ARCH5110/6110H
Advanced Architectural Design Studio I & II: FRAMES – Megastudio 3
Target Students MArch1, MArch2
Course Term 1 & 2
Course Type Studio
Venue Studio
Teacher(s) LAM, Tat
MEGA STUDIO v3.0 builds on two years of experimentation with the concept of the “mega,” previously explored through case studies in Mogadishu and Hong Kong’s Northern Metropolis. These earlier projects revealed the inherent tensions of “going big”: the danger of reinforcing top-down, ego-driven narratives within large-scale design. Rather than rejecting the mega altogether, this third iteration adopts a post-critical stance, seeking to realize the potential of mega systems through co-agency and emergent design logics.
The studio positions architecture as a situated practice within the shifting terrain of post-agency, prompt-based intelligence, and infrastructural mega-systems. It challenges students to reimagine authorship by redistributing agency across human, machine, and material systems. Structured in two terms, the studio combines collective experimentation with individual thesis development. Students engage with AI interfaces, modular prefabrication, and complex urban conditions to develop responsive strategies grounded in systems thinking and socio-technical reflexivity.
Here, “bigness” is reframed not as monumental scale but as systemic complexity, integration, and emergence. Design work embraces complexity rather than resisting it, producing responses that are adaptive, iterative, and open-ended rather than singular or resolved.
Three interwoven frameworks guide the curriculum. Post-Agency uses agency as a tool to deconstruct authorship, redistributing it between human intent, AI-driven logic, and material behavior. Prompt Architecture positions the architect as a strategic communicator, engaging with large language models as co-designers whose generative logics are shaped by language, context, and feedback. Systematic Mega reframes the mega not as an object or spectacle but as a condition: political, infrastructural, social, and epistemic, composed of interdependent systems and contested terrains.
The design process begins with shared tool-making. Students collaborate to build a design grammar, prompt interface, and material logic that merges AI outputs with prefab components. Activities include prototyping, scripting, critical writing, and site speculation. In the second phase, students develop individual thesis projects situated within real, speculative, or imagined megastructures—contexts such as Hong Kong’s Northern Metropolis, NEOM in Saudi Arabia, or fictional post-urban environments.
Final outputs include a shared design interface that tests the studio’s core concepts, alongside individual theses critically addressing both intended and unintended consequences of architectural intervention. Through this, architecture is reframed not as a static product but as a transformative structuring — an evolving negotiation between systems, technologies, and collective agency.
