Discourse™ X Nicolay Boyadjiev

Our third episode in which we discuss institutional design, velcro, dominoes, building as knots and designing for expenditure instead of scarcity.

Jun 04, 2026

Welcome to our third episode. Our guest today is Nicolay Boyadjiev.
Nicolay is an architect and creative director based between Sofia, California, London, and everywhere in between. He is currently the Design Director of Antikythera, a philosophy of technology think tank originally incubated at the Berggruen Institute between Los Angeles, London and Beijing. He was formerly the founding Director of Practice Lab at re:arc Institute in Copenhagen, and Co-Director of the Strelka Institute multidisciplinary postgraduate program in Moscow. Prior to that, he worked as a designer, researcher and strategist at studios ranging from boutique consultancies to large architectural offices. Academically, he lectures regularly at various institutions across Europe and North America.

You have spent the last decade or so building the containers in which other people think things. That’s a peculiar position. Designers are stereotypically perceived as things makers. You occupy yourself with arranging the conditions for things to come. How did that happen, what led you there and what it is right now that you are doing?

Thank you, this is a very generous reading of my eclectic design career path so far, which is honestly not getting any less contrived as time goes by, although maybe that’s for the best. I think the truth is that if you take a step back and squint your eyes, I’m not sure if ‘making things’ and ‘making the conditions for things’ are all that different processes; they may actually be the same activity perceived from a different vantage point.

Most designers make things, yes, but ‘making’ never was my own instinctive understanding of what design was. I see design not as an ‘additive’ but rather an ‘editorial’ practice: combinatory, contingent, opportunistic in ways that don’t entirely fit within popular narratives. The reason why the notion of design as the making of shapes and signature features continues to persist is largely because it tends to photograph and circulate well. The actual work of design is much harder to capture, and has probably always been closer to a process of selective framing and strategic refusal under specific pressures, rather than ‘whimsical confabulation’ by a ‘gifted individual’ from a blank slate.

You describe design as an editorial practice rather than a making practice. What does that actually look like?

The maker narrative has always struck me as a useful post-rationalisation exercise — I don’t have anything against it precisely because of its strategic utility, but it’s not an accurate description of how design actually operates. Even if we accept that narrative, it’s also true that the making of anything starts way upstream of the thing itself: it’s also the making of the brief, the constraint architecture, the protocols or ‘engineered arguments’ as Ven Rao calls them, which is a framing I love… Basically what you called the ‘container’: the conditions under which the thing can be imagined, produced and recognised as a fitting or inevitable result. Crucially also, the things you make are often the result of everything you decided not to make, and in that sense the most meaningful design decisions are made long before anything was drafted.

A way I think about design is as the rearrangement and recomposition of domino chains — design represents the whole relay, not just the last domino.
Sure you’re often responsible for making and placing new individual pieces, but that’s only part of it. The work is in the composition of the relay itself.

Where does that understanding come from for you? Was there a moment it became conscious?

I don’t think it came from any sort of sudden profound epiphany. It was probably the result of a series of revelatory experiences in my previous life as a young ambitious architect in a large corporate office for almost a decade. Ironically, practicing architecture is probably the slowest, most expensive and most cumbersome way to arrive at the simple insight that buildings aren’t actually ‘objects’, but here we are.

As design outcomes, you eventually tend to understand buildings as remnant knots of invisible forces, conflicting vectors of interests, capital and law and zoning and the slow violence of maintenance that doesn’t stop when the architect leaves the site and so on. They evolve, are adulterated by their users, renovated past recognition, eventually demolished by the same forces that summoned them; they only appear static throughout this entire process because our chrono-perception is too ‘coarse’ to see them move and fold in either direction. It probably took me way more client meetings than it should have to finally internalise that designing the conditions for navigating this arc is ultimately where the agency of design resides, and it’s better to design the container that prefigures the cargo.

And in practice, concretely, where does that process start? Is there a methodology?

Honestly it probably starts with your gut. With instinct. With intent. I don’t want to over-theorise it; there is a genuine aesthetic pleasure in sort-of knowing what you think you want to achieve, and getting there in irregular ways. I think that’s the entry point — not a procedure you follow.

