IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PUBLIC ART, CURATORIAL STUDIES OR PRACTICES BETWEEN ART AND ARCHITECTURE AND YOU WANT TO DO A MASTER THAT CONNECTS YOU WITH PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS CHECK OUT THIS COLLABORATION: MASP x Fondazione Querini Stampalia
We are delighted to share a new collaboration between the Situated Practice MA (MASP) at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.
This partnership opens a unique opportunity for MASP students to work within one of Venice’s most fascinating cultural institutions — a place that is simultaneously a palace, a museum and a former home. A layered environment where art, architecture, history and everyday life intersect.
Through this collaboration, students engage directly with the foundation’s collections and spaces, exploring relationships between curatorial practice, research, design and the visual arts. The project invites them to look closely at objects, artworks and domestic artefacts carrying centuries of stories and meanings.
During their time in Venice, we ask a central question: what does it mean to confront a palace that was once a house? Students work with the inventory of domestic objects while experimenting with museographic and curatorial strategies capable of restoring temporal depth to the works — situating them in their past, questioning them in the present and placing them within the Venetian context while connecting them to wider international understandings of culture.
The collaboration builds on a dialogue developed in recent years between the foundation and MASP director Izaskun Chinchilla, bringing together institutional knowledge, architectural thinking and artistic experimentation.
MASP is a master’s programme for those interested in working between art, architecture, curating and urban culture, developing critical tools to interpret the world we live in and imagine new cultural futures.
If you are interested in urban art, curatorial practices and experimental cultural work, MASP might be the place for you.
Applications are now open.
#MASP #SituatedPractice #BartlettSchoolofArchitecture #CuratorialPractice #ArtAndArchitecture #Querinistampalia
MASP UCL Study Trip to Venice
The House-Museum as an Inhabited Curatorial Device
In collaboration with Fondazione Querini Stampalia
This study trip forms part of MASP’s ongoing investigation into architecture as a cultural and curatorial practice. The focus is the house-museum, a typology positioned between domestic intimacy and institutional display.
Venice offers an exceptional context: a city oscillating between habitation and preservation, at once lived-in and monumental. Within this condition, the house-museum becomes a condensed architectural problem — a space that claims to preserve life while simultaneously suspending it.
Historic domestic interiors are often presented as if recently inhabited, yet they are frozen in a permanent present. Objects are carefully arranged and disorder removed; with it disappear traces of labour, proximity and time. The house becomes an image of itself.
Our collaboration with Fondazione Querini Stampalia situates this inquiry within a real institutional framework. The building layers multiple temporalities: Carlo Scarpa’s 20th-century intervention on the ground floor and the preserved 19th-century residence of Giovanni Querini above. These rooms evoke aristocratic domestic life, yet they are neither neutral galleries nor fully domestic interiors. They simulate inhabitation while excluding actual use. The result is a curated stillness.
The guiding provocation is clear: how can an object appear more domestic and more museal at the same time?
Each morning, we will visit three house-museums in Venice in order to situate the Querini project within a broader typological spectrum. At Palazzo Fortuny, domestic and exhibition logics overlap; at the Casa di Carlo Goldoni, biography shapes spatial narrative; at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the transformation from private residence to international museum reveals how intimacy can be both preserved — and diluted — through curatorial framing.
In Venice, where preservation and habitation are perpetually entangled, this question acquires particular urgency.
@fondazionequerinistampalia
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#MASP #UCL #Venice #HouseMuseum #CuratorialPractice #FondazioneQueriniStampalia
FALL, by David Roberts.
SHARING QUESTIONS ABOUT ART, CARE AND THE POLITICS OF EVERYDAY
We believe academic programmes are best understood when we know the people behind them. People are always central — but in teaching, a tutor’s position, experience, and ethical stance profoundly shape what learning becomes. As Bell Hooks reminds us, “Teaching is a performative act, one that offers the space for change, invention, and transformation.”
David Roberts has been part of the MA Situated Practice (MASP) since its very beginning, and his work exemplifies this understanding of teaching as a situated, reflective, and deeply ethical practice.
MASP is a programme that operates between art, architecture, design, and curatorial practice, resisting fixed disciplinary boundaries. It treats research not as an abstract exercise, but as a tool to engage with real social, political, and spatial conditions. In this sense, The Bartlett School of Architecture has long been recognised for cultivating a form of critical thinking that is both experimental and carefully instrumented through research — where speculation is inseparable from responsibility, and practice is inseparable from context.
