TRANSFORMATIVE SPATIAL PEDAGOGIES (2020-2024)
Transformative Spatial Pedagogies is a research project exploring body intelligence as a pedagogical tool for driving systemic change. Paving pathways toward more resilient and equitable design practice, the project aims to create participatory educational environments that challenge dominant narratives, foster critical thinking, and nurture creative agency. By focusing on situated, embodied–enactive teaching tools, we encourage relational, sensorial, and participatory learning.
Through a series of experimental design studios, this research reimagines teaching not as the transmission of knowledge but as an experimental and collaborative act of transformation. It cultivates students and teachers as active participants in producing knowledge for societal change.
TRANSFORMATIVE SPATIAL PEDAGOGIES
Architectural and urban education initiates students into the historical rites of the profession. Yet, the systems shaping our built environment today are no longer adequate to address widening inequalities and the accelerating climate crisis. In this context, education also has a role in empowering young designers to become agents of transformation capable of navigating the dynamic conditions and challenges of the built environment. In this research, body intelligence is explored as a pedagogical tool for driving systemic change. The emerging field of transformative spatial practices challenges the core values underpinning patriarchal, (neo)colonial, and capitalist systems (such as overconsumption, extraction, competition, and unchecked economic growth) as well as “sustainable” design approaches that inadvertently reinforce these dominant ideologies and structures of inequity. Contributing to this field, we experiment with situated, sensorial, and performative approaches to architectural education, foregrounding body intelligence as a disruptive strategy and collaborative model in the production of knowledge for societal change.
Situated, Embodied, Enactive
Architecture and urban design are often practiced and taught at a distance. Within and beyond academia, designers remain bound to their desks, physically and often emotionally detached from the places they seek to affect. Yet, in the face of deepening inequalities and ecological breakdown, we argue that studying and producing spatial knowledge should not imply a withdrawal from life itself. This recognition aligns with the 4EA approach to cognition: the enactive, embodied, embedded, extended, and affective framework emerging from cognitive and contemplative sciences. At its core, 4EA understands consciousness and cognition, including our experience of architectural space, as arising from the dynamic interplay between organisms and their environments. Perception and thought are not isolated in the mind; they are forms of doing that unfold through relationships. This understanding urges us to acknowledge our biological and social inheritance and to resist the material hardness and impersonal values dominating much of contemporary architectural culture. As theorist Harry Francis Mallgrave argues, this calls not only for new architectural theory but also for a reform of the design studio. Following the implications of the 4EA framework, architectural pedagogy must create opportunities to engage, examine, and experiment within situated contexts.
Testing Grounds
Over the course of this research, we have organized a series of design studios structured around sited experiments to explore how embodied–enactive and affective first-person experiences can reshape learning environments. In a sited experiment, one intervenes directly in the fabric of the real rather than interpreting life from a safe distance. Through performative and spatial actions, students and teachers engage directly with local communities, materials, and environmental conditions. From lecture halls to shipyards, from theatres to the rooftops of the academy, we have worked in diverse settings to explore the sensory and performative qualities of place. Together, we have moved in and been moved by each situation. In conclusion, this research proposes a series of teaching tools and methods that emphasize body intelligence as an active agent of change.
TEACHING TOOLS
Unlearning Through the Body
The first set of situated, embodied, and enactive teaching tools cultivates transformative learning experiences that challenge conventional norms and open new ways of perceiving and designing space. Spatial and performative prompts disrupt habitual modes of thinking and making. Through sensorial fieldwork, students learn to “sense themselves sensing,” engaging in exercises of listening, moving, and breathing with their surroundings to develop a heightened awareness of subtle environmental dynamics. This approach extends traditional site analysis through intensive mapping, a poetic form of measurement that reveals the site’s complex interdependencies. Procedural interventions further position design as a transformative, embodied practice. For example, by inviting students to re-enact and physically experience movement patterns across different cultural spatialities like contrasting Western orthogonal motion with the fluid, zigzagging gestures of Japanese space. Collective, nonverbal improvisation with found materials encourages students to let go of preconceptions and act intuitively, engaging design as an open, responsive, and co-creative process.
Dirty Theory
The second set of teaching tools grounds architectural theory in real-world complexity across ecological, social, and cultural dimensions. Rather than separating theory from practice, it emphasizes first-person, lived experience as the foundation for generating new architectural knowledge. As theorist Hélène Frichot reminds us, theory is “good for nothing” unless it engages with the messy, contingent realities of life. Through sited experimentation, students shift from low-context to high-context learning, developing bodily intelligence and new sensibilities that arise directly from their spatial encounters. Knowledge does not precede experience but emerges through it: as students explore, they become scientists of the sensorial, capturing and sharing their unique perceptions. Concept creation here is inseparable from embodied sense-making. Site, sense, and concept evolve together in a continuous process of experimentation, where theory is not applied to practice but discovered within it.
