Studio Daylight & Structure aims to strengthen students’ architectural reflection and their ability to articulate spatial idea and form through making: Building and drawing to find out. The studio integrates scientific inquiry with artistic exploration in a reciprocal process, with daylight and structure serving as the primary drivers.
The investigations focus on how spatial proportions, structural order, material surfaces, geometry, placement and size of light openings, affect daylight conditions in architecture at high latitudes. The aim is to foster an understanding of how local climate, culture, and context inform architectural decisions and how architecture has the capacity to transform and shape daylight from the exterior to the interior.
The studio examines how we can engage with daylight as a free and ever-present resource given by the specific site conditions and how living and building at high latitudes is shaped by diffuse light, low sun angles, and significant seasonal variations that influence health, well-being and spatial experience.
This work forms part of an International academic collaboration, discussing the relevance of Louis I. Kahn for our contemporary discourse, initiated by the Louis I. Kahn Estonia Foundation.
The spring 2026 program, Productive Housing in Estonia, seeks to rethink what it means to live well in the Nordic-Baltic context today — questioning globalized models of housing that prioritize efficiency and profit over spatial, social, and material quality. The studio explores housing as a framework for participation, production, and coexistence, inviting alternative forms of living and working that strengthen local identity, social resilience, and resource awareness.
The semester is structured around four equally important modules that together form an iterative process, balancing acquired knowledge with intuitive exploration, where scientific methods and analytical tools are continuously embedded in the students’ creative work and transformed into architectural understanding.
- Õpetaja: Kathrine Næss