In research, the questions we ask are often as important as the answers we produce. Through Fall, David Roberts leaves us with a set of particularly valuable questions:
Can art help us confront the social consequences of housing developed through unethical practices?
Can artistic practice align itself with a deeper understanding of how public housing generates community?
How can art bring together representatives of civil society without erasing difference?
Can collective intentions coexist with individual narratives?
And how can nature operate as a translator of site-specific conditions when used within artistic installations?
Do you find yourself asking similar questions?
We’d love to hear your thoughts on art and unethical housing policies, community-making, collective versus individual narratives, and the role of nature in place-making. Join the conversation below.
#Fall #DavidRoberts #MASP #SituatedPractice #TheBartlett #BartlettSchoolOfArchitecture #ArtAndArchitecture #CriticalPractice
WOW, WOW, WOW! FIFTEEN SHOW CONTINUES — THE EXHIBITION PORTRAYING SITUATED PRACTICE WORK IS OPEN AT HERE EAST (4–10 December).
Situated Practice encourages students to develop research-led methods grounded in observation, fieldwork and material experimentation. The MASP programme places a strong emphasis on conceptual and ethical rigour, treating practice as a way of thinking — a means to question spatial conditions, engage critically with context, and explore how artistic processes can open new forms of awareness.
Shuangyu Xu’s Heaven Round, Earth Square explores the moon as a temporal rhythm that shapes embodied perception. Through walking, observing and constructing directly on site, she develops Moon Gate, a circular bamboo-and-wood structure that frames movement, light and duration as part of spatial experience.
The installation acts as a threshold — a space to pause, step through and re-attune to the cycles that animate everyday life. Accompanied by a personal essay-film, the work positions ritual not as a fixed tradition but as an ongoing practice emerging from place, material and embodied presence.
The Fifteen Show continues throughout the week — we invite you to visit and experience the projects in person at Here East.
#MASP #FifteenShow #BartlettFifteen #SituatedPractice
#EmbodiedResearch #PracticeAsResearch #MoonGate
#CriticalSpatialPractice #SpatialEcology #ArtAndLandscape
#DesignResearch #HereEast #BartlettExhibition
WOW, WOW, WOW! FIFTEEN SHOW CONTINUES — THE EXHIBITION PORTRAYING SITUATED PRACTICE WORK IS OPEN AT HERE EAST (4–10 December).
Situated Practice encourages students to develop research-led methods grounded in observation, fieldwork and material experimentation. The MASP programme places a strong emphasis on conceptual and ethical rigour, treating practice as a way of thinking — a means to question spatial conditions, engage critically with context, and explore how artistic processes can open new forms of awareness.
In River Symphony, Chutian Li transforms a stretch of the River Lea into a site of embodied listening and ecological encounter. Wearing a steel-tube Pollution Armour, the performer collects discarded materials — plastics, cans, paper and wood — with each piece adding weight and friction to the body.
As the load accumulates, movement slows and becomes strained, producing a raw “pollution percussion” that interrupts the calm of the riverside path. Inspired by endurance-based and maintenance practices (Hsieh, Abramović, Ukeles), the performance positions the body as a carrier of environmental burden.
Passers-by often stop, ask questions or join the clean-up. Through these shared moments of attention, the work makes ecological damage tangible, prompting a more collective form of environmental awareness.
The Fifteen Show continues throughout the week — we warmly invite you to visit and experience the projects in person at Here East.
#MASP #FifteenShow #BartlettFifteen #SituatedPractice
#ArtAndEcology #EnvironmentalPerformance #CriticalSpatialPractice
#RiverSymphony #PerformanceArt #EmbodiedResearch
#UrbanEcology #DesignResearch #HereEast #BartlettExhibition
WOW, WOW, WOW! FIFTEEN SHOW — THE EXHIBITION PORTRAYING SITUATED
PRACTICE WORK IS NOW OPEN AT HERE EAST (4–10 December).
Situated Practice encourages students to develop research-led methods grounded in observation, fieldwork and material experimentation. The MASP programme places a strong emphasis on conceptual and ethical rigour, treating practice as a way of thinking — a means to question spatial conditions, engage critically with context, and explore how artistic processes can open new forms of awareness.
Yuqi Li’s The Protocols of Vision invites us to reconsider how perception is shaped and exchanged. Through nine wearable devices that introduce blur, colour or reflection, Yuqi transforms the act of looking into a shared, slightly uncanny encounter. Installed and performed in public, the work reveals how attention and visibility are conditioned by social and technological forces.
