The studio’s focus, Ervy-le-Châtel, is a small medieval town in France. Compact and historically layered, the town appears nearly ideal, yet many of its young people have left in search of work and urban life. In an age of digital mobility and remote work, this studio asks how design might support new ways of living that enable the next generation to imagine their future in small, rural towns. This studio speculates on the spatial conditions in which post-rural futures might emerge.

Ervy seeks to activate vacant sites at its center while establishing a new incubator at the periphery–linking old voids and new programs into a distributed network of reinhabitation. Hosting artists, writers, and craftspeople–including workshops in the town’s stained-glass tradition–the incubator would bring seasonal residents whose presence could help repopulate sixteen vacant houses in the historic core. Questions remain about whether seasonal programs and hybrid forms of residence can sustain public life, and if design can anticipate both opportunity and resistance.  Students will explore such questions through spatial research and direct dialogue with residents and officials during a one-week field visit.

The studio emphasizes both responding to real conditions and translating perception into architectural language. Students are encouraged to develop proposals not only grounded in programmatic need, but also shaped by atmosphere, material presence, memory, and structural clarity. Architecture becomes both spatial act and inquiry–a tool for cultural and spatial regeneration.

Students will research Ervy’s constructional logic and design a small open-ended intervention on a vacant corner, using a clear structural language. Through on-site engagement with residents, spatial observation, drawing, and testing of ideas, each student will refine their understanding of the site’s role in town life and evaluate potential locations for the crafts incubator in relation to the town’s morphology and topography. Based on site experience, each student will adjust their structure and program and finalize their corner design before working in groups to select a site for a 1,500–2,000 m² crafts incubator at the town’s edge. Site selection is a key design act, and proposals must show how the chosen site engages with the spatial logic of the historic core. Proposals must also include a concept for adapting vacant houses into housing for instructors or visitors. Projects must integrate spatial experiences–framed views, sequences, tectonic cues–so the new architecture emerges from Ervy’s lived fabric, not apart from it.
 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.