‘The past and the future interact to haunt the present.’

– José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

No space is without its ghosts.

Haunted by echoes of the past and auguries or visions of the future, every place we inhabit is layered with memory, desire, conflict and power. These ghosts – traces of past events and premonitions of future possibilities – haunt our architectures, technologies and cultures. To imagine how we might live together, we must attune ourselves to these weak signals and ask whether to resist or embrace them in pursuit of more nuanced architectural futures.

Diploma 12 will explore these spectral traces through the diverse technologies they produce. From storytelling as a medium of transmission to pink as a coding of gender; from the map as a tool of territorial control to Starlink as a weaponised infrastructure, we will interrogate how these things shape the world and reveal its ghosts. These enchanted objects offer clues to the systems they serve and the spaces they create.

We will investigate these technologies to imagine new architectures and the broader ecosystems they inhabit. Starting from real sites of social or ecological conflict, we will develop speculative interventions through film and evocative drawings. These proposals will be tested at 1:1 scale through material artefacts that explore their spatial and political potential in real life.

Ultimately, Diploma 12 is interested in developing our practice. To do this we will engage with experts across disciplines and expand our skills in design, fabrication, materials and media. We see the political and aesthetic power of both architecture and how we produce it. We will operate as architect-tellers, using narrative and material experimentation to propose new modes of planetary habitation. We will ask: How do we want to work as architects? What is our craft? And what forms of architectural expression might bring about meaningful change?

The year will culminate in a design proposal that builds architectures of hope, shaped not only by shelter but also by forgotten stories, imagined communities, trans-species sensitivity, pleasurable resistance and, ultimately, love.