Design studios

Our design studios consist of four studio units as described below:

Asterios Agkathidis – Generative & AI-assisted Design

This unit explores advanced design methods with a strong emphasis on AI-augmented generative workflows and computational design techniques. Alongside analogue and digital form-finding strategies inspired by nature, students will engage with word-to-image, image-to-image, image-to-mesh, and image-to-4D temporal simulations as integral parts of their design methodology. AI platforms such as MidJourney, DALL·E, Tripo AI, Luma AI, Finch 3D, Cove.Tool) and other emerging design engines are incorporated not merely as visual exploration tools, but as active form-finding mechanisms that feed directly into parametric modelling, material experimentation, sustainability, BIM, and 3D prototyping. These workflows enable students to move fluidly across 2D, 3D, and 4D design environments, expanding architectural imagination through hybridised methods. The unit maintains a critical stance toward both computational and AI-driven trends, prioritising typological, formal, and performative innovation rather than surface formalism. Both physical and digital models remain central to the process, ensuring that speculative experimentation is grounded in material–structural performance and the natural context of the Hilbre Islands. (This unit is suitable for the pathways AI & Computational Design, BioDigital Design and BIM-enhanced Design)!

Juliana Kei – Speculative Environmental Repository

This studio aims to produce recordings of the extraordinary landscape of the Hilbre Islands and to work on their transformation into architectural language. We will reflect upon what it means to architecturally participate in a landscape and to contribute to it. In the first stage of this project, we will develop (visual or acoustic, filmic or static, digital or analogue) recordings of our observations that need to be short, precise, and carefully edited. Then, through notational drawing, we will begin to graphically spatialise them. By taking into account the scale and the horizontality of the site, the visual positions and the programmatic possibilities our recordings and notations open up, we will construct architectural propositions that will act as ‘mediating devices’ between ourselves and the landscape.

Guzden Varinlioglu – (Digital) Design & Heritage

Digital) Design & Heritage positions heritage as both physical and digital, tangible and intangible. Architecture is treated not as form for its own sake, but as a practice that mediates memory, atmosphere, and belonging. Students will work with digital heritage as an active design material, exploring how mapping, photogrammetry, sound, and immersive media can reveal cultural and sensory layers of Hilbre Island. Through a participatory game, they will bring multiple voices into the process, with AI acting as an agent alongside human stakeholders. The unit emphasises multi-sensory and human-centred design, leading to architectural proposals that reimagine how heritage is experienced across ecology, culture, and technology. (This unit is suitable for the pathways Digital Heritage and BIM-enhanced Design).