Drawing on thinkers such as Foucault and Jonathan Crary, the project frames vision as an active, situated and political practice — one that invites reflection on the shifting boundaries between discipline, freedom and everyday perception.
The Fifteen Show continues — come and experience the work in person at Here East.
The MASP team will be there to welcome you.
Photography by Yuqi Li and David Roberts
#MASP #FifteenShow #BartlettFifteen #SituatedPractice
#CriticalSpatialPractice #VisualCulture #AttentionStudies
#PracticeAsResearch #ArtAndTechnology #EmbodiedPerception
#DesignResearch #HereEast #BartlettExhibition #VisionProtocols
WOW, WOW, WOW! FIFTEEN SHOW — THE EXHIBITION PORTRAYING SITUATED
PRACTICE WORK IS NOW OPEN AT HERE EAST (4–10 December).
Situated Practice is a strong master’s programme designed to prepare architects for research and PhDs. Conceptual rigor and training in research methodologies are fundamental aspects of the programme. Listen to three members of the staff explaining their approaches to different books they have written.
In this reel, Amica Dall reflects on Common Treasures, a two-volume project that brings together voices from across the UK to rethink rural futures. The books explore regenerative farming, community-led housing, land stewardship, local materials, short food supply chains, and the everyday practices that sustain rural life.
Rather than approaching rurality as nostalgic or remote, Common Treasures sees it as a site of possibility—one where climate-positive, community-driven and economically resilient futures can be built. Through cooperative land models, grassroots initiatives and regional knowledge, the volumes show how rural communities are shaping new ways of living and working with land.
#MASP #FifteenShow #BartlettFifteen #SituatedPractice #CommonTreasures
#AmicaDall #RuralFutures #RegenerativeDesign #CommunityLand #LocalMaterials
#SpatialPractices #DesignResearch #BartlettSchoolOfArchitecture #UCL #HereEast
#BartlettExhibition
WOW, WOW, WOW! FIFTEEN SHOW — THE EXHIBITION PORTRAYING SITUATED
PRACTICE WORK IS NOW OPEN AT HERE EAST (4–10 December).
Situated Practice is a strong master’s programme designed to prepare architects for research and PhDs. Conceptual rigor and training in research methodologies are fundamental aspects of the programme. Listen to three members of the staff explaining their approaches to different books they have written.
In this reel, Polly Gould introduces Antarctica, Art and Archive, a book that revisits the Antarctic not as a remote blank space, but as a landscape shaped by images, stories, science and memory. Through watercolours, field notes and archival fragments, Gould reflects on how meaning is constructed in places most of us have never experienced firsthand.
Her work brings together polar exploration, ethnography, media history and atmospheric observation, inviting us to consider how archives influence our imagination of climate, territory and the more-than-human world. In a moment of ecological uncertainty, returning to these historical materials becomes a way of thinking about possible futures.
#MASP #FifteenShow #BartlettFifteen #SituatedPractice
#BartlettSchoolOfArchitecture #UCL #CriticalSpatialPractice #ArtAndArchitecture
#ArchivalResearch #Antarctica #PollyGould #DesignResearch
#ResearchThroughPractice #HereEast #bartlettexhibition
WOW, WOW, WOW! FIFTEEN SHOW— THE EXHIBITION PORTRAYING SITUATED PRACTICE WORK IS NOW OPEN AT HERE EAST (4–10 December).
Situated practice is a strong master's programme designed to prepare architects for research and PhDs. Conceptual rigor and training in research methodologies are fundamental aspect of the programme. Listen to three members of the staff explaining approaches to different books they have written.
In this reel, Jane Rendell shares insights from Art & Architecture: A Place Between, a key text that reconsiders how spatial practices relate to the public realm. Rather than relying on fixed categories such as “public art” or “site-specific art,” Rendell proposes critical spatial practice—an approach grounded in ethics, politics and the situated nature of experience.
Drawing on feminist theory, cultural geography and urban critique, she explores how spaces are framed, occupied and transformed through interdisciplinary action. Rendell’s work opens a space where architecture and art can question power, create new forms of engagement and cultivate more reflective relationships with the places we inhabit.
#MASP #fifteenshow #bartlettfifteen #situatedpractice #janerendell #criticalspatialpractice #spatialtheory #bartlettschoolofarchitecture #ucl
#interdisciplinarydesign #feministspatialpractice #artandarchitecture #designresearch #hereeast #bartlettexhibition
SITUATED PRACTICE: A PROGRAM ENGAGING WITH CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND SPACE
Situated Practice is more than a collection of MODULES or and academic body —it’s an invitation to engage. Engage with sites, with local communities, and with cultural institutions.
