(Ra)dical (Re)alims
Design Research Lab
RaRe uncovers new forms of value by designing spatial systems and cultivating the insight and capability to evolve and navigate change
Manifesto
The Problem | The Shift | RaRe’s Commitment
Most architecture begins with the wrong question
We are trained to ask how to design before asking why anything should exist at all. We inherit briefs, sites, and programs as if they were fixed truths rather than constructed conditions shaped by economics, governance, and power.
Climate crisis, resource depletion, social inequality. These are not isolated design problems, but systemic conditions produced through entangled networks of extraction, regulation, finance, culture, and habit. Yet architecture continues to operate as if these realities sit outside the project. These forces form the dark matter of the built environment. They govern what gets built, how it is valued, and who benefits, yet they remain largely unchallenged within design practice.
It responds to symptoms, reproduces systems, and stabilizes the very conditions it claims to address. If the problems we face are systemic, relational, and temporal, then architecture cannot remain the production of static objects.
The Shift
different
Architecture is a way of knowing and acting in the world.It is not finished at completion
It is not bounded by a site
It is not limited to form
Architecture Emerges through the interaction of
What we believe and assume (onto-epistemological knowing)
Who and what it affects (relational knowing)
What it mobilizes and at whose cost (resource knowing)
How it is spatially composed and experienced (spatial knowing)
Together, these form an expanded field of practice across space, value,
agency, and time
Architecture is a way of knowing and acting in the world.It is not finished at completion
It is not bounded by a site
It is not limited to form
Architecture Emerges through the interaction of
What we believe and assume (onto-epistemological knowing)
Who and what it affects (relational knowing)
What it mobilizes and at whose cost (resource knowing)
How it is spatially composed and experienced (spatial knowing)
Together, these form an expanded field of practice across space, value,
agency, and time
From this position, architecture does not begin with solutions, it begins with questions. Problems are not given, they are constructed and must be reframed. Briefs, sites, and programs are not neutral starting points, but products of wider systems of power, value and decision-making. Design is not only solution-making, it is a method of inquiry. Buildings are not endpoints, they are temporary states within longer transformations.
RaRe’s Commitment
01
Practice Planetary Attention
We see and act through the relationships that connect the everyday to the planetary.
Architecture does not operate in isolation. Every decision participates in wider networks of actors, ecologies, infrastructures, and institutions. We zoom in and out to trace these connections across scales, from the body to the biosphere, recognising that local actions carry global consequences. We map relationships, expose exchanges, and engage with distributed forms of agency and uneven power. In doing so, we move beyond designing isolated objects toward working within the systems that produce, sustain, and transform the built environment.
“We have shifted from a perceptually infinite world where are externalities never touched to a small world situation where everything is connected... this reality can no longer be ignored.”
Indy Johar
.
Speculate Radically
We challenge ourselves to imagine different futures that engage with and transform the realities that shape them
Architecture cannot remain tethered to the present or confined to repetition. We use speculative ‘What if questions to challange’ to challange assumptions, expose the limits of existing systems, and envision alternative ways of living, working, and organising space. But speculation alone is not enough. It’s imperative that we engage with the dark matter that can govern the limits of change and often prevent it. We do not treat these constraints as fixed; we interrogate them, reconfigure them and design through them to move us toward a preferred future.
03
Design Across Time
We reject the idea of completion. Architecture is not a finished object; it is a process unfolding across multiple time horizons.
We treat architecture as a verb - dynamic, situated, and continuously evolving - shaped by changing needs, values, and conditions. We design across three time horizons recognising that buildings are temporary states within longer cycles of use, adaptation, decay, and transformation; this moves us beyond the now, to include the near future and long-term, speculative futures we cannot fully predict. We distinguish between a building’s life span and use span meaning we design for people we will never meet, uses we cannot fully define, and systems that will continue to evolve beyond our control.
04
Take Full Responsibility
Consciously acknowledge the
imprints we leave and the futures
they shape.
Every act of design is an act of allocation, whether framed as resources, energy, labour or value. If design is a form of consumption, then responsibility cannot end at the boundary of the site, the moment of completion or the limits of the brief. It must extend across lifecycles, supply chains, communities, ecologies and future transformations. We hold ourselves accountable to the wider systems we participate in, recognising how our decisions mobilise global resource flows, shape environmental futures, and position architects as active agents within an interconnected planetary system.
05
Intervene through Narrative
Storytelling is a strategic act to shape what is seen, valued and possible.
We use storytelling to disrupt assumptions, reveal hidden systems, and reframe how architecture engages with time, agency, space, and value. It unsettles dominant logics, amplifies overlooked voices, and produces alternative readings of our planetary environment. In doing so, it becomes a tool of intervention: shifting perception, redistributing attention, and opening up new possibilities for architectural action.
If our world is not okay, then the question is no longer what can we design but... ?
What are we prepared to question, disrupt, and transform together?