In such a global catastrophe and critical condition, we do believe, more than ever, that contemporary urban challenges related with the radical effects of migratory fluxes, global pandemics, structural urban deficits, the digital shift, environmental racism, precarious inhabitation conditions and spatial exclusion are demanding a change of paradigm on architectural thinking and design practices, that could break the separation of our discipline and connect us back with societal problems and realities. We see this moment as a fantastical opportunity for reinvention and we would like to expand the already astonishing legacy of the Studio 1 and to contribute to shape the future of the IoA through intellectual and practical experiments on spatial and material practices in the search of socially and culturally engaged fields of work for architecture.

The work of the academic year 2019-2020 has been centered in the extreme conditions of the European Slums, and particularly in the settlement in Pata Rât in Cluj-Napoca, where the students have investigated the possibility for architectural designs to be centered in reassembling the social and improving the precarious conditions of the site, located in the vicinity of a landfill and product of social exclusion and racism, with the conviction than architecture can still play a role on such socially and environmentally polluted situation.