Sliver Lecture Series 2024/25: Applied Imaginaries

“With its international orientation and its profound artistic, technical and discursive educational program, the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna produces critical work and searches for visionary strategies that address the most urgent questions of our time and the near future: What is the role of architecture in regards to contemporary cultures and societies, urbanization processes, identity policies, migration, climate change, environmental challenges, and disruptive technologies? How do we want to live and co-exist? What will our future look like, and how will that be manifested spatially, physically, and virtually? What role do digital developments and technology play in this? What is the role of architecture in tackling questions on aesthetics and radical beauty?”

Imaginaries have a formative power; they can be probable, plausible, possible, or preferable. They are activated by real or mediated worlds. They operate as structure, interface or as a simulation. They conceive individual, communal, social meanings and relations with the other. They challenge the established and expand our ways of knowing. Imaginaries wide and strange.

In what ways do imaginaries operate as tools that propel propositions to the questions above?

Philosopher and social critic Cornelius Castoriadis saw radical imagination as a creative force that shapes our perception of reality and our capacity to envision new possibilities. On a bigger scale, his notion of a social imaginary represents the imagination of a society, manifested in its way of living, seeing, and making its own existence.

In the context of design cognition and design education, imagination is vital to what Nigel Cross describes as the “designerly ways of knowing,” fostering the human ability to meaningfully compose the world we are within and evolve design and architecture as a discipline of possibilities. 

Therefore, this year’s lecture series, Applied Imaginaries, is curated as an atlas of projects, practices, and strategies that turn imaginaries into design endeavors, some brought into the world and others manifested as speculations yet to be fully formed or actualized.

In the winter term 24/25 we are looking forward to explore imaginaries with:

Wednesday, October 2, 6pm, I oA Square 
Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg (Space Popular) 

Thursday, November 7, 6pm, I oA Square 
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli (2050+)

Thursday, December 19, 6pm, I oA Square
Anne Holtrop (Studio Anne Holtrop)

Coming up in summer term 25:

March 2025, tbc, I oA Square
Sam Chermayeff (Sam Chermayeff Office)

April 2025, tbc, I oA Square
Lucy McRae (Future Sensitive)

Events are held in-person, free of charge and open to the public. Learn more about our past editions on our website. Sliver team: Camille Breuil, Anna Gulinska, Maja Ozvaldič, Giacomo Pala, Galo Moncayo.