Strategic Architecture: How to Map Complexity for Action

Join us for a lecture by Ivana Stancic of Dark Matter Labs on how to use systems mapping as a design practice - moving beyond describing complexity toward coordinating the collective action needed to transform the built environment.

About the Evening School

Architecture has always been less a sovereign art than a gathering of itinerant techniques: the survey drafted for empire, the map drawn for taxation, the diagram lifted from cosmology, the projection honed in the painter’s studio, assembled for a time in the service of building.

Yet, in the past decade, these instruments have begun to drift once more, resurfacing as evidentiary devices in courts and media (forensic architecture), as diagrammatic engines in ministries and agencies (strategic architecture), and as speculative projections in galleries and laboratories (speculative architecture), no longer tethered to construction but redirected toward truth, action and imagination.

From August onwards CAFx’ evening school follows that migration in its strategic inflection, asking what becomes of architecture when the diagram ceases to prefigure form and instead structures deliberation, negotiates trade-offs, and scripts the conditions under which collective decisions are made.

About the Presenter

As Co-Director at Dark Matter Labs, Ivana Stancic works at the intersection of architectural engineering, urban strategy, systems change, and institutional design, developing new ways to coordinate transformation in the built environment. Her work intentionally spans policy, finance, crafts and industry, awareness and civic organisations.

Her work asks how complexity can become actionable. Through initiatives including Net Zero Cities, the New European Bauhaus, and the recently established XO (Extitution for Optionality), she explores how mapping systems reveal where interventions can unlock cascading change. Her current work, XO: Extraction Zero Policy, investigates how a single policy shift can reorganise governance, markets, culture, and practice around post-extractive futures.

The evening school is made possible with support from Statens Kunstfond