Of course there are different methodologies in terms of capturing and drawing contours around interesting constraints in the process. Not necessarily every constraint that emerges, but the ones that are generative and worth taking seriously. But even that process is fairly tacit and instinctive. It’s like sharpening a silex, but a silex somehow made out of velcro. Every blow and dent is intentional, but is also the result of external forces you perceive and choose not to ignore.

The shape ends up looking weird not because someone’s practice ‘sits at the intersection of weirdness and shapes’, but because all overlaid constraints made it so.

And the flint’s uneven velcro surfaces allow for external ideas or ambitions from different angles to be projected and travel with it, sometimes even without your knowledge. I know that’s not an IDEO-like methodological answer, but it’s what comes to mind, especially when I think about our former work at Strelka.

Strelka is an interesting case to sit with. It produced some of the most compelling design research of the last decade, and it did so inside a fairly paradoxical setup — a private institution in Moscow, with an openly speculative agenda, co-run with a philosopher, funded by people who had very different ideas about what modernisation meant. How did that tension shape what you were able to build?

In retrospect it’s clear that the paradoxical setup you mention was a feature not a bug, and likely a core structural condition of what made Strelka possible and successful in the first place. I know that from the outside, Moscow in those years was probably perceived as yet another bougie cosmopolitan design capital for the same global design elite to attend the same design event circuit between Milan, Berlin, London, New York, Venice and so on. But in my experience, Moscow was different: one of its main structural advantages was that it was located far enough from that western circuit’s gravitational pull, and as such we were largely free of a lot of its performative overhead. A healthy distance from the shibboleths and so-called ‘radical’ jargon of the 2010s felt like a protected airspace that allowed us to develop our own jargon and shibboleths — I’m not saying necessarily better, but at least different enough from ‘International-Art-English’ to be potentially interesting without the pressure of being called out if you strayed too far from this or that fashion cycle’s pre-approved topics of conversation. Effectively, the reputational cost of thinking out loud at Strelka was much lower precisely because we were far from the hype.

How did you actually end up there? What was the school you wanted to build?

Honestly, in terms of career trajectory, it probably helped that I wasn’t a particularly good architecture student, which I mention here not as a flex or as false modesty but as a professional confession which had a big role to play in the work that I ended up doing. I definitely had a lot of asynchronous academic interests, but was particularly poorly suited to the politics, cultural nuances and institutional pecking orders that characterise traditional academic success — probably more due to a lack of contextual intelligence than to any type of conscious rebellion on my part.

As such Strelka’s ‘para-academic’ institutional profile was definitely on my radar, especially since it was directed at the time by infamous poster boy for cynical realism and architectural iconoclasm Rem Koolhaas, with whom I was obsessed as a student. It was a good match both in terms of Koolhaas’s fixation on globalisation as the ultimate expanded ‘site condition’ for architecture, but also in terms of the institution’s underlying promise for a multidisciplinary pedagogical framework which was in itself explicitly understood as an object of design.

I joined the Strelka program in late 2015 as a student/researcher, stayed on as faculty and eventually as co-director with Benjamin Bratton until early 2022 when the war in Ukraine started and the institute was abruptly dissolved. At a personal level, it was truly the privilege of a lifetime of being given an opportunity to co-design the school I wish I could have attended as a student, and I will always be grateful to former Strelka CEO Varvara Melnikova for that experience.

Do you think the institution could have worked without that tension — without Moscow, without the paradox?

Probably not. Paradoxically and inversely to the west, in Russia some things were ‘easier done than said’, if that makes sense. The default register of most cultural institutions I had experienced until then was that some sort of manifesto always precedes the work: you articulate a position usually by leaning heavily to your ‘values’, defend it discursively to secure peer ratification, and only then are you permitted to maybe build a diluted, compromised but symbolically virtuous version of it. This is partly why I think we seem stuck in a culture of moralistic declarations and design moratoriums of all sorts — a particularly cringe typology of design practice for former A+ students in my opinion, as it presupposes some sort of benevolent or malicious headmaster that may not actually exist. In Russia, because the declarative space is congested and ideologically supervised, Strelka had attempted to invert this register, and its position was embedded in the affordances of how the institution was set up rather than its statements.

