Concept Design for Architecture

The workshop will provide an opportunity for practical synthesis through which to test all the knowledge acquired across the other educational modules, offering participants the chance to engage with one of the most complex and radical scenarios of the near future: the coexistence of cities and nuclear infrastructure. Led by Liam Young, filmmaker and visionary of speculative architecture, together with Giulio Rigoni of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, the workshop will investigate the role of architecture in redefining the collective imagination surrounding nuclear energy—a technology that, according to the vast majority of international scientific agencies, will inevitably be part of the post-fossil energy transition.

The central theme of the workshop will be the exploration of the relationship between human settlement and nuclear presence: no longer an infrastructure relegated to the margins, but an integrated component of the city of the future. Participants will be asked to question how to live alongside power plants, storage sites, and radioactive materials, imagining scenarios in which urban and architectural design respond to needs of safety, symbolism, and coexistence. Building on the reflections introduced by Young, the workshop will address an unprecedented temporal challenge: designing an architecture capable of speaking to future civilizations through non-verbal, architectural, and territorial languages.

Within this perspective, design becomes an exercise in architecture’s ability to engage with geological time, to shape new urban rituals around energy, and to construct shared narratives in a world in which nuclear power is no longer an emergency or a taboo, but a structural condition of inhabitation. Between dystopian scenarios, critical speculations, and future imaginaries, participants will be called upon to develop visions of resilient cities capable of metabolizing risk, technology, and deep time through design—transforming uncertainty into creative matter and concept design into a tool for cultural anticipation.