This workshop examines pleasure in architecture as an active and critical condition of design, emerging from tensions between order and excess, use and event, body, space, and media. Pleasure is not treated as decorative surplus, but as a conceptual driver capable of structuring architectural thinking and production.
Through a close articulation of theoretical seminars and media experimentation, students explore multiple forms of pleasure—technological, spatial, embodied, controlled, and media-based—and analyze how these manifest in architectural projects, devices, and representations.
The workshop combines critical readings, film analysis, and architectural references with experimental sessions using tools of digital capture and representation. It equips students with intellectual and practical instruments to interrogate the role of pleasure in contemporary architectural design.
Aaron Sprecher is an architect and Professor at the Technion Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, where he founded the Material Topology Research Laboratory (MTRL). He is also co-founder of Open Source Architecture, an international collaborative research practice. His work investigates the intersection of media theory, computational design, and digital fabrication through teaching, research, and practice.
Gilbert Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics”
Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture”
Elizabeth Grosz, “Embodied Utopias: The Time of Architecture”
Mark Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender
Sylvia Lavin, “Current Kisses”, in Kissing Architecture
