Utopian Laboratory Ilica

Utopian Laboratory Ilica focuses on the experimental and discursive potential of architecture, where utopian scenarios for action in complex and layered contexts of today are developed and tested through the format of a research-project study.
The Utopian Laboratory Ilica presents speculative scenarios that read Ilica as a space between the possible and the impossible. Ilica has become a laboratory for testing architecture as a discursive and speculative practice. Instead of a nostalgic look at the lost activities of street ground floors or creating quick solutions for urban regeneration, students take the existing state as a starting point for a critical reading and imagination of alternative futures. Understanding utopia not as an idealized picture of the world, but as a creative and critical method, speculative scenarios explore the interrelationships of spatial and social forms through different scales – from the individual and the immediate environment, through communities and institutions, to the city as a whole. Observing space through the themes of habitat, process, system and care, the projects reflect on contemporary climate, social and political challenges. Through collective drawings, diagrams and texts, the students developed narrative-visual scenarios of alternative developments in Ilica that simultaneously question the present and propose new forms of coexistence of people and other beings within the complex urban space. The exhibition presents the results of that process: Ilica as it is and as it could become.
Utopian laboratory Ilica dealt with research and development of the existing layered urban space using utopia as a critical method for reading space and acting in it. The course starts from accepting the complexity of today’s space and society, as well as the negative connotation of creating totalizing narratives. Instead, it develops a set of creative, research and transdisciplinary tools taken from utopias and fiction that, through a precisely defined methodological structure of the course, tested the ways in which architecture as a discipline can be included in conversations about our wider spatial, climatic, cultural, political, economic and social environment. Using problematization as a research-design approach, students processed and developed a series of tools for action in the context of today’s spatial, social and ecological problems and challenges, while developing their holistic and interdisciplinary understanding of the (un)built environment and its human and non-human users.
Each of the four groups of students developed a speculative scenario throughout the semester through one of the four offered utopian themes: habitat, processes, systems and care.
The theme of habitat expands the theme of habitation to include not only the space of human habitation but also that inhabited by other living beings and the conditions necessary for their maintenance and development. The concept of process expands the concept of production, i.e. work, from exclusively useful and usable results to by-products, waste and other unwanted or even harmful products. The theme of systems starts from the idea that nowadays the focus of development is no longer on individual inventions and technologies, but innovation needs to be observed on a systemic scale. And finally, the concept of care, which builds on the management process, starts from different power relations that imply the contextualization and integration of the needs of individuals and smaller groups within a common system.