Community Building
The third set of teaching tools centers on collaboration, shifting architectural education from a culture of competition and rivalry toward one of generosity, care, and community. It emphasizes that curiosity-driven, proactive experimentation always emerges in correspondence with the site and with others. The rigid categories of “architect,” “artist,” “scholar,” and “student,” along with goal-oriented work habits, are replaced by a more fluid, transformative approach to learning. Within this framework, emotional experiences such as anger, fear, and stress are given space through sharing circles and collective acts of resistance, nurturing empathy and mutual support. Instead of semester-based courses, we organize community labs as ongoing, affinity-based spaces where hierarchy dissolves and participants contribute what they can and take what they need. Projects unfold over years and beyond the classroom, cultivating not a fixed field of knowledge but a meadow of knowing—grounded in situated awareness and expressed through multiple modes of sharing, such as visual essays, performances, zines, podcasts, and collective manifestos.
IMPACT AND REVEBERATIONS
At its core, this research reimagines education not as the transmission of knowledge but as an experimental and collaborative act of transformation. The focus on the body not only stems from new insights in cognitive and contemplative sciences but also constitutes a form of resistance in itself. In the context of societal change, “transformation” has become increasingly tokenistic. Despite repeated calls for a more responsible approach to the built environment, the industry continues its existing habits now often veiled by the language of sustainability and care. By centering the body, we resist the accelerating tendencies of architectural practice and the competition and rivalry perpetuated under the banner of “green growth.” Instead, we create space for a slower, more reflective exploration of alternative relationships with our surroundings.
Next Steps
Building on this knowledge, we continue to reshape architectural and urban design curricula, leading courses that challenge traditional hierarchies within academic institutions and foreground co-creation with communities. Current involvements include redeveloping the research and theory education at ArtEZ Master in Architecture, giving form to the Feminist Spatial Practices International Solidarity Toolkit, and contributing to the EIT Culture and Creativity Transformation Agent Program.
KEY LECTURES
KEY PUBLICATIONS
Titel
Publisher/ Venue
Medium
Link | Download
Feminist Pedagogies
Panel participation at BK-Talks, TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture, Delft, Netherlands. 2024.
Lessons Learned from Passing Through Doorways
Book Chapter in R. Gorny, S. Kousoulas, A. Radman and H. Sohn (Eds.), Noetics Without a Mind. Delft, the Netherlands: TU Delft OPEN Publishing. 2024.
Sensing the Shipyard: A Sensorial Journey
Panel participation at Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 2018.
Zigzagging Pathways and Somersaulting Horizons as Agents of Transformation
Invited Lecture at Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. 2023.
Working With/In the Gap: Japan-ness in Architecture of Experience
Doctoral dissertation, KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, Brussels/Ghent, Belgium. 2021.
PORTFOLIO
Hugging Architecture
Hugging Architecture is a pedagogical project activating radical care and affection for the built environment through spatial and performative interventions. Situated in Amare, a new cultural centre in The Hague (NL, the project draws on our ongoing research into creating compassionate spaces through bodily engagement and collective play. The project begins with a sensorial and participatory investigation of the building complex. The act of hugging is explored as a spatial tactic to cultivate shared ownership and responsibility within the public realm. This approach extends into the educational experience. Centered on radical care and affection, we create collective moments to check in on one another’s health and wellbeing, share food, and develop formats to exchange knowledge across student groups. The final exhibition presents ten spatial and performative artworks that cultivate intimate relationships within and with the interior public spaces of Amare.
PORTFOLIO
Movement Matters
On October 11, 1978, the exhibition Ma: Space-Time in Japan opened at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Curated by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, it introduced the concept of ma to a European-American audience through nine spatial installations that revealed its many expressions in Japanese thought and practice. Exactly forty years later, on October 11, 2018, students from the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague reinterpreted this exhibition at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment.
In the three-year course Movement Matters, they explored the contemporary potentials of ma through situated experimentation, engaging directly with the original catalogue as a living score. Rather than replicating the 1978 exhibition, the students’ work evolved from it, continuing the creative dialogue in new forms. In the final performance, Moments of Ma, multiple facets of ma are made experiential: when the performer draws the curtain, light floods the room, a puppeteer emerges, and copper rods trace ephemeral constellations. The experimental process leading up to the performance culminated in the publication 'Grasping Ma', featured in the book Architectures of Life and Death (2021).