Even today, I think the deficit in most contemporary cultural institutions is not a deficit of ideas or will but a deficit of form. Strelka’s form was deliberate yet unstable, which is what allowed it to be generative, post-disciplinary, compressed in intervals, and so on. That vocabulary now sounds incredibly banal and common-sensical, but for us it had to evolve under conditions where existing inherited templates or defaults were unavailable. I also think the institution both emerged and folded at the beginning and end of arguably what we may end up calling the last ‘normal’ decade of the twenty-first century; its distinct combination of speculative ambition, peripheral HQ, and private capital that never micromanaged the research agenda created conditions that are probably very difficult to recreate in the current moment.

There’s a version of institutional design that’s about access, legibility, inclusion — making sure everyone can find the door and feels welcome once they’re inside. And then there’s another version that starts from a research question so specific, so strange, that the community forms almost as a side effect of the work itself. Where do you place yourself between these two poles?

I’m not sure hyper-specificity is the opposite of inclusion or legibility — there are many different kinds of legibility. Audiences are always designed, whether the institution admits it or not, and therefore the criteria for inclusion ought to be predicated on the quality of the brief that gets articulated in the first place rather than the perceived or projected identity of who gets to get in. If your institutional design begins and ends at the design of the door — who can enter, on what terms, with what assurances of welcome and so on — then you run the risk of treating the work as something that needs to accommodate that audience first and foremost, no matter what. That may be perfectly fine for some use-cases, but at a personal level I was never that interested or attracted to that version. The institutions I’ve been involved with have always begun from a position, a provocation, or a question precise enough to be uncomfortable, and have let the so-called audience self-assemble around it. Questions precise enough to be falsifiable typically generate a working surface where real insights can actually be made, whereas questions vague enough to be agreed upon by everyone typically generate a kind of kumbaya consensus theatre that goes nowhere.

I think ‘ideas’ are something you should be able to disagree with; if everyone agrees, that’s not an idea as much as a ‘slogan’ for this or that in-group.

What’s interesting in your question however is maybe how to avoid drifting into ‘spectacle’ in either direction, whether the spectacle of inclusion or the spectacle of exclusivity. The spectacle of inclusion runs the risk of collapsing institutions into performative stakeholder theatre, typically deployed to perform consensus around a sort of lazy, foregone conclusion. At best, it produces groupthink or the regurgitation of platitudes dressed as participation, slowly suffocating any creative environment in which someone could risk being wrong in actually interesting ways. At worst, it can produce the most draining form of moralistic virtue signaling and peer policing that masquerades as community work, or the well-known ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ to the benefit of the loudest or most dramatic bullies which I’ve also witnessed first hand. In the other direction, with the spectacle of exclusivity you have this kind of artificial scarcity engineered at every layer through unnecessary frictions, accreditations, VIPs and other tactics that produce a kind of refined apparatus of exclusion mistaking its own gating for substance. I think generally if your primary move is to overwhelm rather than to articulate, it is usually because articulation would expose the absence of a genuine question or purpose. That’s not so different from the spectacle of inclusion: both gravitate towards a curated experience of tribalism over the friction of doing actual work. Kumbaya tribalism on one side, velvet-rope tribalism on the other. Same tribalism, different starter packs, much like that meme from back in the day showing how Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones sell the same supplements with different packaging.

All this to say I’m not interested in either pole, but I am interested in hyper-specificity as a precondition for a more interesting kind of openness. A question precise enough to exclude most people paradoxically produces the most unexpected and generative organic communities — weird rabbit holes producing weird Venn diagrams conjuring weird audiences, where the strangeness of the intersection is what makes the encounter valuable for everyone involved.

Niche audiences are not small audiences; they are non-generic audiences. Their value is not in numbers but in something like a ‘density of fit’, where work can be evaluated by people who actually care about the stakes.

You moved from re:arc — where the brief was essentially philanthropy and climate, very concrete stakes — to a think tank whose central concern is planetary computation and the evolution of intelligence. That’s a significant shift in scale and abstraction. What did you learn about institutions in that move? What breaks, and what transfers?

