A Forest RESONANCE Dream explores pleasure as a spatial, acoustic, and collective experience, questioning the presence of a foreign natural body within the city. The workshop imagines the forest not as vegetation alone, but as an expanded ecology of creatures, myth, folklore, and resonance. Inspired by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the project blurs the boundaries between reality and imagination, order and chaos, architecture and performance.
The workshop engages students in an experimental practice where architecture, sound, and storytelling converge. Drawing from Shakespeare’s text, students develop acoustic architectural creatures—resonant instruments, models, or performative devices exploring vibration, friction, echo, and noise. The work privileges instinct, rhythm, and improvisation over technical virtuosity.
The productions reference characters and situations from the play—metamorphosis, confusion, absurdity, naivety, illusion—and are shaped through materials selected for their acoustic qualities. Together they form a collective sound forest, activated through a final performance combining installation, narrative, gesture, and sound.
Ricardo de Ostos is an architect and educator whose work develops speculative fictions around architectures situated in urban forests and climate-affected environments. He is currently completing a Mangrove Museum and Ecological Learning Centre in Bangladesh. Born in Brazil, he lives and works in London, where he teaches at the Architectural Association and The Bartlett School of Architecture. He is co-director of the NaJa & deOstos studio and co-author of several books.
Instagram: @najadeostos
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Ricardo de Ostos & NaJa, Scavengers and Other Creatures in Promised Lands, Architectural
Association, 2017
Ricardo de Ostos & NaJa, The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad, Springer Wien / New York, 2006
