The research group ‘Tectonics in Architecture’ is motivated by the increasing need to tectonically transform the complex multidisciplinary processes, technologies and economies that condition contemporary architectural practice into spatial gestures.

We believe in the beauty of architecture and its spatial potential as an environmental and human gesture capable of actively aiding a viable urban development. Releasing this potential represents a tectonic challenge that, to us, necessarily transcends the principles of architectural research, teaching, and practice.

By referring simultaneously to the human experience of the built work and the task of actually constructing it, the notion of tectonics juxtaposes the goals and means of architecture. Read in this way, the question of tectonics manifests a critical and optimistic potential to continuously evaluate and develop the quality of our work as researchers, educators, students, and practitioners. As a group, we investigate this potential on various interlinked levels by joining a series of academic fields in a multi-scalar crossing of architecture and engineering; architectural history and theory, development of design analysis and -methods, research-by design experiments and developments related to specific materials, craft-based, industrial- and digital technologies, and industrial and practice- related innovation projects. The group comprises individual researchers that together represent a plurality of innovative perspectives on the topic of tectonics in architecture that we seek to nurture and cross feet mutually with the common aim:

To increase the experienced spatial quality and viability of the built environment through the development of a tectonic mindset, including theory, methods, and models applicable in conceiving technical principles as spatial gestures in architectural research, education, and practice.