Spatial Ecologies master’s programme

Spatial Ecologies is a master’s programme where architecture meets ecology, culture, and innovation. Based in Kalundborg, Denmark, you’ll work in a living laboratory, tackling global challenges through local action. 

Spatial Ecologies understands architecture as a practice grounded in the material, ecological, and cultural layers that shape environments over time. The programme approaches place not as a passive backdrop, but as a living and historical medium where geological, biological, and social processes intersect. Architecture is framed as the interpretative and constructive act that works these relations through speculative thinking, design and making. By engaging with political ecologies and the dynamics of extraction, labour, and renewal, the programme encourages students to develop strong material awareness and transcalar methods of inquiry. Through fieldwork, research, and full-scale experimentation, students learn to work with different temporalities—care, decay, repair—and gain the tools to respond ethically and contextually within conditions of ecological uncertainty and change.

Teaching and research are structured through three interconnected frameworks:
–Resource Flows—examining materials, energy, and labour as circulating systems linking extraction, production, use, and reuse.
–Geo-local Ground—studying geological, ecological, and cultural layers as foundations for architectural reasoning and imagination.
–Lateral and Vertical Relations—exploring connections from underground to atmosphere, and between tectonics, landscape, and climate.

 Kalundborg and its region serve as one of the programme’s “living labs”. Its industrial symbiosis, coastal landscapes, and agricultural areas offer real contexts for understanding how global issues appear locally. Students work directly with communities, industries, and ecosystems, transforming observations into spatial and material proposals.

Learning at the program Spatial Ecologies is rooted in making. Through drawing, modelling, mapping, full-scale testing, and dialogue with stakeholders, students learn to read environments through scientific, cultural, and artistic lenses. They develop architectural responses that integrate care, ethics, experiential qualities and precision—preparing them to think and act across scales, disciplines, and timespans in a world facing ecological transition.

Subjects and content
The programme brings together design studios, theory and history seminars, analytical workshops, laboratory work, and field-based research. Architecture is approached as both material culture and political ecology: students investigate how built forms emerge from—and contribute to—processes of extraction, transformation, and regeneration.

Through drawing, modelling, mapping, and full-scale tests, students explore how assembly, decay, reuse, and repair shape architectural form, landscapes, and spatial meaning. Learning takes place through observation and experimentation in real environments - industrial, agricultural, and ecological - turning analysis into informed design ideas.

International professor Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin will lead the programme
Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin is a trained architect and joins from Urban Design and Critical Theory at TU Delft, where she founded and led major interdisciplinary initiatives, including Transitional Territories, Critical Environments, and Delta Urbanism advancing design research and education on climate adaptation, resource governance, and territorial transformation. 

Taneha brings with her an impressive portfolio of international research projects, and the programme Spatial Ecologies will be characterized by placing architecture in other contexts such as resource flows, geo-local ground, and lateral and vertical relations.

Application requirements
To be eligible to apply, applicants must have a Bachelor's degree in architecture or architectural studies from a nationally recognised school of architecture. This means that your degree must be recognised by a national architectural association or board as a degree that leads to a professional qualification as an architect.

Apply online before March 1. More info about application here.