Solidary Mobile Housing Design Studio

Co-organisation and tutoring of a Community-engaged Architectural Design Learning design studio at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture (in collaboration with Prof. dr. Yves Schoonjans, Prof. dr. Burak Pak and Ken De Cooman) during the co-design phase of the Solidary Mobile Housing (SMH) co-creation process.

In the context of this studio, seventeen students of the first International Master of Architecture Program met weekly with the course tutors to work on the preliminary design for SHM. All the other SMH partners, including the SMH future inhabitants, were also invited to join the weekly sessions without any obligation.
Once a month a joint co-design workshop was organized, in which the students’ work was presented to the whole SMH team and sometimes also to externals. In these moments, everyone, including the future inhabitants, worked together on exploring, discussing, and improving the design ideas and proposals.

As not all the partners might feel comfortable attending meetings at the university campus, the SMH Design Studio joined the KU Leuven WTC24 temporary use project in the WTC complex (located in the Brussels North Quarter).

In the context of the SMH Design Studio, different methods and techniques for co-design and participative feedback were employed, including: collective site visits (enabling all the participants to see the potential sites through each other’s eyes), collaborative hands-on workshops (empowering the future inhabitants and students to get engaged in hands-on ‘making’ activities), and participatory review and evaluation sessions (enabling everyone to engage in dialogues about the design proposals and ideas). Furthermore, scientific experts and/or field actors (from Brussels and beyond) were regularly invited to join the weekly studio sessions to receive input from external stakeholders. They were asked to talk about their own research or practice and co-comment on the design proposals under development.