Strategic Architecture: How to Map Complexity for Action

This is the second event in CAFx's lecture series Strategic Architecture: An Evening School. Ivana Stancic from Dark Matter Labs speaks about systems mapping as design practice - not merely as a tool for describing complexity, but for coordinating the collective action required to transform the built environment.

As co-director of Dark Matter Labs, Ivana Stancic works at the intersection of architecture technology, urban strategies, systems change, and institutional design, focusing on new ways to coordinate transformation in the built environment.

The evening school begins with a fundamental observation: architecture has always borrowed its techniques from elsewhere - mapping from empire, the diagram from cosmology, projection from the painter's studio - and assembled them temporarily in service of the building. Over the past decade, these instruments have begun to migrate again: they appear as evidence in courtrooms and media (forensic architecture), as diagrammatic tools in ministries and agencies (strategic architecture), and as speculative projections in galleries and laboratories (speculative architecture) - no longer anchored in construction, but directed toward truth, action, and imagination.

From August, CAFx's evening school follows this movement in its strategic dimension and asks what happens to architecture when the diagram stops anticipating form and instead structures deliberation, negotiates trade-offs, and creates the conditions for collective decision-making.