This round table, Architects Against the Machine, brings together five intertwined PhD research projects that collectively challenge the traditional mechanisms shaping architecture today. Centered around the theme of Practices of Disobedience, the discussion will explore strategies for resisting and reimagining the architectural discipline and the role of the architect as an agent of critical inquiry and change. The discussion will follow three essential questions. What is the machine? — a metaphor for systems such as traditional educational models, disciplinarity within complexity, adaptability crises, gentrification through art washing, and pervasive urbanization — as factors of conformity, exclusion, and standardization. Against this backdrop, each research project answers a second question - Why and How to Disobey? - proposing distinct but complementary acts of disobedience. The discussion will follow the lenses of educating, connecting, experimenting, framing, and implementing in an attempt to contribute to the discussion of the main question - How Could the Role of the Architect Change Through These Practices? Educating through Utopian and Radical Practices challenges entrenched pedagogies, dismantling the reproduction of institutional norms. It reclaims imagination, criticality, and alternative futures within architectural education, positioning the school as a site of resistance rather than compliance. Connecting via Transdisciplinarity subverts the isolationist tendencies of the academy. By forging alliances across disciplines and sectors, this practice destabilizes hierarchical knowledge structures, enabling more pluralistic, inclusive, and dynamic modes of architectural inquiry. 8 Experimenting within Creative Experimental Labs counters the outcome-driven demands of mainstream design production. By embracing uncertainty, failure, and iterative making, it proposes learning as an open-ended, messy, and deeply human process—an essential countermeasure to systemic rigidity. Allowing for different levels of collaboration and participation to be critically employed in order to enrich these processes. Framing through Critical Curation politicizes the curatorial act, refusing the neutrality often ascribed to exhibitions and public narratives. By exposing exclusions, reframing dominant spatial ideologies, and challenging normative storytelling, it reveals and contests the hidden power structures embedded in space-making. Implementing by reclaiming Urban Voids disrupts capitalist urban logics, transforming forgotten and neglected spaces into terrains of possibility and resistance. It reimagines vacancy not as failure, but as fertile ground for alternative urban futures. Together, these practices outline a radical reconfiguration of architectural agency. Rather than operating within the confines of traditional roles, the architect emerges as an educator, connector, experimenter, framer, and implementer—each act of disobedience opening pathways for systemic change – but also and more importantly as a practitioner of collaboration. This round table will invite critical reflection on how these interconnected strategies can be mobilized in practice and theory. It aims to provoke discussion around the risks, potentials, and ethical imperatives of disobedience in architecture. How might these practices redefine what it means to build? How can architects meaningfully resist the cooptation of their work by capitalist, institutional, and disciplinary machines? And crucially, how might collective action amplify the transformative possibilities of individual acts of resistance? By situating architectural practice at the intersection of activism, education, curation, experimentation, and urban reclamation, Architects Against the Machine offers a powerful call to rethink and retool architecture for a more critical, imaginative, and insurgent future.

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Urban Voids,Transdisciplinary Practices,Radical and Utopian Pedagogies,Critical Curating,Drawing as an Urban Practic