For decades, architecture has pursued performance through optimization: more efficient, more precise, more controlled. This model relies on complex systems operating under stable conditions. As climate uncertainty and resource scarcity transform the environments in which buildings operate, this paradigm reveals its limits. Buildings optimized for stability often prove the least capable of accommodating change.

The studio proposes robustness as a new understanding of architectural performance. It asks how performance might be redefined–not as the maximization of efficiency, but as the capacity to absorb uncertainty. Robustness privileges redundancy over precision, repair over replacement, and adaptability over permanence.

Corporate office buildings provide a critical ground on which to test this shift. Built at an unprecedented scale and increasingly challenged by declining occupancy, they are among the building types most exposed to premature obsolescence. They depend on intensive mechanical systems and continuous maintenance, making them vulnerable to climate change and rising operating costs.

The studio investigates how new climatic artifacts within existing buildings can challenge conventional approaches to adaptive reuse. Rather than programmatic change, proposals emerge from the interaction between climate, context, and low-tech climate systems.

Brussels, home to the European Commission, contains 12.5 million m² of office space for 1.2 million inhabitants–one of Europe’s highest office-space-per-capita ratios. The studio trip will combine an in-depth understanding of the case study with meetings and discussions involving the various actors engaged in the transformation of these buildings. Much of this stock now faces premature obsolescence, while its ongoing transformation has typically relied on energy- and resource-intensive renovations.

Guided by an economy of means, the studio will instead explore selective, resource-conscious approaches. Drawing on Layers of Change, we will read the building anatomically, assessing each component by its lifespan and adaptive potential. Prioritizing in situ reuse, we will repurpose existing components into new climatic artefacts.

Rather than transforming the whole building, the studio will identify where limited interventions can produce the greatest architectural and climatic impact. We will develop climatic prototypes as architectural interventions evaluated through digital modeling and CGI imagery.

Ultimately, the question is architectural: how does shift in value–from optimized objects to robust artifacts–reframe our understanding of new ways of living?

This studio is supported by the John Portman Visiting Chair in Architecture.