Between the Parts

Architecture is joined time. A building does not stop being designed when construction ends: materials weather, programs shift, ecologies move in, and the spaces between parts keep negotiating long after the architect has left. This program, led by Rasa Navasaityte, treats that negotiation as the subject of design. Its central concept is the ecological void: the interstitial space between building elements where environmental, social, and technological systems meet and produce new spatial possibilities. A courtyard is not a hole in the block but a climate device, a water choreography, a place of assembly; a joint between two parts is not a closure but a negotiation between material, weather, and eventual disassembly.

Four operations make this designable, and they structure the teaching as much as the research: typological variation, the comparative reading of related spatial situations; dimensional translation, the deliberate movement between scales and media; synthetic multiplicity, the composition of several performances of one place at once; and interdisciplinary integration, the embedding of measured environmental and social evidence directly in the drawing. The lineage runs from the Bauhaus grammar of Kandinsky and Albers through Ungers’s classifications to Kiesler’s endless space.

The program’s evidence is built, exhibited, and taught. The Garden of 999 Trees in Nanjing is a 30,000 m² timber complex whose facade is composed from two tree elements. Maison Partino took the combinatorial method to the Prague Experimental Architecture Biennale. The studios Living with Trees and Circular Hubs at UT Austin composed ecological infrastructure for student housing and circular-economy urban spaces, and were recognised with Design Excellence Awards in 2020, 2021, and 2025. The dissertation Between the Parts: A Relational Methodology for Ecological Design (University of Innsbruck, defended May 2026) sets out the method in full, and the foundation course Visual Communication III and the workshop ARID LOGICS carry it to cohort scale and to other schools.