Utopian Laboratory Ilica Publication

Utopian Laboratory Ilica – First Steps in Developing New Methodological Approaches

The design studio Utopian Laboratory Ilica, the results of which are presented within this publication, took place during the winter semester of the academic year 2025/2026 at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb. The studio was developed as part of the overarching course Research, seminars, projects: Architecture (Istraživanja, seminari, projekti: Arhitektura) in which the faculty staff have the opportunity to develop new series of topics and assignments from which students can choose based on their own interests and preferences. 

Utopian Laboratory Ilica also represents the first iteration of experiments in architectural and spatial education designed in the context of the EDUTOPIA – Utopia as Educational Practice in Architecture: New Methods for Envisioning Transformational Change research project. As a broader research framework, EDUTOPIA brings into focus the discursive aspect of the architectural discipline and its potential to address social and spatial issues of today through activating the experimental, artistic, interdisciplinary, and utopian side of the discipline. Starting from the concept of utopia as a critical method, and situating itself within the context of spatial education, the project has two parallel and interconnected goals. It explores ways in which utopian thinking can inform the structure of architectural and spatial education, while simultaneously developing specific tools and approaches for teaching students to actively employ utopia as a critical method for rethinking the existing, and imagining new socio-spatial narratives within their own disciplines. 

Instead of approaching utopia as an idealized model of a distant future, we explore it as a methodological framework within which students learn how to speculate, narrate, and critically examine the socio-spatial conditions which they inhabit or are confronted with. The main focus is therefore not one of teaching students how to design ideal cities of the future, but one of introducing and conveying methods that enable them to imagine and develop critical speculative narratives of alternate realities that go beyond what is obvious and probable, while remaining grounded to the contexts from which they emerge. By devising and testing new methods and approaches for design studios, the project fosters a new generation of architects and urban planners capable of transversal thinking and the critical interrogation of space, equipping them with the tools to address contemporary challenges within a global context. 

These methods – which combine approaches and insights from architecture and urbanism with those from other creative and humanities fields – are developed, taught, and tested across various levels of architectural and spatial education. The newly developed methods teach students to problematize the contemporary context and offer novel insight into the most pertinent environmental and social issues, fostering an intersectional, holistic, and interdisciplinary understanding of the (un)built environment that aims to include and empower diverse actors and voices into the conversations about our global futures. The entire research process of the EDUTOPIA project, as well as its results, are systematically collected, analyzed, and shared to foster a broader discussion on the necessary development of the architectural academic community and contemporary spatial practices. In doing so, the project encourages future architects, urban planners, and other spatial stakeholders to broaden their horizons beyond the process of building and construction, towards envisioning and ensuring positive long-term effects that are evident not only at the spatial level, but also at a broader social and cultural level. 

Utopian Laboratory Ilica, as the first iteration of the EDUTOPIA project, focused on the experimental and discursive potential of architecture in which research-by-design methods were used to develop and test utopian scenarios for intervening in the complex and layered contemporary context – in this instance specifically – in the context of Zagreb’s Ilica street. The publication resulting from the Utopian Laboratory Ilica thus presents a series of new speculative scenarios which read Ilica as a space between the possible and the impossible. Employing utopia as a critical method, students worked through four themes – habitat, care, process, and system – imagining the potential futures of this urban space, while reflecting on contemporary climatic, social, and political challenges. 

Over the course of the semester, Ilica became a laboratory for testing architecture as a discursive and speculative practice. Rather than taking a nostalgic view of the street-level activities that have been lost or seeking quick-fix urban regeneration solutions, students used the existing conditions as a starting point for a critical reading and the imagining of alternative futures. Approaching utopia not as an idealized image of the world, but as a method for simultaneously examining the current condition and projecting possible alternatives, the projects explored the interrelations between spatial and social forms across various scales: from the individual and their immediate surroundings, through communities and institutions, to the city as a whole. Through collective drawings, diagrams, and texts, students developed narrative-visual scenarios for alternative developments of Ilica. These scenarios simultaneously question the present context and propose new futures which are based on various forms of coexistence between humans and other beings within the complex urban space. This publication brings the results of this process: Ilica as it is, and as it might yet become.