Human structures are not just within the world but in a continuous state of action on it. They are inherently Earth-producing machines: terraforming, redistributing and reconfiguring matter over time. Recognising this state of action means there is the potential – and obligation – to reorientate them towards collaboration with other forms of agency and life: plants and oxidation, fungi and soil, animals and pollination. This year, we will consider architecture as a state of action.

In few places is this state of action more visible than the city edge. Urban growth has been unparalleled over the past century, taking place through processes that require the destruction of forests and other habitats posing as obstacles to its unbounded form. Our site will be the borders between city and habitat – spaces with the potential to be two or more things at once, overlapping human development with an intensified nature as a prerequisite for any future.

We live inside the inextricably linked emergencies of climate change, biosphere loss and social isolation. In response, we need new transformative structures: new social economies, new architectures, new earth machines. We will work in the overlap and interactions between material, environmental and social realms to create architecture that layers human and natural systems, yet is unambiguously an act of human culture. We will design buildings that create new actions, both subtle and explicit, capable of enabling stronger social and collective structures; that use construction techniques which hybridise ancient material processes and new responsive technologies; and that understand local environmental potential as both resource and limit.

We will use large-scale physical and digital modelling methods, where the design and construction of experimental architectures will be the primary vessel for developing and testing ideas, and where design is as much about discovery as it is invention.