This year’s Summer School invites you to develop a new approach to architectural thinking. The central theme of our experimental examination will be the game. The material (non-digital) game is a social event as well as an organizational model. It challenges both the community as well as the individual. It tunes our senses and capabilities, in social as well as in practical terms. For this reason, the game has been conceptualized in different academic fields, such as urban, sociological and economic studies.

We are interested in the complex structure of a game, the rules, the elements, the playing field, the strategy and the element of chance.

The village Lazaropole, where the 27th Summer School will be held, will be our starting point. The settlement was built around, and up a hill, on the economic basis of sheep farming and wool processing in a textile mill close-by. Strikingly the buildings for living are all of similar size and similar materials and built in similar techniques, though none of the buildings is identical. There is enough deviation in each project to give it a singular position, relation and expression. Today it is abandoned during the wintertime and used as a holiday camp in summer.

The Summer School will progress through various stages, such as 1:1 experiments using vernacular techniques, a process-orientated analysis of the existing architectural/settlement condition, leading to playful speculation on the future development of this place and how that might be realized – and therefore what new kinds of construction methods and architectural forms that could then give rise to.