SHARE Georgia 2026 Forum

Educational architecture must move beyond the design of fixed, single-purpose buildings toward adaptable and resilient environments capable of responding to changing needs and unforeseen challenges.


Key questions
1. Designing the Future School – architectural competitions in the educational field
2. Resilience and Emergency – educational architecture as civic infrastructure
3. Openness vs Safety – safety without barriers
4. Extreme Reuse – extreme reuse as an architectural and educational strategy
5. Existing Infrastructure – the adaptive educational facility
6. Design and Management – the building is not finished


Moderator: Otar Sulaberidze, Architect, ArtStudio (Georgia)


Speakers:


Olga Bolshanina
Senior Partner, Herzog & de Meuron (Switzerland)


Patricia Sturzoiu
Partner, Quadratum Architecture (România)
"How Public Can a School Be?"
A school does not become public simply by opening its gates. Its degree of openness must be negotiated through the needs of the communities it serves—balancing shared use, safety, identity and belonging. Drawing on Labirint, the intervention argues that educational architecture becomes public when it gives form to the right relationship between school and community.


Otar Sulaberidze
Architect, ArtStudio (Georgia)
"Resilience and Emergency – educational architecture as civic infrastructure"
Resilience and Emergency – educational architecture as civic infrastructure


Armand Vokshi
Founder, Avatelier (Albania)
"Memory, Place, and Learning: Reinterpreting Genius Loci in Educational Architecture"
Drawing from the evolving academic discourse in Albania and the wider Balkan region, this intervention explores how architectural education redefines local memory and genius loci. Beyond physical facilities, the discussion centers on the critical debate within the academy: how theoretical inquiry, spatial dialectics, and cultural identity challenge generic globalization and shape a pedagogical space that empowers future architects to translate local realities into visionary built forms.


Artak Knyazyan
Chairman / Founder-Partner / Chief Architect, AGL Group (Armenia)
"Space as an Educational Tool"
Spatial organization in educational architecture plays a key role in shaping how students learn, interact, and experience their environment. The intervention explores how flexible learning spaces, shared areas, circulation, landscape, and connections between different age groups can create a more collaborative, adaptable, and engaging educational environment.

Protection as Architectural Communication


The lecture explores protection beyond physical function, showing how materials, boundaries and opening can become an architectural language of trust, vulnerability, hospitality and communication.


Key questions
The discussion will explore protection as an architectural language: when does enclosure become communication, and when does opening become an act of trust? Key topics include material protection, thresholds, transformable façades, vulnerability, hospitality, and how tectonic decisions can carry emotional and cultural meaning beyond their technical function.


Moderator: Nikoloz Lekveishvili, Co-founder, TIMM Architecture (Georgia)


Speakers:


George Zautashvili
Co-founder, R312 Architects (Georgia)


Gvantsa Nikolaishvili
Expert in Urban Planning (Georgia)


Ellen Kapanadze
Projects Manager, Tbilisi Public Art Fund (Georgia)


Zura Jishkariani
Writer and Artist (Georgia)


Tobias Wallisser
CEO / Founding Partner, Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) (Germany)


Amr Attia
Principal & Managing Partner, PUD Consultants (Egypt)


Viggo Haremst
Partner & Design Director, Henning Larsen (Denmark)
"Making the Iconic Human"
What makes an iconic building meaningful to the people who use it? Viggo can explore how data, context and human behaviour can inform design decisions at every scale — from the experience of moving through a building to its relationship with the city — creating architecture that is not only distinctive, but intuitive, welcoming and connected to everyday life.

AI & Immersive Architecture


The session explores how AI and immersive technologies are transforming architectural design, visualization, collaboration, and the role of the architect in contemporary practice.


Key questions
The discussion will explore how AI and immersive technologies are shaping architectural industry; visualization, decision-making and collaboration. Key questions include: How will these tools reshape the architect’s role? Where is the balance between human creativity and machine-generated solutions? How can architects use new technologies meaningfully without losing the ‘‘grip’’, critical thinking and design quality?


Moderator: Dimitri Chaava, Founding Partner, X Architecture (Georgia)


Speakers:


Denis Lacej
Design Principal, Gerber Architekten (Germany)
"From Computational Architecture to Landscape at Scale"
Using King Salman Park as a case study, the intervention explores how computational and data-driven methods addressed the challenge of documenting a landscape of such immense scale. The approach coordinated the species, type and location of over 19 million plants according to landscape typologies, planting mixes and extensive design criteria developed throughout the project.


Nikoloz Japaridze
Founder, Architects of Invention (Georgia)


Dimitri Chaava
Founding Partner, X Architecture (Georgia)
"AI & Immersive Architecture"
This intervention examines how AI is moving from an experimental design tool into everyday architectural practice, changing the way architects explore ideas, develop projects, communicate and make decisions. It will also consider what remains uniquely human in the design process—critical thinking, intuition, authorship and responsibility—and how architects can use AI without allowing technology to define the architecture itself.


Alireza Taghaboni
Founder & C.E.O, Next Office (Iran)


Tobias Wallisser
CEO / Founding Partner, Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) (Germany)


Will Plowman
Partner, Architect, Foster + Partners (UK)