Resilient Futures

(In 2021-2022) It was 29 years since the start of the Siege of Sarajevo, and 29 years until 2050, a notional idea of ‘future’ and the EU’s climate neutral deadline.

Sarajevo was our starting point again this year; learning from the extraordinary civilian lead resistance in The Siege (1992-1996).

We aimed to investigate how ordinary civilians and architects overcame scarcity by inventing and up-cycling resourceful, transient, covert and often surreal tools, architectural interventions and urban infrastructures for survival. 

We sought to create and imagine new architectures of resilience against the local and global crises facing the city today, as well as predicting future crises and trends: political division, global warming, water shortage, waste mountains, air pollution, flooding, unregulated development, social injustice, erasure of public space and Covid-19.

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We aimed to draw Sarajevo in relation to its current and future environmental and social crises. Developing individual and collaborative propositions through collage, drawing, and modelling, to create an ‘Exquisite Corpse’ of diverse propositions, allowing space for multiple visions of resilient futures to co-exist.

Throughout the year we worked at various scales; from the ‘Device’ to Buildings and the City, in both past and future. Each student explored their own personal interests, and techniques of drawing and modelling.

Inventing ad-hoc visionary devices, either drawn or made, as manifestos for resilience. Using speculative drawing games and narratives; imagining futures in which to site our projects. Real, fictional or semi-fictional. 

As agents we aimed to have a residency in the city. We engaged in a hyper-state of being both in Sarajevo, and in Sheffield, developing and using the studio's growing digital archive and website for our collective and individual explorations.

We aimed to use our energy and opportunity in the pandemic as architect activists to be a presence in the city.

Studio tutor