Studio led by Youri Kravtchenko (YKRA)

Assisted by Cécile-Diama Samb (sapid studio)

This is the story of a drop of humans and non-humans somewhere on a platform in 2050. Lifestyles and customs have changed, technology has evolved, and the climatic phenomena of this near future condemn them to nomadism, navigating between the natural disasters that occur. In order not to sink themselves, they decide to imagine their own Studio with a clear mission: to study the typologies of spaces and furniture that have been imagined in the past, rewrite their histories and build them – with the means at hand. With this invented myth as a guideline.

The MAIA students reflect on the future of working (living) together and its corollaries and its application, its staging in the field of design. What are tomorrow’s living and working spaces be made of? In our Anthropocene era, in the entanglements between interior spaces, environment and media, what are the architectural responses to contemporary environmental and societal challenges and the implications of today’s new ecological paradigms? Set in the near future – 2050 – we imagine the living and working space of tomorrow realistic enough to speak of our society but fabulously futuristic enough to show its darker side or unacknowledged dreams.

Through The Studio, we explore new types of spaces, objects, customs and ways of living together between humans and non-humans as much applied to the real as to the prospective future. From the soothsayers of antiquity, to the prolix writers of Science-Fiction, many have tried to predict the future to the point that today’s predictions are becoming a political and mercantile wealth of knowledge jealously guarded by states and multinationals. These speculations – generally following social, technological, economic, environmental and political issues and based sometimes on empirical and historical, statistical and scientific data or simply on imagination – form a tree of conditional possibilities. Using various methods from strategic foresight or simply imagination, it would be possible to extrapolate the next cycles of change and to be able to design tomorrow’s environments, architecture and objects or furniture as far as possible. And if – as a result of the trials and tribulations and hypotheses of our studies – the imagined Micronation will not be the exact image of our future, it will certainly be a testimony of our present.