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Name          Cassia Ward

Nationality   Canadian Citizen / Australian Resident

Institution    ClarkeHopkinsClarke Architects, Melbourne, Australia (please don’t publish this)

Here for Humankind

Just a few years in the future…

The world’s increasing fascination with technology has resulted in a screen-based society where all learning and communication happens solely online. Traditional university campuses have become obsolete. Efficiency is favoured over human interaction. Informal skills and social development have been drastically overlooked, and most of society has completely forgotten how to communicate without the aid of technology.

Globe Nodes have been implemented worldwide as a final effort by the United Nations to cease the imminent doom of humankind’s evolution into robots.

Globe Nodes are a series of floating modules that reject technology in order to promote human interaction and social development. Stimulating soft skills and informal communication proficiencies previously learnt during the early years of school, students journey on the Globe Nodes for one year after completing high school.

Using the ocean as means of transportation, the modules voyage around the globe linking together with modules from other countries, encouraging students to gain a genuine knowledge of other cultures as well as form lifelong bonds with people all around the globe, foregoing assumptions and stereotypes. This development of interpersonal skills plays a critical role in the evolution of humankind.

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Name + Surname : Victor Eduard Serbanescu

Nationality : Romanian

Institution : UAUIM Bucharest

The future of learning is up in the air

What good is a university when education is moving online? When students can learn everything from product design to data science on Udemy or Coursera the old brick-and-mortar university seems to be left without a purpose. Or not.

Floating links seeks to foster the interactions, debates and the teamwork that massive open online courses could not successfully replicate. This hovering machine with a complex learning infrastructure picks up people from around the world. In this hop on hop off cluster of knowledge students dwell, develop and perform together in a holistic environment.

Public spaces that facilitate synergy and cooperation are intertwined with smaller, private spaces that aim to preserve the emergence of original ideas, that are then put to challenge.

The social aspect seems to be the only feature of traditional education that is still relevant in this digital age.     The university of the future is interdisciplinary and cross – platform. Floating links takes students to uncanny, but also familiar places in a continuous frenzy of intellectual interactions.

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Rosanna + Just, German, Studio Junktion

Alexandr + Minkin, German, Studio Junktion

Traditionally universities are located in an urban context. Rising rent prices and continually increasing demand for housing in larger cities all over the world make it more and more difficult for students to find accommodation.

At the same time rural areas struggle with depopulation and vacancy, because they cannot offer the same infrastructure as cities do – including facilities of higher education.

Advances in modern technology now make it possible to study at centrally located universities, while enjoying the pleasures of living in a natural environment.

This project shows an exemplary scheme for the greater area of Brandenburg, where students could cheaply live, while attending university programs based in central Berlin. The scheme however is designed to be applicable to any rural area around a central university city.

Only a minimal modification is necessary: A tube added to the home makes drone deliveries effortless. The first drop contains a home kit for lectures and research. Afterwards books ordered online from the library can be sent via airway straight to the student’s home. Autonomous vehicles meanwhile provide mobile laboratories, supply shops, and study rooms for the students to physically meet and exchange knowledge, adding a vital part of the university experience.

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Adrian Burgerhoff, South African, SAOTA

Nadiyah Burgerhoff, South African, SAOTA

The project suggests an extrovert architectural nature, more joyful and ecstatic, with a looser, more open framework that stimulates the spaces within us. An arts centre by its very nature allows for a whimsical freedom to approach the architecture as an artwork; the curvilinear gives rise to a poetry that influences life and transforms the university through an explicit spatial dimension, generating form innate to the concept.

The design accommodates ideas, relations and blended conditions to create an experiential space, acting as a precinct typology that functionally suspends the parallel dynamics of fluidity and rigidity to facilitate evolution and growth. Culturality is continuously dis-entangled and re-entangled through the medium of creativity towards generating a vibrant intercultural interchange.

The design intention is a move towards finding a renewed and revitalized vocabulary for human life in the city, simultaneously evolving through democratic, scientific, and artful aspects.

The successful integration of mutually evolving societies begins where differing idioms are laminated into a threshold architecture. This does not represent a compromise, inherent to our uncertainties, but as a dynamic ecological logic within our differences and reciprocation of ideas emanating from the rich capital, from which our architecture could begin to reinvigorate its educational paradigm.

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Name Surname: Nergis Aşar

Nationality: Turkish

Institution: Istanbul Technical University, Department of Landscape Architecture, Master’s Degree programme

Name Surname: Oktay Metin

Nationality: Turkish

Institution: Marmara University, Institute of Fine Arts, Graphic Design

Pop-up Box Classes

Knowledge and ideas can not be limited by borders, neither education.

