Berlin Summer Studio
University of Kentucky
28.05. – 04.07.2025
The University of Kentucky returns to Aedes with 11 second-year architecture students for a six-week workshop exploring the relationship between human scale and activity in Berlin, developing objects that encourage social interaction and engagement with the built environment.
Task
In cities like Berlin, wayfinding systems – such as signs, barriers, and public objects – play a vital role in guiding movement, ensuring safety and shaping everyday experiences. These elements use visual language – text, imagery and form to signal meaning and invite interaction. Often standardised in design, they follow recognisable typologies that make them easily understood in the urban environment.
This workshop challenges students to rethink these everyday objects and their potential to do more than direct movement. The goal is to design a new urban element – an object with a distinct character that encourages social interaction and engagement with the built environment.
Each intervention will be site-specific and respond to its context, using form and material to reflect the human scale, local culture and patterns of public life. Students will explore how design can foster connections between people, place and the city itself.
Focus Areas
- Series and Typology
- Activity and Form
- Event and Effect
- Material and Tactility
- Documentation
Studio Coordinator
Prof. Jason Scroggin with Brianna Mattingly
