Building Audiences

The Building Audiences Group explores curatorial practices, examining how research, installations, exhibitions, publications, and public programs engage diverse audiences and inspire action. The Building Audiences Group responds to today’s participatory culture, where curatorship extends beyond galleries into public spaces, digital platforms, and urban interventions. It rethinks architecture as not just building, but as a platform for engagement, addressing challenges like urbanization, the environmental crisis, and spatial justice. Students will curate exhibitions, design installations, and edit publications to bridge academia and the publics, developing engagement with the built ­- and unbuilt - environment.

Focus and approach

Building Audiences emphasizes curators as mediators between academic knowledge and the public, equipping students to engage with architecture’s social, political, and environmental dimensions. Using a research-by-design approach, students will tackle societal challenges by creating exhibitions, publications, and digital initiatives to convey complex architectural ideas. The program also explores curatorial responsibility, guiding students from conceptual development to the physical realization of displays, with a focus on the circularity of temporary installations. Students will critically assess their role as cultural producers, reflecting on the politics of display, audience engagement, and architecture’s role in public life, crafting strategies to challenge, inform, and inspire action.

Programme

MSc2 studio

Each MSc2 studio is part of the “Curating” series, a sequence addressing various societal challenges. Students curate exhibitions, using architecture as both content and a medium for public dialogue. Beginning with collective research, they develop individual proposals, crafting narratives to engage diverse audiences. Central to the studios is the design of pavilions, installations - real or virtual - or repurposed spaces that foster public interaction. These designs are situated in real-world sites impacted by each studio's theme, where students will travel to identify key issues. The research-by-design approach integrates sustainability and public engagement, ensuring the final designs inspire societal action.

Additional information

For detailed course description, we refer to the information in the study guide:

  • MSc 2* (only in Spring Semester)

* The MSc2 semester of the Architecture track consists of a 5 EC compulsory course and 10 EC of track-specific Architecture electives in the third quarter, followed by a 15 EC (intra)disciplinary elective in the fourth quarter, which can be an intensive architectural research and design project or an intradisciplinary elective in which you are challenged to work together with students from other tracks on overarching themes.

Contact

Javier Arpa Fernández