About the project
Active Architecture examines how architecture might respond to the information age by shifting from the production of closed, static forms to the programming of open-ended spatial systems. Drawing from Archizoom's No-Stop City, Superstudio's speculative grids, and research into mass customization, the thesis positions the architect less as a form-maker than as a system-maker. The architect establishes rules, infrastructure, and interfaces, while inhabitants participate in authoring the spatial outcome over time.
The project is organized through the dual logic of system and element. The stable system combines a regular grid, bearing walls, a steel frame, circulation, and integrated mechanical services into a durable infrastructural base. It gives the building structural coherence and the capacity to grow, change, or densify without prescribing a single permanent use. Within this framework, adaptable elements - movable walls, sliding panels, rotating screens, freestanding storage, and adjustable thresholds - allow rooms to expand, contract, overlap, or separate in response to daily routines, privacy needs, and changing household structures. Architecture becomes a toolkit rather than a finished prescription.
The domestic research focuses on intergenerational cohabitation, particularly arrangements in which older residents rent part of their homes to younger tenants. A conventional fixed wall embodies the conflict between autonomy and connection: it protects privacy, yet often prevents meaningful exchange. Through diagrams, physical prototypes, and spatial studies, the thesis replaces that static partition with dynamic boundaries that residents can negotiate. Openness and enclosure become adjustable states, allowing solitude, observation, shared activity, and informal encounter to coexist without forcing constant interaction.
This system-and-element logic expands from the dwelling to an adaptive superblock. Compact housing units occupy a shared structural field, while courtyards, gardens, circulation routes, and flexible communal nodes support dining, recreation, gathering, and neighborhood exchange. At the scale of public space, a movable partition can combine bookshelves, seating, open frames, and semi-enclosed rooms to activate an otherwise undefined plaza. Plans and sections extend the same framework into the landscape so that interior and exterior boundaries, planting, shade, and occupation can evolve together.
Rather than proposing a rigid masterplan or a single ideal lifestyle, Active Architecture offers a living framework capable of absorbing different generations, household types, and patterns of use. Privacy and publicity are not fixed by room labels; they are continually negotiated by those who inhabit the building. The thesis ultimately reframes architecture as a responsive and democratic interface between structure, environment, and human agency - a framework for life that remains deliberately open to change.