I don’t see as significant of a shift in the work I’ve been doing across these organisations, but maybe that’s just me. Recently, I spoke elsewhere about how despite their vastly different surface aesthetics — I wasn’t involved in the graphic identity or brand voice of re:arc — for me the through line between Antikythera, Strelka, and the former Practice Lab that we created at re:arc with Olga Tenisheva — with who we also ran the Strelka programs and now collaborate at the Zaha Hadid Foundation in London — has always been incredibly straightforward. The insight there was that the problem with architecture isn’t just what it does, namely its broken incentives structures and the negative externalities of construction. It’s also what it doesn’t do: meaningfully address the institutional inertia that prevents the realisation of alternative architectures in the first place. Like Strelka and Antikythera, the Practice Lab was first and foremost an experiment in institutional design — an attempt to tackle what I consider to be the most critically unaddressed design challenge of our generation: how to create the organisations that we lack, to support the processes that we want, in order to realise the projects that we need moving forward?

In the case of Antikythera, this means creating an epistemic institution that helps navigate technological and cultural shifts which legacy institutions — universities, policy institutes, traditional think tanks — seem structurally unable to navigate at the speed and integration that the moment requires. In the case of the Practice Lab, it meant acknowledging that many viable community-led projects of climate adaptation go unrealised not because they are expensive, because they are difficult to build or because we somehow continue to ‘lack awareness’ they go unrealised because we lack new relevant funding models put in place to help kickstart, commission, and make them real, and those models need to prototyped from an infrastructural perspective with creativity and pragmatism.

And what does that continuity look like on the question of climate? re:arc was explicitly climate-focused. How do you carry that forward?

Honestly I think it’s critical to avoid the slippage of climate change ‘discourse’ into the American culture wars, and their very specific sanctimonious framing which — paradoxically to its own ideological claims — has been one of the most astronomically successful American cultural exports of the last fifteen years precisely in the way of overwriting and flattening every other possible framing, mental model, or vocabulary with its own. This is not because of any theoretical allegiance to either side of that conflict, but because ultimately I don’t think public-facing ‘narratives’ matter as much as most institutions pretend to think that they do. I truly see the climate crisis not as a problem of storytelling but as a problem of Work, literally, in the physical or thermodynamic sense of Force x Direction. If we think of our planetary-scale civilisation in less sentimental terms as a simple, frantically running colossal carbon conveyor belt currently optimised in one direction — from the lithosphere to the atmosphere — then our cumulative efforts should be focused on doubling or tripling the Force of specific well-known actions in a radically different Direction, rather than indulging in the much more comfortable perpetual-motion-machine of ‘staging conversations’ for people wanting to be seen saying things in front of people wanting to be seen hearing things, increasingly blurring the line I think between who’s actually doing a favor to who.

I think our generation doesn’t have the luxury of being naive — or, more likely, pretend to be naive — about this. The only thing worse than not doing anything in the face of the ongoing crisis is falsely creating the impression that something is being done. This is called ‘predatory delay’ in the context of the fossil fuel industry, and there is a real risk if institutions position themselves as having a role to play in the just transition but — whether through equating representation with intervention or using ‘raising awareness’ as an alibi for not doing much else or simply through blatant indifference disguised as opportunistic solidarity — end up performing potemkin activism without any accountable results.

Especially in philanthropy, the ‘motivational TED-talk’ or savior narrative is structurally incoherent: to inspire or save presupposes a rescuer standing outside the scene of danger, and that exterior position is and always has been completely fictional.

I want to ask about failure — not of projects, but of institutional forms. There’s a moment in most design institutions where the methodology becomes the product. Where the studio, the program, the process, starts to reproduce itself rather than produce new thought. How do you recognise that moment, and what do you do when it arrives?

