The 4th Awakening: Leveraging crisis Part 2 Project 2025 Teodor Catalin Pricop Loughborough University | UK This project proposes architecture not as static form, but as a thinking system — a layered, living methodology. Set within a post-industrial site in Riga, Latvia, the design challenges conventional top-down processes by implementing a hyper-democratic matrix: every 5×5 metre segment of the building was interrogated through a series of spatial, emotional, material, and environmental questions derived from interviews with Latvian citizens across generations.Architecture here becomes the product of collision: between past and future, chaos and control, utility and wonder. The resulting scheme — an innovation centre fuelled by the waste of surrounding industries — functions as both a provocation and a prototype. Chimney fragments pierce new space, materials are reused without nostalgia, and movement becomes a language of architecture.Though rooted in Latvia’s industrial psychogeography, the design system developed here is globally transferable. This is not just a project about Riga — it is a manifesto for architecture as mentality, process, and civic authorship. It invites architects to move beyond “form follows function” toward “form follows thought,” reclaiming the power of design to ask, respond, and adapt.Rather than a solution, the project offers a method — one that absorbs crisis and invents new futures through constraint and curiosity. Tutor(s) Francis Breheny