How to Speak to Space: Towards a Practice of Regeneration
Ania Molenda and Clarinde Wesselink
What if the stories we tell reshape not only our narratives but the very world we inhabit? In the face of the ecological collapse, architecture can no longer be seen as a passive participant; it is complicit in the devastation. The urgent question is: how do we rebuild, not just with materials, but with radically rethinking designers’ capacity and responsibility in creating regeneration? To embrace architecture as an integral, active component of an ecological whole, we need a profound shift in how we teach to think, act, and speak. An enormous challenge, given the historical legacy that continues to separate nature from culture. Can we dare to rebuild not just our habits, but also our very understanding of space and our place within it?
How to Speak to Space is a workshop method based on an exploration of how we perceive and engage with spatial relationships. Participants are invited to develop their unique language through choreographic scores applied in situ. Rather than focusing on the professional jargon and critical gaze that typically dominate their vocabulary and their way of being in space, they are asked to build a sensory understanding of architecture and its materiality: how it feels, sounds, and what it means to move through it alone or together. This process emphasises that ecology is not a backdrop for our buildings but an active, living force within them. Every material and every method of construction influences how we see, hear, and move. We view a building not as an object but as a dynamic set of relations through which we can wander. It is an invitation to break down hierarchies and see architecture as a meeting point of bodies, materials, and environments. Not through theories, but in practice. Through collective exercises, the participants are invited to develop a new lexicon that becomes a relational and continuously evolving knowledge system. Inspired by Indigenous epistemologies, where language does not rigidly separate space, body, and environment, we explore how a building is not in but is part of an ecosystem.
Ania Molenda
www.aniamolenda.com
Ania Molenda is an independent researcher, curator, writer, and educator. She is a co-founder and director of the research and publishing platform Amateur Cities. Her work focuses on the cross-section between spatial practices, technology, ecology, and their socio-cultural impact. It is expressed through experimental publications, exhibitions, and cultural programmes. In 2019 she was a finalist of the Geert Bekaert Award for architectural criticism, and in 2018 a co-recipient of the Dutch Design Award in Design Research for Amateur Cities and New Generations. Before starting an independent career, Ania worked as a researcher and design teacher at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture (The Why Factory) as well as an architect at MVRDV, Powerhouse Company and SVESMI.
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