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Antti Ahlava gave a presentation on Relationship-based Architectural Design: Methodological Developments in The Design Principles & Practices conference in Sapienza, Rome on February 25-27, 2026. The speak was followed by a joyful discussion.

Antti's research and development work in question originates on one hand from a review to some of the canonical metabolist and post-modernist writings from 1960’s to 90’s. On the other hand, it stems from an anthropological reading of architecture during the recent ontographic turnaround. The study of relationships has been an inherent, but often hidden topic in some of the key writings of such architects as Christopher Alexander, Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe with Fred Koetter, as well as Robert Venturi.

This work takes a step from anthropological ontography, which is the descriptive and speculative study of people and their world of objects, into metaxography; the study of relationships between objects. The metaxographic approach contributes to the topical development of non-anthropocentric culture. This detachment of relationship-based architecture from human-based, rationalist, functional and performative design approaches replaces these attributes with adaptability, flexibility, changeability and resilience and in this way contributes to sustainability.

The metaxographic approach is pragmatist and involves relationship-centred cross-disciplinary learnings from methods in other fields to architecture. The approach helps in managing collage formation, visualisation of relationships, layered system and permutations within spatial language systems and consequently lays new theoretical basis for relationship-based computational design, as well as produces physically new type of architecture.

This is the to Antti's presentation video in Youtube. It includes the slides as well as narrative: Relationship-based architectural design.