This research investigates the potential of architecture to shape values, lifestyles, and behaviors, particularly in the context of mass consumerism. The study begins with a chronological exploration of the history of consumer culture and retail architecture, learning how architecture has evolved to influence consumption patterns, behaviors and societal values. Through this historical lens the research identifies the potential of architecture to define constraints and shape human action, illustrating how built environments reinforced consumer behaviors over time.

Moving beyond historical analysis, the research focuses on the ethics of care and the process of responsibilization. It examines how neoliberal frameworks shift responsibility for mindful consumption onto individuals, emphasizing Personalization, Authorization, Capabilization, and Transformation. The research identifies a missing step in this process - the relational and situated awareness needed for cultivation of care. Conscientization, as a necessary step, deepens personal responsibility by embedding individuals within a broader context (nature, others and the self). This situated awareness is essential for transforming consumer behavior from an alienated process to an active and responsible participation. Through speculative method the study explores how spaces can embody the principles of responsibilization creating environments that stimulate care-oriented consumption practices.

This research concludes that architecture plays a crucial role in shaping consumer behavior. While architects cannot fully control the impact of their designs, they can establish frameworks that cultivate responsibility and care in the context of mass production and consumerism, using the process of responsibilisation grounded in care.

Based on the research, an architectural project was developed in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, which integrates a public workshop with living amenities and an urban farm.

1.7 Earths currently, 3 in the next decade.
That is the worth of resources that we are using yearly, and the estimated doubling of it,
by the end of the following decade. Two-thirds out of all those extracted resources end up as waste.
It’s kind of ironic and paradoxical that we go to all that trouble to obtain these valuable resources and materials, design them, form them to become something, just to become nothing, worthless, waste, by a simple toss into the garbage bin.
But one can be wasteful only in abundance - this abundance, however, breeds a carelessness towards consumption, accumulation, and ultimately, destruction.
This is an exploratory (design) thesis that delves into how to reevaluate waste conceptualization, and what would be needed for a collective to do so. How to create a space where the Ethos of Care and Repair becomes (one of) the method(s) of this reconceptualization, and rethinking relationship with waste.

This thesis explores ways of architectural production that do not conform to typical representational techniques. It begins with analysing how image production has shaped contemporary architectural labour and explores the networks it is entangled in. This resulted in an online performative repository: https://pkirilov9.github.io/renderillas-and-oraxontans/. The "design" part of this thesis has been approached as a way of figuring out how I want to define myself as a future practitioner. In that sense, it is an exploration of modes of performative production and archiving. I did not focus on end products or final results, instead, I wanted to show that I am capable of doing, of figuring things out on the ground, thinking on my feet, immersed in my environment, rather than detached from it.

The proposal incites the collectivisation of maintenance and organisation of the electricity grid in Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam Zuid.

In times of unproductive polarisation along a ‚Political Spectrum’ and the proliferation of a reactive subjectivity that lacks contextual attunement, the citizen appears to become incrementally more a consumer of politics rather than a productive participant in the organisation of our togetherness.

As the progressive automation of our lives intensifies the general proletarianisation of the citizen, the capacity to productively participate in politics turns quite literally forgotten and invites for determinate governmentality to continue its recursion.

Drawing from Schizoanalysis, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, and care ethics, the research focuses on the exploration of libidinal, political, and energetic engagement with the formulation of individual and collective desires, beliefs, futures, and values through our environments.

Questioning the degree and value of the automations that surround us in our daily lives, the project aims to integrate the subject with (locally to globally) outsourced problems that it has progressively been alienated from and turn the paranoid architecture of electricity into a convivial tool that allows for the experience of collectivity, work as leisure, and political participation on a daily basis.

Through the necessity that is electricity as a collective (political) problem individuals can learn about parts-to-whole relations and dependencies. Via participatory spatial production, immediate material engagement, and the making sense-able of day-to-day automations, the project turns the inaccessible and intangible local electricity grid and transformer station of Afrikaanderwijk into a didactic environment to learn to care and to problematise desire as well as the coming together of individual and collective. It is a plea for an architectural process rather than product that is assisting in the emergence of literate, active subjects that can productively inform local and global collective efforts and challenges via a politics of transindividuation.

