Happening Architecture was developed within Intermediate 12 at the Architectural Association in 2013–2014, taught by Tyen Masten and Inigo Minns. The brief positioned the unit within a moment of architectural education increasingly concerned with image, object, and output. In response, the year turned toward the temporal, exploring how events, audiences, and actions could become agents in the production of architectural meaning.

The work moved fluidly between research, performance, and design. It took as precedent the cultural architectures of expos, festivals, rituals, and demonstrations, from the Venice Biennale to Burning Man, and used them to question how collective experience produces form. The unit treated events not as spectacles but as spatial systems, framing the city as a site of participation, duration, and legacy.

The central ambition of Happening Architecture was to reimagine architecture as an active, time-based structure, one capable of shaping and being shaped by the events it hosts. Rather than privileging permanence, the brief investigated the contingent and performative: architecture as score, stage, or script. The intent was to shift the locus of authorship from object to operation, from the formal to the social, testing how use, occupation, and cultural ritual could drive design.

Students developed analytical and representational tools to capture these temporal conditions: diagrams of unfolding, time-based drawings, and documents that behaved like events themselves. These exercises asked what an architectural drawing could become when it needed to express not only form but transformation.

The year unfolded in three acts: Event and Occupation, Architecture as Provocation, and City and Legacy. Beginning with a collective “Event Archive,” students catalogued architectures of gathering, from ephemeral installations to world expos, examining their spatial, tectonic, and cultural mechanics. This research became the substrate for individual building proposals sited in Istanbul, conceived as urban triggers for action, participation, or dissent.