Niche

Michaela Prunotto

Studio Description

This research group proposes a new and subversive spatial typology for exploration: the niche. Niches are encountered in fashion (stylistic codes), economics (market niche), architecture (wall recess), and ecology (the role and position of a species within an ecosystem). Across all domains, it is a term that signifies a highly specific, small scale, and in-between position.

Taking cues from territorial urbanism, the studio will forensically locate a series of hidden, vacant or degraded mini-spaces around the city, identified as non-capitalist zones of potential. Through engagement with local grassroots actors—what Paola Viganò describes as the “seeds of transition”—and with attunement to urban ecology, we will provoke real ways for these segments to be regenerated towards ecosocial continuity.

How do micro trends become viral? How does niche become mainstream? The studio is interested in not only strategically designing a melange of regenerative niches, but also understanding mechanisms for them to be sustained and propagated en masse. Campaign may be leveraged as a tactic. A parallel, joyful agenda of the studio is for participants to be proactively finding their own niche amidst an industry landscape of accelerating homogeneity.

Studio Outcomes

Finding a Niche

We will react to the premise that architects are, at times, devising perfect answers to monstrous questions. Moving beyond notions of architecture as pure service provision, we will source tools for proactively creating, and then critically interrogating, a project rationale “for the public good” (OFFICE). We will begin by scouting sites where niches can take root, constructing a methodology and criteria to locate small spaces of non-capitalist potential around the city. Such sites may be vacant buildings, post-extractive landscapes, oil spaces, degraded patches, industrial skeletons.

Critical Spatial Practice

Markus Miessen’s crossbench practitioner acts without mandate, as an “uninvited irritant” into fields that may benefit from external thinking. This attitude will drive design proposals: a clear, short and punchy demand to the city will shape each intervention (see Imperfect Assemblies). Inputs throughout the semester will support strategies of systems thinking, adaptive-reuse, regenerative design, biobased materials, and urban ecology. Niches will be designed in an incremental way: small and grassroots in the beginning, yet surging into larger sites as resources are accrued, accumulating towards a niche infrastructure.

Studio Leaders

Michaela Prunotto generates architectural and territorial design research. She is currently working as a research and development specialist with Cultures of Assembly (Luxembourg), on a series of exhibitions titled Imperfect Assemblies which launched at Copenhagen Architecture Forum in early 2026. She is also a designer with Studio Miessen. This follows a year in Switzerland between EPFL and ETH Zürich as a Fritz Janeba Scholar, undertaking a specialist program in urban and territorial design. ‘Niche Studio’ is informed by her co-research in Switzerland led by Prof. Paola Vigano (Habitat Research Centre) and Prof. Milica Topalović (Architecture of Territory), in collaboration with Caleb Mitchell and Thibault Marghem.

Readings & References

• Centre for Research Architecture, Common Sensing, ed. Riccardo Badano, Tomas Percival, Susan Schuppli (Spector, 2025).
• Cultures of Assembly, audio podcast series (2022—present).
• Flowers of Evil, ed. Céline Baumann (Triennale Milano, 2023).
• forty five degrees, Radical Rituals, ed. Berta Gutiérrez Casaos, Alkistis Thomidou, Elise Misao Hunchuck (Punch, 2023).
• How to Not Demolish a Building, ed. 51N4E and l'AUC (Ruby Press, 2022).
• Imperfect Assemblies: Towards New Civic Infrastructures, curated by Markus Miessen and César Reyes Nájera (exhibition, 2026).
• Markus Miessen, Crossbenching (Sternberg Press, 2016).
• McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Paola Viganò, The Biopolitical Garden (Actar, 2024).
• Researching Otherwise, ed. Nitin Bathla (gta Verlag, 2024).
• Silicon Forest, ed. Futurefarmers, Elizabeth Thomas (Sternberg Press, 2026)
• Unmasking Space: a handbook for student activism, ed. Shriya Chaudhry, Emma Kaufmann LaDuc, Giacomo Rossi, Qianer Zhu (dpr-barcelona, 2025).

Schedule:
Tuesday 3pm - 6pm
Friday 3pm - 6pm

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