'Be prepared to live in the land you draw.'

 – Khensani Jurczok de Klerk

This year, Diploma 5 will investigate terrain, territorial boundaries and borders as central forces shaping how space is occupied and how cultural memory becomes spatially encoded. We will examine the ways in which architecture engages with shifting geographies, where land, language and relations – social, political, legal, cultural and personal – are continuously drawn and redrawn through acts of reterritorialisation. We will consider the ways relationships, both physical and abstract, are organised and defined through mapping, movements, crossings, gestures, beliefs and proximities. Every territory marks a threshold, signalling a point of contact, transition, belonging or exclusion.

The unit will establish a framework to consider architecture as a mediating act – a way of reading, recording and rearticulating the landscapes, borders and boundaries we inhabit. Through building, we mark presence, assert memory and reconfigure territory. Design emerges not from programme or function, but from negotiation with ground: tracing the line, placing the anchor, establishing the mark.

We will examine how legal frameworks, colonial mapping and surveying instruments have shaped dominant conceptions of territory. In response, we propose alternative forms of measure, informed by ritual, oral history, sound, myth and embodied memory. Measurement is never neutral. It is political, affective and situated. What do we choose to count? What do we omit? How do we map a story, a scar, a silence?

DIP5 engages overlapping geographies and contested edges, working in and through sites in flux. The land becomes a living archive, carrying marks of gesture, erosion and remembrance. Each drawing becomes a record, an inscription, a proposition. We will explore territory as a negotiated space of connection, friction and becoming. We will treat architecture as a spatial practice of relation-making, where land, structure and story converge.