Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam is home to Gerrit Rietveld Academi, which offers highly regarded the master’s programs in fine arts, interior architecture, and design. One of the institute’s main departments is the Studio for Immediate Spaces, a two-year program for teaching space-related practices. It aims at exploring, investigating, and shaping spatial practices on the genesis of and production of contemporary spatial configurations. Directed by Swiss architect Leopold Banchini, it embraces a truly global approach that constantly crosses and deliberately ignores borders.

This book offers a glimpse into this unique journey around the globe. Illustrated with some 760 color and black-and-white photographs, it features work produced collectively by participants in simultaneous roles of geographer, researcher, architect, urban planner, and designer. Brief texts on each project and essays by Leopold Banchini, his codirectors Julian Schubert and Ludwig Engel, studio tutor Marie-Avril Berthet, studio participant Maike Statz, artist collective Fabulous Future, and curator and writer Lukas Feireiss round out this exceptional documentation of forward-thinking higher education in spatial design.