A.05 Contemporary Research Informed Practices: Urban Design Think Tank (U-TT Design Group)

Studio Name: Urban–Think Tank (U-TT)

Practice: Interdisciplinary design studio and research collective focused on housing, informal urbanism, and spatial equity

Regions: Founded in Caracas, Venezuela; currently with strong bases in Zürich, Switzerland, with projects and collaborations across Latin America, Africa, and Asia

Lecture Name: Urban–Think Tank: Housing the City

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About the Practice

Urban–Think Tank (U-TT) operates at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and social justice. From its founding in 1998 by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner in Caracas, the studio has made it a mission to work with informal settlements, underserved communities, and rapidly urbanising cities. Its work spans tactical interventions (for example, incremental housing prototypes in townships) to large-scale research publications and exhibitions (e.g., “Sí / No: The Architecture of Urban–Think Tank”). The practice emphasizes collaboration across disciplines—architects, engineers, social scientists—and across sectors, seeking to reconceive housing not merely as building blocks but as networks of infrastructure, opportunity, mobility and civic inclusion. In the lecture Housing the City, U-TT likely framed housing as an urban-system challenge, exploring how design can intervene in informal systems, leverage existing condition, and propose scalable, context-sensitive strategies rather than one-size masterplans.

About the Founders

Urban–Think Tank was founded by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, architects and professors whose partnership has defined a new model of socially engaged urbanism. Brillembourg, born in New York and educated at Columbia University, and Klumpner, from Salzburg and educated at ETH Zürich, began collaborating while teaching and researching the complex spatial conditions of Latin American cities.

Alfredo Brillembourg

Their shared vision grew from fieldwork in Caracas, where they witnessed the ingenuity of informal communities and recognized their potential as models for sustainable urban growth. Together, they have led U–TT’s transition from a local practice in Venezuela to an international research platform based in Zürich, where they continue to teach at ETH Zürich’s Chair of Architecture and Urban Design. Through both built work and academic discourse, they advocate for design that bridges the gap between formal and informal systems, architecture and infrastructure, and policy and people.

Hubert Klumpner

Team Research Strategies

For this profile, our team gathered data from the official Urban–Think Tank website’s “About” section to understand their mission, scope and disciplines. We cross-referenced publications (such as ArchDaily articles) documenting U-TT’s housing work in South Africa and other global contexts to capture how their housing practice manifests on the ground. We also reviewed event listings that referenced their lecture Housing the City to confirm the thematic framing. Finally, we looked into exhibition catalogues and scholarly texts (e.g., Hatje Cantz book on U-TT) to better understand the research-driven, interdisciplinary character of their studio. Together, these sources allowed us to synthesise how U-TT frames housing as both design challenge and urban opportunity, and why the studio is relevant to your focus on adaptive urban strategies.