Unit brief
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
— William Gibson
“How can we live together?”
This fundamental question grounds Projected Topologies, a speculative design-research studio exploring the architectures, ecologies, and social structures of an off-grid live-work community on a hilltop site in rural Greece. Situated at the intersection of landscape and architecture, body and system, present and distant future, this unit fuses material experimentation with computational imagination to prototype new topologies of cohabitation.
Informed by the methodologies of Speculate Everything, students will develop a suite of proto-architectural elements and systems—flexible, modular, and open-ended—that can adapt across deep time. Designs are not singular buildings, but part-to-whole ecologies: evolving assemblies that reconfigure how we inhabit land, labor, and life in common.
The project is collaborative and first-person. Using Minecraft as a design engine and shared world-building space, and working with AI tools across mapping, modeling, language, and narration, students will co-develop a continuously transforming digital twin of the site. The hilltop is surveyed through drone photography and 3D scanning, generating a base reality from which speculative futures—at 10, 50, 100, and 1000 years—are projected and narrated through first-person filmic storytelling.
Architectural interventions will be informed by ecological simulation, climate modeling, and energy/resource calculation, targeting not only off-grid autonomy but a positive ecological footprint—restoring biodiversity, sequestering carbon, and producing net-positive ecological services.
Central to the unit is the concept of topology—as both geometric continuity and systemic interrelation. Students will explore continuous landscapes, hybrid infrastructures, and form-active structures that blur distinctions between landform and architecture, built and grown, drawn and lived.
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