This talk by Objects of Common Interest and LOT Office for Architecture explores how spatial design can act as a negotiation between opposing forces: the container and the contained, the revealed and the concealed, the permanent and the ephemeral. Through a body of work that spans architecture, installation, and design, the two studios investigate how form and experience emerge from these tensions—not to resolve them, but to hold them in dynamic coexistence.

Their projects operate as spatial exceptions: interventions that neither conform to typology nor reject it entirely, but instead remain suspended in a productive ambiguity. Through minimal means—often elemental materials and geometric clarity—they construct environments that invite improvisation, emotional response, and bodily engagement.

Central to this exploration is the concept of the “static performance,” a spatial condition that is at once composed and open-ended, stable yet charged with potential movement. These works are not stage sets nor passive environments, but rather environments that hold tension—between the fixed and the fluid, the permanent and the temporal. They invite different readings, uses, and memories, allowing for a multiplicity of experiences within the same physical framework.

Projects discussed will include public installations, domestic-scale experiments, and collaborative environments that blur the lines between object and architecture. These works propose space not as a resolved container, but as an active participant—one that reveals and withholds, supports and resists, inviting the visitor into a choreography of shifting perceptions.

Image: Objects of Common Interest, Standing Stones, presented at ADAM – Brussels Design Museum. Photo by Stefanos Tsakiris.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk