POLYCOSMOS is a nomadic school for architecture, design, and spatial practice, developing experimental forms of education across institutions, disciplines, and forms of knowledge.
In an age of polycrisis and profound transformation, we need radically different pedagogies for co-creating other futures.
As technologies reshape the conditions of knowledge, POLYCOSMOS explores how machine intelligence can be placed in dialogue with embodied experience, situated practice, collective consciousness, and novel cosmologies.
In an age of polycrisis and profound transformation, we need radically different pedagogies for co-creating other futures.
As technologies reshape the conditions of knowledge, POLYCOSMOS explores how machine intelligence can be placed in dialogue with embodied experience, situated practice, collective consciousness, and novel cosmologies.
PROGRAM FALL 2026
If we want to shape machine intelligence rather than be shaped by it, we have to take an active position and cultivate what is essentially human and what no system can simulate: embodied knowledge, creativity, the depth of consciousness.
For the Fall Program 2026 POLYCOSMOS investigates three different tracks — AI for Design Research linked to the research laboratory AI as Cosmotechnics — The Making of Other Worlds, a research journey on the creation of designcosmologies — Engineering Sacred Spaces, an investigation on the spatial dimension of sacred places.
DESIGN INTELLIGENCE
As AI transforms how we work and create, POLYCOSMOS positions design intelligence as the core discipline of a research and design practice rooted in the reality of lived experience.
Space is never neutral.It embodies the worlds we live in — shaping how we think, feel, create and make meaning. Design intelligence is the trained capacity to sense the complexity of space and to translate it into new form.
A SCHOOL FOR WORLD-MAKING
POLYCOSMOS engages the present knowledge revolution and develops the educational forms needed for a new generation of architects, designers, spatial practitioners and changemakers.
Space-making is world-making.
If we want to build new realities, we have to go beyond the poly-technical academy and develop learning practices that are poly-cosmological — attuned to designing and shaping many worlds.
COSMOPOLITICAL AGENCY
We no longer design for a world that is singular or exclusively human. Every space participates in a field of forces — material, ecological, technological, ancestral, invisible — that shape how reality comes into being.
POLYCOSMOS defends the agency to act consciously through critical, decolonial, and situated knowledge practices — to hold space for the encounter of worlds, and to shape the conditions in which new forms of coexistence can emerge.
A COMMUNITY OF CHANGEMAKERS
POLYCOSMOS is a growing community of architects, designers, educators, mentors, and spatial practitioners consciously engaged in the transformation of the professional field — committed to changing how we build, inhabit, and care for the worlds we share.
We work across online classes, workshops, talks, and events, with on-site formats in local hubs — taking root in Berlin, and growing toward Asia, Brazil, and Africa.
POLYCOSMOS is open to collaborations, partnering institutions, and funders who share this vision. We invite teachers, hosts, and co-creators to join us in building a different kind of academy.
POLYCOSMOS FOUNDER
Rainer Hehl
architect, designer, researcher, educator and seeker, Doctor of Science with focus on the transformation of urban environments in the Global South
Expertise
More than 20 years of full time teaching and research in various universities in Germany, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, South Africa and Brazil
Director of Studies for the MAS Urban Design at the ETH Zurich and for the international Master Program M-ARCH T with focus on typological studies at the TU Berlin, co-author of numerous books on spatial transformation, collective architecture and future typologies
Mission
My mission is to educate and guide a future generation of seekers and creators to transform the reality and co-create new worlds from the endless field of possibilities.
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