From Building to Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding
the creation of an imaginary world, with its governance, economics, social relations and cultural influences
In the future, how will we solve problems for which architects are currently our best answer?
The way that architects learn and work has changed very little in the past 600 years. It has been our answer to shaping the spaces we inhabit - but building alone offers little agency over the economic, political, and environmental systems that are the source of our greatest challenges. These systems operate far upstream from where building begins. By the time an architect draws a line, the most consequential decisions have already been made.
This site proposes a different framework - worldbuilding.
Rather than accepting constraints handed down from above, worldbuilding gives creators agency to define the parameters of the societies they wish to inhabit. Coincidentally, the elements that storytellers use to build worlds – governance, economics, social relations and cultural influences, are the very 'contingencies' or 'externalities' that are often left out of the equation, by architects, in the pursuit of 'pure design'. Worldbuilding addresses a broad spectrum of concerns by default.
When grounded in a real-world setting, worldbuilding transforms into a collaborative practice, across storytelling, gameplay, and spatial thinking - not to escape reality, but to actively redesign it.