The relationship between sex work and the city centre of Amsterdam ‘the Wallen’ area, also known as the ‘Red Light District’, already dates back towards 1350 (Majoor 2020, 46). While sex work in most cities happens on the periphery, in Amsterdam it traditionally exist in the heart of the city center. Despite the historical connection between sex workers and the district, they now fear being displaced by the municipality to towards the outskirts of the city into the Erotic Center. Several years ago I became resident of the Wallen area and while living above the sex working spaces I have become familiar with the ways how sex work is part of everyday life. While observing the interactions between sex workers and clients below my window the complexity of the relationship between the profession and the urban structure of Amsterdam fascinated me. It also revealed why spatial interventions in the area should be treated with delicacy. Since I believe sex workers to be essential care givers, who contribute to the diversity and safety of this neighborhood, the intention for this research is to examine how they could remain part of it in the future and to counter the plans that will lead to the gentrification of this neighborhood.
To the plans of the municipality the sex workers out of the area have reacted with the message: “don’t save us, save our windows”, a note that is revealing how the area is dealing with a material and social problem at once. This message is also very relatable to this research, since I will be approaching it through the window. The architectural element of the window has an high symbolic value and reveals a lot about societal norms and values. Therefore, to explain a wide range of developments that took place over the last two centuries, this research begins with examanining historical photographs that display the windows of sex workers and are carefully analyzed through hand drawings. These studies will be supported by theoretical resources which elaborate on prevailing societal norms and values that concerned sexuality.
What this research will illustrate is how sex work is often concerned with moral questions, like the issue of (female) body determination. As a result, sex work became a familiar topic within histocial feminist debates, having either a liberative or oppressive effect on the profession. Since the goal for this research is to imagine the future of sex work spaces in the Wallen area, it will navigate through these debates in order to take a position in the contemporary feminist debate myself. Hoping to find a appropriate design approach which will challenge the strategy of the municipality.

Architecture as a discipline is deeply involved in a constant material entanglement with a large number of entities. Yet across the discipline, nature-culture, subject- object distinctions are still being forcefully being held up, with the consequence of invasion of many territories, inhabited by other species and the destruction of their environments. In order to overcome such damaging differentiations, it is necessary to reconsider tour concepts of ontological hierarchies and their outcomes in architecture. This may allow us to create new affective environments, considerate of the constant set of relations that we find ourselves entangled in.

The project strives to imagine a district of commoning in Warsaw, where the common praxis is to be fueled by capturing the desires of visiting subjects. It is followed by an investigation of the relations of space and desire, finally culminating in the design of a cinema, which is to be a centrepiece of the desiring district.

The Rhythmic escape propose a retreat in Rotterdam based on environmental features in nature that is of significance in rituals held in nature by people living with nature.

This research and drawings focus on the recent post-Soviet history of Tbilisi, Georgia and the production of architectural and urban interventions as they coincide with larger political processes (i.e. the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shift to neoliberal economic policies, etc.) and social phenomena (i.e. production of ethno-nationalist narratives) as they affect the production of the city. The elaboration of an architectural process which is a result of an expansive investigation of the contemporary issues facing Georgia, can provide an approach to cultural conservation in contexts that confront the problem of subverted narratives. The historical section will in-part be informed by data collected over a period of five years through anecdotes, and conversations with local researchers, activists, and political actors. The technical procedure which is a result emphasizes the value of local intuition and the production of space which occurs in the years post-Soviet collapse to arrive at a solution for conservation which attempts to overcome nationalist narratives which can be exploited by power structures.

This project deals with the event of disaster; more specifically, the contamination and destruction by a wave of sediment of towns in the Iron Quadrangle and the Rio Doce valley after the rupture of a tailings dam on November 5, 2015, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Through the manipulation and questioning of concepts such as hauntology, ongoingness, contamination, co-constitution, purity and complexity drawn from several theoretical sources, this work proposes a life-affirming site for the circulation of materials, people and knowledge, against the threat of premature death posed by the extractive economy.

