2025 Workshop – UR BAN – RU RAL / Jan De Vylder

Cover image by MCH students

Date: 29th of September to 3rd of October

This workshop proposes a critical pause within the architectural discipline, an invitation to reclaim the fundamental act of questioning. Before projecting, organizing programs, or adopting theoretical positions, it becomes essential to briefly step back and revisit the foundations: What is space? What role does life play in architecture? How do time, matter, and human presence shape the built environment? Rather than responding to trends with ready-made statements, this workshop seeks to rediscover meaning through reflection.

Today, architecture often speaks through urgency, numbers, metrics, sustainability claims, and technological promises. Yet the discipline risks losing its own language in the haste to remain relevant. This workshop offers an alternative path: a deliberate slowing down to engage in thoughtful inquiry. It encourages a return to architecture as a cultural act rooted in experience, perception, and human existence.

Drawing and review sessions

Hand drawing will serve as the primary method of exploration, not as a nostalgic gesture, but as an instrument of thought. Through drawing, we observe, question, and construct meaning. Each line becomes a reflection on space, each sketch a search for essence. Drawing by hand cultivates attention: it reveals relationships between space and life, silence and structure, movement and time.

Through a series of reflective exercises, participants will explore how architecture emerges not merely from function or efficiency, but from the fundamental elements that make space meaningful: time, memory, materiality, and human presence. The goal is not to deliver final answers, but to reopen the essential questions, to rediscover architecture as a space for life and thought.

Image of the final exhibition by MCH students

About Jan De Vylder

About Brittany Siegert

Author: Camilo Meneses. MCH Manager