Plenary Session Becoming Attuned

Concluding the Becoming Attuned track, this plenary frames attunement as an architectural capacity to listen, notice, and respond to the ordinary and overlooked. Positioned as a critical mode of engagement rather than passive sensitivity, it gathers the track’s questions and frictions on meaning, poetics, and uncertainty, proposing attunement as a method for navigating layered cultural and material contexts.

The role of the Critical Antagonists in the plenary session is to articulate a critical understanding of Becoming Attuned—a vision that takes into account the fifteen sessions with over forty speakers, while focusing in particular on the two original Research by Design investigations and the two emerging workshops.

Within this framework, De Vylder Vinck present ENTR’ACTE as a practice of precision and restraint, where economy of means and refrained interventions keep projects open to past meanings and speculative futures. In parallel, Atelier Bow-Wow develop Nocturnal Tokyo as a hypothesis, combining comparative fieldwork with analytical and speculative drawings to read nightlife as a path-dependent urban structure and to propose alternative temporalities for climate adaptation. Two workshops extend these inquiries: BeAr Architects intervene in the souvenir and ornament as micro-narratives of dissidence, constructing present-fictions for Barcelona, while Bangkok Tokyo Architecture test distributed authorship through iterative, exchanged generic constructions assembled from ordinary leftover materials.

Together, the plenary positions attunement as the track’s concluding proposition: an active, empathetic engagement that listens to landscapes, stories, needs, and cultures, embracing uncertainty and the ordinary to curate meaning in spatial practice.