This thesis is to be regarded as a reflection on the interplay between a recent ongoing personal experience, the accidents and encounters that it entailed, and underlying theoretical concerns.

I have been living in Tbilisi for the past few months.
During this time, I focused my attention on a case of architectural abandonment in the context of Tbilisi; Laguna Vere, a late Soviet aquatic complex that is today privatized and in disrepair.

In a moment of research and reflection on the tendency of conceiving reality through totalities and opposing concepts such as “inside- outside, me-other, subject-object, matter-form, local-global, east-west, state-market, private- public etc.” I happened to enter the building and experience its current condition firsthand.
Laguna Vere’s state could be analyzed and problematized in such terms; often, architectural objects or public spaces oversaturated by historic-political- symbolic-propagandistic signification tend to fall into polarized dialectics that affect and limit their perception, thus, their becomings. Opposing concepts to be regarded as forms of reductionism, implemented by power structures as control tools, that create, at a first level, a sense of nostalgia (or else, condemn), while producing, at at deeper level, public apathy, political pessimism and nihilism due to the experience of violence, impotency and passivity that the conflict causes. This manifests in a general unproductive approach towards existing (valuable) architectural objects, trapped in their being but filled with potential for new forms of appropriation and re-activation, new forms of becoming.

Laguna Vere has been framed as a symbol of the Soviet era, of International competitiveness. Laguna Vere was also a vibrant public space in the city center. It was open, green, and crowded. One could learn how to swim, how to hang out, and build networks there. It was a displace of bikinis and bare bodies, a cinema, a theatre.
Its status has deteriorated over time to one of physical abandonment and mental forgetfulness, which has been exacerbated by the city’s most recent privatization processes. Within its transformation dynamics and life cycle, the architectural object currently appears static, inaccessible, impermeable to external influences, and devoid of any link with the (public) context.

Nonetheless, no single moment in Laguna Vere’s evolution should be regarded as prominent, as either one thing or another; rather, it should be considered as a continual flux, an assemblage of singularities resulting in multiplicity.
All of the above-mentioned moments in time and space may be found as traces in Laguna Vere’s current state, and as a result, the current state also bears suggestions about the future, about what it could be but is not (yet).

In this thesis I am looking for traces; where /when to search for them and how to keep tracing?
How could bodily experience, as a tool for perception and analysis, be used to problematize the state of an abandoned space and foresee a possible future? Thereafter, in design terms, how could this space be rehabilitated and how could collective benefit be produced?

The reason for this choice of topic is a life-long bewilderment towards the self-destructive potential of humankind. Supposed continuous accumulation of value is nurturing some of the most destructive and unvaluable events that this globe has ever seen. In many cases, the driver for what we do - our idea of what is valuable - seems to be leading us to do things which are anything but valuable in the long term.
A rationalizing approach has led to the establishment of one-dimensional evaluations: Quantity is attempting to express quality. The resulting introduction of a level of abstraction is distorting the evaluation of what makes a decision valuable. This attempt of capturing value is very much not capable of expressing it to a satisfying degree – necessary information is lost in the process of reduction. One establishes a distanced perspective on how a decision becomes valuable in its qualitative and specific sense.

Especially the profession of the architect - as taking decisions from a very distanced perspective towards the real-life engagement with the architectural product and its construction - is at risk to rely on general typologies and predeveloped solutions as proposals for their designs. In this graduation, it is therefore the goal to challenge this plane of abstraction while decision taking by introducing a conscious engagement with the real-life interactions and material processes of the architectural object which allows to focus on the affective specificities of place and time.