Institutions fail most often because they fail to recognise, anticipate, and design the terms of their own dissolution, a lesson I’ve learned the hard way now twice. There’s a quote by Borges I think: ‘nothing is built on stone; everything is built on sand but we must build as if the sand were stone.’ I love this quote not only because you can sound more profound at parties but because in my opinion it’s very apt at describing institutional design, a practice predicated on building with conviction on foundations you already know are — and ought to be — temporary. The mistake would be to forget either half of the sentence. Forget the sand, and you start seeing your own work as a permanent fact of the world, something almost ‘owed’ to you in perpetuity. This is how institutions become mausoleums or parodies of their former selves. But forget the stone and you never build anything of substance at all, retreating into the safe space of meta-commentary or the fetishisation of process over meaningful outcomes. The challenge is to hold both truths at once.

The default failure mode of any institution is probably to optimize for its own continuity. This tends to happen less by conscious decision than by inertia, as a kind of humming autophagic administrative structure of payrolls and reporting and reputational sunk costs ends up displacing the work it was set up to host in the first place.

I’m not sure how to recognise the moment. Maybe it’s when your imitators become as good or better than you — which, as far as I’m concerned, should also be the success metric. We should think of institutions less as units of reproduction and more as midwifing mechanisms. Or as units reproducing by meiosis rather than mitosis: a recombination through deliberate splitting dissolution rather than identical replication. Mitosis produces more of the same organism: the franchise, the satellite campus, the new program cycle running on the same template under a different banner with a different font. Meiosis, on the other hand, produces something new at the cost of the parent generation, carrying a fragment of its DNA into a different problem space. In this sense, a healthy institution doesn’t try to clone itself; it produces odd gametes in the form of methods and vocabularies and alumni networks that go on to recombine elsewhere — sometimes literally in professional and personal ways as historically all the Strelka weddings can attest — into things that the parent could have never anticipated or authored intentionally.

An institution that reproduces itself by cell division is already in decline; the decline is just happening in slower motion than its short-term success can render visible.

We had perhaps reached that point at Strelka, with several alumni over the last decade successfully starting their own experimental organisations and communities in Berlin, Madrid, Amsterdam, London and others. Arguably, Antikythera itself is a composite offspring of the model we prototyped in Moscow, which made meiotic dissolution easier because to some extent it was already recursive and oriented toward continuous rearrangement rather than discrete identity. Does that mean that Strelka failed? I don’t know.

Design inside a philosophy of technology program is a strange brief. It’s not about making things legible or beautiful or functional in any conventional sense, is it? What does design actually do at Antikythera? What would be lost if it wasn’t there?

It’s refreshing that we haven’t talked about design work at Antikythera until now — if this was the first question you had asked, I might have had a more rehearsed boilerplate answer. I guess as a ‘recovering architect’, my own idiosyncratic, totally unrigorous and non-academic definition of design has more to do with surrendering to the fact that everything around us has been composed — whether consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or via path-dependency — and therefore in principle it could be recomposed otherwise.

So what does design do inside Antikythera’s nebulous institutional format whose deliverables aren’t legibility, beauty or function in any conventional sense? Here I see design less as a service rendered than a mode of research and inquiry — collaborative, curiosity-driven, research-based, and deliberately positioned between disciplines. It doesn’t mean ‘styling’ philosophy but rather deploying a projective and combinatory aptitude for counterfactual imagination. One of Antikythera’s core tenets is that we are currently living through a moment where technology has outpaced the conceptual vocabulary available to make sense of it. Design here is partly what binds technical literacy, editorial judgement, and the willingness to discard or commit to specific frames in the construction of the new kinds of legibility that are needed.

You mentioned different kinds of legibility. What do you mean by that in this context?

There is a distinction I find useful between philosophical and design rhetoric. Generously, a philosopher’s project is to be understood — build arguments, use analogies, go to great lengths to land a concept precisely, otherwise the project has ‘failed’. Designers are more Machiavellian and get to benefit from the ‘terms of misunderstanding’ — even if their audience doesn’t understand a concept, there are ways people can misunderstand things on productive terms, in ways that are actually beneficial to the concept and the designer. Back to Antikythera, yes design ultimately includes the responsibility of making things legible across various platforms, articles, films, public exhibitions, software prototypes and so on. But I don’t think design has the pretense of making any purely technical or philosophical contributions; it operates in the realm of culture but in the literal sense of ‘cultivation’, planting and pulling threads from a shared common soil.

