Strategic Architecture: How to Design Decision Rooms?

Join us for a lecture by Amelie Klein - a member of the curatorial and research practice Design & Democracy - on how to design Decision Rooms. The world has changed dramatically, yet the essential architecture of contemporary Western democracies has remained largely untouched for around three centuries. This talk will explore what that means for inclusivity, diversity, and participation as we understand them today.

About Amelie Klein

Amelie Klein is a freelance curator, author, teacher, and design critic. Recently, she developed the exhibition All In! Redesigning Democracy, which was showcased at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany (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, and 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). They are no longer tethered to construction but redirected toward truth, action, and imagination.

From August onwards, CAFx’ evening school will follow this 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.