Master in Advanced Architecture — Digital Matter Studio Final Presentations

Architecture has a material problem. What we extract, how we build, and what we leave behind are questions the industry can no longer defer. The Digital Matter Studio brought students from the Master in Advanced Architecture face to face with that reality — and asked them to design their way through it.

Aligned with the UIA 2026 “Becoming Embodied” agenda, the studio explored how reclaimed materials, urban mining, embodied carbon analysis and advanced digital technologies can shift construction away from extraction and toward circularity. Students developed new workflows for monitoring, reusing and reconstituting material resources — redefining not just how buildings are made, but what they are made of and how long they last.

From biochar and cork to banana fibre, reclaimed concrete and earth — six teams investigated materials that are often discarded, undervalued or overlooked, and found in them the building blocks of a more honest architecture. The results were technically rigorous, visually striking and deeply positioned within the broader ecological, social and political discussions surrounding decarbonization and resource equity.

This is what sustainable architecture looks like when it stops being a label and starts being a practice.