REVIEW'26 | SITE, TYPE, MATERIAL, SOCIAL

From October 7 to 15, 2026, the Institute of Architecture and Design will host its exhibition showcasing the results of design studios from the 2025/2026 academic year. REVIEW is an annual format curated, designed, and organized collaboratively by representatives of the Institute of Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning, TU Wien, across all research units.

SITE, TYPE, MATERIAL, SOCIAL

No architecture is without a site, yet site is never simply what is found before the project begins. It is already a construction of relations: ground, orientation, distance, boundary, climate, memory, access, horizon. Architecture does not merely occupy these conditions; it selects, measures, intensifies and reorganises them. A wall prolongs a limit, a platform establishes a new ground, an opening turns orientation into form. Site becomes less a context than a system of differences through which architecture finds its place.

Architecture remembers. Every project enters into forms that precede it. Type is not the repetition of these forms, but the possibility of variation through them. To read a project through type is to isolate the spatial invariant by which an inherited disposition is displaced, compressed, enlarged, inverted or combined with another. The project becomes one transformation within a longer architectonic genealogy. To saturate type is therefore to see architecture not as the invention of an unprecedented object, but as a precise act performed upon forms already available to thought.

Architecture acquires body through matter. Material is not what arrives after form, as its surface or expression, but one of the conditions through which form becomes thinkable at all. Thickness, weight, span, joint, repetition and resistance establish their own orders. To think through material is to saturate architecture on the threshold where an abstract order is animated by the inertia of the world and thus becomes concrete.

Architecture makes room for bodies before it accommodates functions. It suggests distances, proximities, separations, encounters, exclusions and forms of sharing. A door, a corridor, or a courtyard are never socially neutral; they always offer ways of inhabiting. To read a project through the social is to ask what human relations its spatial order makes possible. Not how architecture determines life, but how it disposes the spatial conditions from which heterogenous forms of life can freely emerge.