London becomes our studio: we welcome inspiring guests, explore cutting-edge galleries and exhibitions, and benefit from critical feedback from expert mentors.
A highlight of the program is field trips. These opportunities allow students to work with professional cultural institutions and produce their first commissioned projects under the guidance of expert curatorial teams.
Our partnerships for the next couple of years include:
Querini-Stampaglia Foundation, Venice: Working with Director Cristiana Collu and her team, students select pieces from their remarkable collection to bring into public spaces, rethinking how culture can positively impact citizens’ lives.
Concentrico Festival, Logroño, Spain: Collaborating with Javier Peña and Taller en Blanco, students engage with over 30 international site-specific installations, enhancing social dialogue with local communities.
If your ambition is to develop artistic interventions, curatorial projects, or pop-up architecture that actively transforms public space, Situated Practices is your gateway.
💡 Design for impact. Curate for change.
#situatedpractices #publicspacedesign #curatorialarchitecture #urbanculture #socialimpactdesign #izaskunchinchillaarchitects #culturalengagement #artinthecity #urbaninterventions
SITUATED PRACTICE: A MASTER TO PRODUCE THE FIRST PIECE FOR YOUR FUTURE ART, CURATORIAL OR DESIGN REFLECTIVE WORK
The Situated Practice Master at The Bartlett School of Architecture is a 15-month program built around five modules that invite students to question, connect, and redefine how architecture, art, and design engage with the world.
In the first term, students explore Research Methodology and Open Works.
Through seminars and talks, Research Methodology introduces a transdisciplinary approach to thinking and making —bringing together anthropology, ethnography, and science to understand how knowledge can be embodied in design.
Open Works encourages students to shape their own brief: choosing a site, defining ethical values, and reflecting on the kind of impact they wish to have through their practice.
In the second term, Site Writing and Mediated Environments expand the conversation.
Site Writing challenges the boundaries between writing and spatial practice, giving voice to the power of language in architecture. Thanks to mentors like Jane Rendell, students learn to transform writing into a design tool —to translate thought into space and to write through the city.
Mediated Environments opens a dialogue between technology and perception, inviting students to experiment with video, sound, and image as materials to record, narrate, and design the environments we inhabit.
A long module, the Major Project, runs from the third term to the end —where research, writing, and design merge into a project that reflects each student’s situated perspective.
Directed by Izaskun Chinchilla, the master fosters creativity through collaboration and critical reflection —turning architecture into a space for participation, care, and transformation.
#situatedpractices #izaskunchinchillaarchitects #designresearch #architectureeducation #transdisciplinarydesign #bartlettschoolofarchitecture #ucl #careandcreativity #learningbydoing #architectureofcare
GOOD NEWS!! IZASKUN CHINCHILLA IS THE NEW DIRECTOR OF THE MASTER’S IN SITUATED PRACTICES AT THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE (UCL)
We are thrilled to announce that Izaskun Chinchilla has been appointed Director of the Master’s in Situated Practices at The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) — an incredible honor and an exciting step in her long-standing commitment to education, research, and architectural practice.
To celebrate, we’re sharing this video as an introduction for future students interested in joining the program — a space where design, community, and experimentation meet to create real impact in local contexts.
For more than two decades, Izaskun has explored the intersection between ecology, public engagement, and material innovation through her practice Izaskun Chinchilla Architects, based in Madrid and London. Her projects often take place in the public realm, where architecture becomes a catalyst for social connection and environmental regeneration — embracing the principles of care, participation, and collaboration.
Among her most emblematic works is the Organic Road Pavilion (New York, 2015), built entirely from reused materials such as 550 bicycle wheels and 350 umbrellas, as part of the NGO Figment’s efforts to open Governor’s Island to the public. In Anyang, Korea (2023), her installation encouraged the practice of walking barefoot at sunset, reconnecting people with the natural rhythms of their environment.
In Logroño and San Sebastián, her projects turned public space into a laboratory for co-design and collective imagination — from mobile furniture built by citizens to embroidered utopias created through craft and dialogue.
As Director, Izaskun aims to nurture an ecosystem where students can define, design, and construct architectures with tangible social and environmental impact — projects that engage deeply with place, community, and care.
Learn more about the program:
https://share.google/DBsCZ5njoSV1pSWwu
#izaskunchinchilla #bartlettucl #situatedpractices #architectureforchange #publicspace #ecology #communitydesign #urbancare #architecturaleducation #sustainability
