Diploma 6 develops hybrid methodologies for experimental practices, navigating transitions within both the city and the architectural discipline. We explore the vital traits that enable architecture to negotiate complex contexts, operate across spaces and temporalities, and juggle multiplicities while preserving the integrity of the whole. This year, we will focus on consistency: the ability to align with contemporary urgencies while attending to a project’s own boundaries, knowledges and tools. Going beyond the tension between external contingency and contextualism versus internal logic and method, we will respond to urban issues with complex, multi-scalar and coherent projects.

The unit is interested in exchanges between infrastructure and architecture. We will target a constellation of sites across European cities where multiple systems – transit, logistics, data and energy – suggest new entanglements and joint design potentials. Our research will look at deeper structural and spatial shifts behind parallel processes: the decentralisation of transport and communication infrastructures alongside the centralisation of data and logistical hubs; the decline of traditional typologies with the proliferation of new cultural depots, commercial terminals and productive enclaves; and the emergence of autonomous self-managing systems that shift the logic of human presence from function to meaning. Learning from pragmatic and speculative practices, we will construct divergent urban futures that respond to present-day conditions.

To balance our urban concepts and scenarios with more detailed design models and prototypes, we will adopt flexible design methods. While maintaining methodological continuity, we will shift between dissimilar approaches, from systemic and cybernetic to diagrammatic thinking; from typological structures to spatial infrastructures; and from social ecologies to technical hyper-objects. The resulting graphic outputs will be diverse – including hybridised maps, diagrams, drawings and images – yet they will coexist within a single conceptual framework. Cutting across contexts and scales of thinking, our projects will expand ideas of consistency as a mode of engaging with urban infrastructures and their fallouts without abandoning architectural imagination, judgement or intelligence.