Strategic Architecture: How to Design Decision Rooms?

Join us for a lecture by Amelie Klein, part of the curatorial and research practice Design & Democracy, on how to design decision rooms. The world has changed dramatically, but the essential architecture of contemporary Western democracies has remained largely untouched for around three centuries. What does that mean for inclusivity, diversity and participation as we understand them today?

Amelie Klein is a freelance curator, author, teacher, and design critic. As part of Design & Democracy, she recently developed the exhibition All In! Redesigning Democracy, which was shown at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, in 2024.

About the Evening School: Architecture has always been less a sovereign art than a gathering of itinerant techniques - the survey drafted for empire, the map drawn for taxation, the diagram lifted from cosmology, the projection honed in the painter's studio, assembled for a time in the service of building. In the past decade, these instruments have begun to drift once more, resurfacing as evidentiary devices in courts and media (forensic architecture), as diagrammatic engines in ministries and agencies (strategic architecture), and as speculative projections in galleries and laboratories (speculative architecture). No longer tethered to construction, they are redirected toward truth, action and imagination. From August onwards, CAFx' evening school follows that migration in its strategic inflection, asking what becomes of architecture when the diagram ceases to prefigure form and instead structures deliberation, negotiates trade-offs, and scripts the conditions under which collective decisions are made.