Within the European context, the Hambach region manifests conflictual and dialectical relationships drawn upon a territory transformed from a constellation of rural villages interrupted by Markwalds - common forests - into a territorial machine shaped by the rhythms of the lignite extraction. While ecologists' movements occupy the remaining forests, the voracious expansion of the mining operations has led to a continuous displacement of many villages - then rebuilt in generic and prefab modules at the minimum cost - while the "abandoned" towns have been re-populated by migrants. A floating solar park, an artificial yet idyllic lake, a void kept as-it-is as a perverse touristic attraction; as the coal phase-out is approaching in 2030, the many proposals for the redevelopment of the region can be read as a collection of ideologies - techno-fix, nostalgic, techno-romantic - which all fail to account for the multiple and diverse conditions of the site. Instead, the thesis investigates how to mediate a relationship with the very site of those conflicts: the soil. Beyond productive purposes and idyllic representations, the soil is understood as a civic milieu - a laboratory for new forms of life. The project addresses the aforementioned issues in the form of a constellation of interventions: a multiplicity of narrations rather than ever-fixed and replicable solutions. An occasion to reflect on and question the implicit power of architecture-as-media that traces relations and to wonder about the quality of these relations as a possible field of agency as an architect: to affirm architecture as a tool in staging the multiplicity of the real.

Exhaustion is the surfeit of modern society’s excess. Growth is an essential aspect of modern economies and our everyday life. We embark on journeys searching for the infinite, only to find ourselves in the middle of nowhere to realize that the infinite that we have been searching for is not a destination. The project designs an environment with and for play that stimulates people to engage in a playful way of long-term tourism in order to cure the exhaustion brought on them by society and to address their own exhaustiveness.

In contemporary architecture, we design with the preconceived notions of what rooms are, where habit and habitat are unconditionally linked. We sleep in the bedroom, we dine in the dining room, we work in the study. The rooms are linked to each other, where the architecture is static, the user the dynamic factor moving from room to room, leaving most of the space unused most of the time.

The world’s population is growing and in combination with a mass-urbanization movement, this results in the projection that 70% of the population will be living in cities by 2050. Not only will space become even more of a luxury in urban areas, there is an urge for a higher density in order to accommodate the cities future inhabitants. Manhattan, New York City’s most dense borough, will need expansion in order to accommodate 105.000 new inhabitants. Instead of expanding upwards or outwards, this project explores expanding ‘inwards’.

Minimal architecture is the starting point of this project and is defined as: ‘an architectural movement with a flexible and transformable floor plan, with sustainability, creating a higher urban density and reducing the ecological footprint of the design, as the main motive.’ The user is static and the architecture is dynamic, constantly transforming the space and allowing for a 24-hr-architecture.

The problem statement includes both the need to create a higher urban density and the inefficient use of the contemporary floor plan. The aim of the graduation project is to develop a new way of urban living. Creating housing in a high density with a fundamentally different approach to the program and layout. Designing collective spaces, while maintaining the quality of urban individuality. The project will present the rethinking of minimal architecture.

The project, while focusing solely on the example of the Nadodrze district in Wroclaw, is trying to call attention to a much bigger problem present in a plethora of other cities. The deprivation caused by long years of imposition of a new order, a new architectural identity and a plan to unify the individual in a collective are still distinctly visible in many urban structures. Leftovers of past changes touch upon both spatial and societal aspects.
The main question investigated in this project was exploring to what extent a spatial experience is capable of altering social behaviour, social patterns and the perception of self in a collective. By focusing on relations between people and aiming to trigger and enhance the formation of the local community and its new urban rituals of dailiness, the project is trying to address aforementioned problems.
The design process does not aim to provide a ready solution, it is rather focused on exploring and investigating the current situation in hopes of forging a tool. Furthermore, it aspired to introduce a background for the various behavioural patterns and opportunities that might surface in the community of the Nadodrze district by attempting to provide a multiplicity of experiences.

The essay and the design project are an attempt to re-explore the fundamental purpose of architecture as mediating interactions between the human self and the external world. From the intuitive perception of an environment to the establishment of an artificial system of proportion and order, the hypothesis considers the design of buildings as a desire for re-orientation within a scale-less universe, abstracting the vastness of a greater cosmos into tangible, habitable, space in the quest for orientation and meaning.