The Pop-up classes are in constant connection with the other pop-up classes around the world through the screens in the box, in an effort to share and improve ideas, spark arguments about various topics and generate knowledge. The pop-up classes give opportunity to nomadic education where the emphasis is on change: The space changes, the location changes, the topic changes, the people change.

Pop-up classes are temporary spaces, which only promise to stay in one location for the duration (in terms of academic term) of the given course. By changing the location of the box, knowledge can move around to find different people for the next academic term. Knowledge should be accessible, therefore the location of the knowledge should be more accessible.

By appearing in a location which is well-known by the citizens, pop-up boxes will outstand in the everyday life and will gain attention from the  inhabitants of the city. They will welcome them to be a part of the knowledge through the membrane screens of the box, and encourage them to follow knowledge by registering to courses in the next term, somewhere else.

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Name: Aashti Miller

Nationality: Indian

People cross borders.

It’s been that way ever since

borders crossed people.

Class of 2022:

Welcome one, welcome all, to the the past and the future. While most of our competitors are dealing with questions of how and why, we look at the notion of “where”. Where is the best place to provide you with an institution that enriches your thinking? Where will you be able to confront the unknown head-on, and learn from those who are different, and yet, the same? Here is where.

It’s not about the courses that you take, or about the facilities that you are in. It’s about the people that you meet. We do not build walls, we break them. We believe that the inverse of discord, is knowledge – knowledge within and without borders. Hence, in a world so fraught with uncertainty, complexity, and dissent, we hope to nurture an integrated society that is able to rebuild the past and reinvent the future through a simultaneous unlearning and relearning. Together, we shall redefine the edge between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – using a University in the truest sense of the word : “the whole truth.” Let us show you what exists beyond the confines of your minds and four walls.

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Nuria     Pérez Cabrero – Spanish

Sem     Fernández Varela – Spanish

For centuries University has been imprison between four walls; learning was linked to a norm, a dull convention that also implied to have enough means, only in disposal of a minority of the population. Complete equality is difficult in a human world, however transferring learning to a truly public experience may mean something.

Benches are the most basic and universal elements of urban furniture, places to pause and get lost in your own thoughts, they become a constant part in the background of your life. A bench generates activity in its surroundings: from your playful tender years, through your teen meeting chats until you reach the age when you enjoy the simplicity in staring people passing by.

This summarize the reasons why our revolutionary devices are attached to them. Small lights floating in the air, anywhere in the world, amplifying the reach of knowledge and education for anyone willing to learn.

Fireflies are the seeds from which an alternative learning scenography will flourish. A closely studied and complex programme will favour both, professors’ teachings and individual initiatives. Technology and human cooperation, working together will transform urban space into The University.

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Name:  Mohammad Fares

Surname:  Whby

Nationality: Syrian

Institution: Damascus University, Faculty of Architecture

There are about 7.53 billion people around the globe (2017), and 5 billion people now have a mobile phone connection, according to GSMA data, and we can’t deny the effect of   technology on our daily life that’s why we need to use this technology in our learning process to make it more efficient.

In the future. The classes will be empty. No chairs no white boards nothing but clean white spaces with virtual devices and projection systems that we can change according to the subject taught. The students will be involved in the learning process and experience everything inside the classroom. We need to develop new devices and make it affordable for everyone in this world, so we don’t have to build new schools and we don’t need to cut new trees to make desks, all we need is few devices, couple of glasses and an empty room.

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Riccardo Marchi, Italian, Politecnico di Milano 

Riccardo Sforzi, Italian, TU Delft

Education widespread in the city 

In their broader meaning Universities are places where people meet and exchange knowledge.

Their open character is denied by the strict procedures and fixed layout defining contemporary learning spaces.

This contradiction sets the need to rethink the image of University:

Does it need to be enclosed by walls?

Should it be a condensed unity or rather a scattered entity?

The Marketplace of Ideas defines a new vision for learning spaces by combining the organisation of the local market with the educational purpose.

The single-building university is fragmented and becomes part of the public space. Different pavilions are littered in the city and integrate with the existing context.

Each of them allows for a different use, guaranteeing every lecture to be held in the proper environment.

As in a market the layout is not fixed. Stalls can be moved in order to trigger the re-activation of abandoned and underused parts of the city.

According to the trade rules the supply is shaped by the demand. Students are free to browse the offer and select whatever appeals to them at any time, allowing them to learn as effortlessly as they take a coffee.

“What are you interested in? Go grab new ideas!”