DSGN 401
TRANSSCALAR DESIGN STUDIO III
SCALE: SMALL
THEME: COSMOS

FALL 2026
BDCI/SAPL/UCALGARY
JOSHUA CLARKE

IN PROCESS is a transscalar design studio that investigates how design and architecture can construct new ways of attending to the larger relationships within which human and more-than-human life is situated. The studio begins from the premise that the cosmos is not simply something distant to be observed, but a field of scientific, ecological, cultural, symbolic, material, temporal, and metaphysical relationships already present within everyday experience.

Across cultures and throughout history, humans have developed instruments, observatories, calendars, maps, diagrams, rituals, myths, monuments, and architectures through which cosmological realities could be perceived, measured, interpreted, embodied, and shared. The studio examines these devices not simply as representations of knowledge, but as instruments of attention: designed constructions that make otherwise diffuse, invisible, slow, distant, or abstract relationships available to human perception. This studio asks: >>> What is at stake for our capacity to cultivate attention towards that which is larger than us? <<<

>>> ABOUT INSTRUCTOR

>>> STUDIO INSTAGRAM

>>> STUDIO LIBRARY

THIRD YEAR DESIGN STUDENTS

Nathanial Cadieux
Alyson Chintea
Hieu Di Dao
Farah Haji Mohammad Taghi
Daniel Hernandez Giacomin
Maria Juneau
Bailey Kamanzi
Sasha Mantei
Gabriel Murray
Buyantegsh Naranbaatar
Elizabeth Okrusko

Ashish Panda
Jordan Peterson
Claire Pogor
Maria Polania Rozo
Djehann Reyes
Gabby Ribeiro da Silveira
Harkaran Sandhu
Aurora Schultz
Anna Speller
Warner Wedenig
Qodesh Weekes

PHASE TWO >>> BRIEF 2

BACK

PHASE THREE DEVICES >>> BRIEF 3

>>> The Ministry of Cosmic Affari’s Design Brief <<<

4 WEEKS
GROUP

SITES OF ATTENTION

What kind of cosmological site does our contemporary moment need? Throughout history, particular places have helped us orient ourselves within a world larger than ourselves, bringing people together to observe, experience, and participate in the rhythms and forces that shape our existence. Phase Four asks what becomes possible when attention to these larger realities is cultivated not only through the individual body, but through shared encounters grounded in the particularities of place.

Responding to the second open call from the Ministry of Cosmic Affairs, students work in pairs to design Sites of Attention — speculative, small-scale architectural interventions that cultivate encounters between people, place, and cosmos. Building upon their Devices of Attention, students translate and adapt their design operations into architectural propositions situated within specific geographic, environmental, and temporal conditions. Through site research, experimentation, physical modelling, tectonic investigations, and hybrid drawing, students explore how architecture might register, mediate, amplify, or reveal cosmological processes through spatial occupation and collective experience.

The challenge is not simply to enlarge a device or place an architectural object within a landscape, but to discover how the particular conditions of a site might become active participants in an encounter with the cosmos. Each proposal explores how architecture can cultivate shared practices of attention, revealing new relationships between bodies, place, and the larger realities we inhabit together.