Thinking about mobility and designing its vehicles demonstrates not only the design acumen of an architect, which could extend to various domains of design thinking, it is a lens into an architect’s broader scope for understanding and realizing spaces of inhabitation beyond the common architectural figure of the building. Vehicles of the land, sea, and air become mobile architectures that house users for the duration of transit between buildings and geographies. Similar to inhabiting buildings, users experience the environment/landscape as an outside through/with/from the inside of a vehicle’s enclosed space, albeit one moving across terrain.

Still, vehicles of mobility continue to remain external objects with respect to buildings and landscapes that concern architectural/urban thinking. Although architectural/urban research has explored the machinic relationship between cars, movement, and environment, they have not been explored as sites of inhabitation and/or as extensions to sites of inhabitation like buildings and urban spaces. But one can argue that vehicles – although not architectural objects – assemble associations of an architectural/urban character between an inside and outside conception of space.

It is this inside-outside relation that this Research Methods workshop explored through an architectural/urban lens and using architectural analytical tools. Students followed non-humans, traced technical developments, and re-assembled the making of space (i.e., spatialisation) and habitat (i.e., inhabitation). They asked questions about mobility architectures, technogeographic milieu, and architectural associations.

Students extended the fields of architectural humanities and urban studies to explore the architectural, urban, and/or infrastructural modes of connection across environments of movement, beyond the common figures of the building and the city. While those figures remain useful, there is ample potential in studying the envelopes and atmospheric enclosures of new figures in an increasingly mobile world. With this novel approach and methodology, we can expand our architectural know-how beyond buildings, but we can also stay with buildings and see them in a new light.