PORTFOLIO
Tiny Perceptions
Tiny Perceptions is a collaborative, pedagogical project situated on the rooftop of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (NL). Over two weeks, students from the Jewellery and Architecture departments worked outside to explore how architecture can heighten sensitivity to shifting weather conditions. Inspired by Japanese performative practices, we ‘listened with the whole body,’ transforming the rooftop through gentle, site-specific interventions. We learned to defend choices through bodily knowing rather than verbal reasoning. The knowing, rather than knowledge developed here is tied to a specific material, at a specific spot on the rooftop, in a particular season, and from a unique perspective. In this way, research becomes situated, singular, and sensible rather than generic, isolated and falsifiable. New forms of care surfaced when, after a refreshing shower, the wood grew ‘lazy’ and the wind playfully scattered our materials. In a world marked by environmental degradation, we learn that in-situ craftsmanship through an attunement on tiny perceptions can ground us and gently reshape the way we inhabit our surroundings.
PORTFOLIO
Sensing Shipyard
As part of Sonic Acts Academy we hosted the collaborative research project Sensing the Shipyard: A Sensorial Journey. Under the guidance of artist and teacher Cocky Eek, in collaboration with artist Nicky Assmann, sound artist BJ Nilsen, and architect Renske Maria van Dam a group of ten art students tapped into the different industrious rhythms of the Damen Shiprepair in Amsterdam. This terrain, located in the harbor on the north side of Amsterdam, next to the River IJ, is used to conduct numerous repairs on cargo and leisure ships. It is in operation for almost a hundred years and is bustling with energy and activity on an industrial scale. Guided by a listening to, moving with, and breathing with that what crosses our pathways we wonder: How do we relate our human presence to enormous living machines? How is this relationship sensorially inscribed at this rich and historic industrial complex? By recording the different sounds, movements and smells, and investigating surfaces and scales by touch, we explore this remarkable shipyard by sensorial mapping, whilst researching how we can recompose these location-specific stimuli into an experimental and experiential environment in which visitors embark on a sensing trip based on uncommon approaches to navigating through space.
PORTFOLIO
The Architectural Body
The Architectural Body is a pedagogical project drawing on the work of artist-philosopher-architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeleine Gins. Together we study the bodily dimension central to the emergence of spatiotemporal experience through procedural interventions. In the work of Arakawa and Gins, architecture becomes a tool for self-invention, enabling us to understand and construct ourselves differently. To emphasize the philosophical implications of their ideas, Arakawa and Gins designed procedural architecture: process-oriented interventions that explore how moving bodies and environments mutually shape and extend one another. While functional tools like hammers or telescopes extend our physical senses, procedural architecture reorganizes the sensorium itself. This project culminated in a final exhibition presenting seven spatial installations that actively engage and reorder the sensorium through carefully designed procedural interventions.
TRANSFORMATIVE SPATIAL PEDAGOGIES
Team and Partners
The pedagogical approach presented here is the result of extensive testing in educational environments worldwide, including KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture (BE), TU Delft Faculty of Architecture (NL), Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg (SA), Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University (AUS) and Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam (NL). The project began in affiliation with the Teaching Tools research group at University of the Arts The Hague (NL) and has continued in partnership with ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL).
Alex Gasparis, Alexander Heil, Ana Oosting, Andrej Radman, Anni Nöps, BJ Nilsen, Bjarte Wildeman, Bryony Roberts, Britt van Dam, Catherine Ostraya, Cocky Eek, Daan de Loor, Finn Stevenhagen, Flora van Dullemen, Florianne Libilbehety, Franca Ullrich, Gabi Jand, Helena Basilova, Herman Berge, Ivan Čuić, Jesús Canuto Iglesias, Juliette Delarue, Kaja Boudewijn, Kristján Stein, Laura Schurch, Lianne van Roekel, Marc Bouwmeester, Mark Raymond, Max Baraitser Smith, Mica Pan, Mischa Lind, Milton Almonacid, Neza Kokol, Nicky Assmann, Nina Luisa, Rana Ghavami, Robbie Doorman, Roos Kootjes, Seonmi Shin, Sharon Stewart, Sophia Bulgakova, Soeria van den Wijngaard, Tamman Azzam, Taconis Stolk, Tania Phuong, Thordur Hans, Thorir Höskuldsson, Valter Torsleff, Vakki Park, Vera Khvaleva, Victor Ynzonides, Vivien Vuong, Wimke Dekker, Yujia Wu, Youngji Cho, and Zoë d’Hont.