private and public spaces and a sense of belonging over time.

In this studio, the students pick their own topic and site but should relate to and critically explore cultural sustainability and its related concepts and tools provided by the studio. The students are to find a site and topic as early as possible, onto which we will apply a research-by-design approach. This means you will have shared research tools but narrowed down to your topic, making large questions manageable.

Through lectures, the studio provides concepts, guidance and research tools regarding on-site mapping, analytical drawing, precedents and thesis structure. Structuring your work is crucial, and you will get valuable sources on structuring your thesis, from academic methods to editorial and graphic design ideas.

We are a team. The goal is to engage in creative discourse, materialise poetic ideas and enjoy this last concluding year.

Please visit skatar.com/master and the DIA incom workspace at dia.incom.org/workspace/55

Link to all the studio's info documents: 
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BnvSo1DDEaevBU5aNpBB_x1FcNYAY7QE?usp=drive_link