At the end of every August, the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) holds its annual conference and general meeting.

This year, the conference was hosted by the Escola Técnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) under the theme of Transhistorical Pedagogies.

We submitted a paper to Session 4 Skills and Crafts. We took a particular interest in this part of the session’s call for papers:

“Critical thinking and design processes applied to architecture, cities and landscapes require a slow pace. True understanding in these fields requires depth of learning and sedimentation. In a society that values quick results and instant gratification, this commitment to a more deliberate process is radical, even subversive.”

We decided to use this call as an opportunity to present and discuss some of the unpublished research from the book – while also shamelessly promoting the book in its first week of sales. We introduced the book by looking in detail at the cluster Time and Structures, in which the properties Immersion, Time, Rhythms, Synchronicity & Proximity, and Project Cycles all address how the meta-, mesa- and micro-rhythms of studio intersect and interfere with one another to affect the educator’s and student’s experience of studio.

Although we did not name it in the book, we used the conference paper to conceptualise this as the polyrhythmic studio as a means to speculate on how the differing scales of rhythm combine for every student and educator to create a highly personal experience of studio. The challenge for educators is that such time-based architectures are very often invisible, tacit, and assumed, meaning they can be easily dismissed when under-resourced or under cost pressure in the contemporary university.

Studio Properties makes tacit and explicit the properties of studio for educators, giving them tools to examine, surface and articulate the value of studio in the face of increasingly commoditised higher education environments. In particular, it recognises the value of studio as offering: the time and place for  immersion and the long durée of a studio experience; the textures of activity in studio as rhythms acting as curricular entities; student agency to create their own learning spaces. Studio Properties challenges reductive ideas of education as immediate, standardised, or transactional and instead argues for the value of studio as a deliberate – and we might suggest – polyrhythmic pedagogy. 

Our paper will be further developed based on feedback from conference delegates and will be published in the proceedings later in time for the next conference in August 2026.

Sincere thanks to the conference organisers, scientific committee and delegates for an engaging and enjoyable conference. And for supplying chilled Cava in the 36° heat.

Photo: Mia Roth.