I’m also reminded of something I read ages ago as a student about the nuance between ‘thing-technology’ and ‘idea-technology’. If we interpret technology more broadly as the use of intelligence to change existing conditions, then ideas are no less products of technology than things like ‘computers’ are. However, a broken computer is almost immediately revealed as useless, while a broken idea can persist and travel forever despite its uselessness — in fact it may travel even better, because it’s more sticky, more memetic, more perceptually intuitive. Design at Antikythera is predominantly ‘idea-technology’: the crafting of concepts through briefs, scenarios, diagrams, thought experiments so that concepts can enter collective circulation and be tested and contested instead standing still as axioms on a page in an analytical essay. The ‘thing-technology’ aspect such as Antikythera’s media outcomes also matters, but only insofar as a delivery mechanism for the ideas underneath. Like a sugar-coated pill for a kid to take their medicine.

What about beauty? Is that something design at Antikythera is pursuing or makes room for?

It’s probably equally refreshing that we haven’t talked much about AI either, but when you mention ‘beauty’ I’m reminded of that entire ‘taste’ conversation that peaked in Q1 2026 — the Zoomer version of the Millennial ZIRP decade, tellingly compressed into a single quarter. You know, tech bro Rick Rubin impersonators writing longform essays on X about how ‘taste is the new oil’ or something like that. I have to say I’m suspicious of beauty in the same way that I’m suspicious about taste; it tends to re-entrench the status quo and launder a set of inherited social advantages into a vague possessed faculty for people already in positions of power. ‘Taste becomes whatever tasteful people possess’, nevermind that ‘tasteful people’; happen to be the same emperor-wears-no-clothes people as before, only now their lack of rigor and work ethic is intellectually justified rather than tiptoed around.

I don’t think the role of design has ever been to pursue taste or beauty. Of course, you can’t pretend beauty doesn’t exist or that you can’t see it when it’s there, but for me it’s something closer to a kind of ‘structured cleverness’: a creatively pragmatic procession of unexpected moves between an interesting question and a working answer. That’s the path to real creativity, being extremely pragmatic to the point of being speculative. Not freedom from constraints but the structured layering of original overlapping constraints.

Creativity is not the opposite of structure. If I’ve learned one thing in all my years of practice, it’s that to do something genuinely creative you need ten times more structure, not ten times less.

Lastly, is there a particular rabbit hole you’re in right now — something that’s shaping how you think about what comes next?

It’s a bit of a tangent, but Georges Bataille is having a moment in my group chat lately. I’m reading ‘The accursed share’ for the first time now in my late thirties, and honestly I wish I had read about his idea of a general economy predicated on ‘excess’ instead of scarcity much earlier. I think his philosophical point is that if indeed there is a giant, spherical, thermonuclear furnace in the sky blasting us with something like 100 billion megaton bombs’ worth of solar energy every second — many many orders of magnitude over what any living system could ever possibly metabolise — then this excess or surplus unavoidably will and must be spent, either gloriously through art and rituals or catastrophically through war and violence. I think this changes how to think about ‘waste’ as some kind of individual or societal moral ‘failure’ to be optimised out of existence, and calls for more responsible and perhaps more honest ways of designing for expenditure rather than against it.

I sense that there is a parallel between this obscene abundance of surplus energy that must be squandered, and the supposedly upcoming obscene abundance of surplus ‘cognition’ that AI will unleash upon every level of society in the next decade, with non-human artificial minds likely outnumbering human minds by a factor of a hundred or a thousand to one. A friend of mine recently wrote something about how from the perspective of capital and energy, AI is an incredibly luxurious technology still inaccurately interpreted from the framework of efficiency, and I think he’s onto something. But I don’t think anybody can predict how we’ll end up coping with this new Cambrian explosion and all of the re-enchantments and doomerisms and other humanistic spasms that will result from it. I certainly don’t have any particularly deep insights on this yet, and to be honest I’m only halfway through the book with everything else going on in real time. But will keep you posted.

Hope you enjoyed :)

If you want to learn more about upcoming projects from Giga you can also follow us on Instagram and check our website.

Thanks for reading Giga News Room! Subscribe for free to receive new stories every month.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?