One Section, Many Worlds

ITERA Lab is an architectural research and design practice investigating how spatial and material systems respond to territories in transition. Across environmental inquiry, spatial research and material strategy, the studio examines conditions shaped by climate, migration, infrastructure and resource circulation, developing adaptive approaches that operate across territorial, architectural and material scales. For London Design Festival 2026, ITERA Lab presents One Section, Many Worlds: Plural Territories, Common Matter, an exhibition bringing together architectural research, models, material studies and invited artistic practice. Alongside projects situated in Navotas, Metro Manila, and the Tibetan Plateau, the exhibition includes Borrowed Assembly by invited artists Xiaochi Chen and Ming Chen, an exploratory installation examining temporary custody, reversibility and the afterlives of materials. The exhibition treats the section as an epistemic and speculative device: a way of cutting through the apparent coherence of territory to reveal the relations held within it. Land and water, settlement and infrastructure, atmosphere and ground, human occupation and ecological systems are read as interdependent conditions. The section also becomes a means of suspending these relations in a provisional state, allowing them to be reconnected and imagined differently. The work in Navotas investigates coastal urbanisation, tidal fluctuation and infrastructural adaptation within a densely inhabited littoral territory. The Sanctuary, situated on the Tibetan Plateau, examines displacement, settlement transformation and the persistence of collective cultural practices under changing territorial regimes. Across both projects, architectural narrative becomes a form of spatial re-imagination, reconstructing relationships between environment, inhabitation and political geography. From territory, the exhibition moves toward the material systems through which architecture is produced. Matter is understood as part of longer trajectories of extraction, manufacture, circulation, use, abandonment and return. Environmental responsibility therefore extends to the reorganisation of existing material conditions and the ways in which materials move between successive states of value and use. Within this framework, reuse becomes both a material strategy and a question of identity. A material may shift between resource, waste, structure, artefact and infrastructure, acquiring different meanings across time. Architecture becomes one temporary condition within these longer material histories. This enquiry is developed through Borrowed Assembly, which temporarily removes post-consumer PET bottles from established recycling streams and gives them a provisional architectural role before returning them intact to circulation. Its proposition of “not ownership, but temporary custody” frames architecture as an interval between material states, where spatial value can emerge without fixing matter into a final identity. Across these scales, One Section, Many Worlds positions architecture as a practice of reading, reframing and temporarily reorganising existing conditions. Through interdependence, reversibility, stewardship and material continuity, the exhibition asks how spatial practice might operate within a finite and materially connected world.