Imagining-by-Acting
Inês Nascimento
Not Yet Cultural Association is a non-profit incubator of experimental laboratories, based in Lisbon, working where architectural education, research and collective spatial practices meet. It rests on one conviction: that imagination and action are inseparable, and that to change what architecture can be, we must change how its makers are formed. Around this we developed Imagining-by-Acting, the pedagogical proposition at the core of our work.
Not Yet was founded by Inês Nascimento and Henrique Andrade, two researcher-practitioners whose doctoral investigations at ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon converged on the same ground from different directions. Between us we bring architecture, artistic and editorial practice, teaching, and the design and facilitation of international workshops and pedagogical programmes.
Inês is an architect and researcher at DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte, completing a PhD on utopian and radical pedagogies in architectural education. She is a published author and an editor of an international drawing and photography contest, at SCOPIO Magazine, and designs, leads and moderates workshops, encounters and panels on architectural education.
Henrique is an architect, visual artist and researcher, also at DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte, with a background in drawing and public art. He is the founder of Cri_Lab, an experimental laboratory of critical and creative spatial practices, and brings learning-by-making, experimental image methods, and experience of teaching in secondary education. His work treats failure and process as generative methods.
What is new is not either of us alone, but the practice we build together. Imagining-by-Acting could not have emerged from one investigation; it lives in the meeting of architecture and art, theory and making, research and the school. We bring years of individual work and the openness of a young joint practice, still at its beginning — grounded enough to know what we are doing, and unfinished enough to let it be changed.
Are imagination and reality really separate? We do not think so.
Like the shadows in Plato's cave, what surrounds us can be mistaken for the only reality — yet without imagination, we cannot question the world we live in, and without action, imagination detaches from the conditions it seeks to transform. The spaces we inhabit shape what we can imagine, while imagination changes how those spaces are read and altered. They exist at the edge of one another, constantly producing each other.
We are an experimental practice and research laboratory on this liminal ground, where education, art and architecture, research and collaboration question spatial conditions while activating imagination's speculative power. Architecture faces a double crisis, of imagination and of action, running through its practice and its teaching: asked to repair rather than replace and to act within ecological and social limits, its schools still train solitary authors of form. To change what architecture can be, we must first change how its makers are formed — teaching not only students but society itself, inside the institution and beyond. Imagining-by-Acting, born from two doctoral investigations, proposes that imagination and action are inseparable: we do not first imagine and then build; action generates reflection, and imagination becomes operative, embodied and spatial.
We have tested this through international workshops and experimental laboratories, at university and secondary-school level, where participants think and make their institution, campus or school otherwise. Nothing is drawn before it is done; work is built by hand, then surrendered and reassigned, so authorship becomes collective and error is kept as material rather than corrected. The ambition is not a universal solution, but repeatable conditions for collective imagination to become spatial action, raising better architectural questions that can generate better answers in the future.