Every day, thousands of students move through Belval and enter the Maison du Savoir, the main academic building of the University of Luxembourg. Outside, the weather shifts constantly: wind, rain, cold mornings, or warm afternoons. Inside, however, the atmosphere feels almost unchanged. The temperature remains stable, the air controlled, and the environment predictable.
This everyday experience became the starting point for the research project “Beyond 23°”, developed within the Master’s in Architecture program at the Uni.lu. The project investigates how interior comfort is produced and how the systems that maintain this comfort shape the architecture of contemporary buildings.
We began by observing, documenting our daily encounters with the building through photographs, drawings, and spatial mapping. The goal was simple: to understand how the interior environment of the Maison du Savoir operates and how it is experienced by the people who use it every day.
An unexpected pattern began to emerge. Many interior spaces within the building appeared strikingly similar. Corridors, study areas, and transitional zones often shared the same atmosphere and spatial cues. The repetition suggested that the interior was not shaped solely by architectural design decisions but by a broader set of systems and conditions working in the background.
To understand this phenomenon more clearly, we introduced a simple framework for reading the building through three layers: visible spaces, interface spaces/elements and hidden spaces. Visible spaces include the architectural elements, and most people immediately recognize them as walls, floors, ceilings, and rooms. Interface elements act as the mediators between users and the building’s environmental systems, guiding movement and subtly shaping behaviour. Hidden spaces, meanwhile, contain the infrastructures that regulate the building’s atmosphere and maintain its stable interior climate.
Seen through this layered perspective, the interior of the Maison du Savoir began to reveal itself differently. The building was no longer simply a collection of rooms and corridors. Instead, it appeared as a complex spatial system in which many elements withdraw from everyday perception while still influencing how the interior behaves.
At the centre of this system is the governance of climate. The building maintains an almost constant temperature of around 23 degrees Celsius, a condition commonly considered comfortable in contemporary indoor environments. Yet this stability does not occur naturally. It is produced through a network of mechanical systems and infrastructural spaces that continually regulate air circulation, temperature, and environmental balance.
Recognizing this led the research to a deeper question: how much of the building’s interior space is actually dedicated to maintaining this stable atmosphere? To answer this, the project mapped and calculated the areas and volumes associated with environmental control and institutional infrastructure. The analysis revealed that the Maison du Savoir contains a total interior area of 47 052 square meters and a total interior volume of 214 875 cubic meters. Within this, approximately 10 450 square meters of area and 47 720 cubic meters of volume are dedicated to spaces that maintain environmental stability and organizational order.
These spaces include mechanical rooms, ventilation shafts, service corridors, technical voids, and other infrastructural elements that rarely appear in architectural discussions, yet occupy significant portions of the building’s interior.
By bringing these hidden allocations into view, our research reveals the presence of two architectures operating simultaneously within the same building. One architecture is visible and familiar: the architecture designed through drawings, plans, and spatial compositions. This is the architecture students encounter in lecture halls, studios, and circulation spaces. Yet alongside exists another architecture produced by technical, environmental, and organizational systems. This second architecture is rarely acknowledged as part of the building’s spatial design, yet it occupies real volume and shapes how the interior must function.
Understanding this dual condition also raises questions about agency within architecture. Traditionally, architects are understood as primary agents shaping buildings. However, the research suggests that many spatial decisions are influenced by other forces: environmental standards, institutional regulations, and technical systems that determine how buildings must operate. In these cases, architectural design adapts to the requirements of climate control and operational infrastructure rather than directing them entirely.
Making these systems visible led to a turning point in our research. Instead of only asking how control works, we began asking a different question: what happens when control itself becomes visible as space?
Through mapping and visual representation, the infrastructural volumes responsible for environmental regulation were translated into readable spatial forms. This allowed them to be understood not simply as technical necessities but as part of the architectural interior itself.
Once these spaces became visible, they opened the possibility of reconsidering how interior space is allocated. Our research does not propose removing or replacing the systems that sustain the building’s environment. Instead, it invites reflection on how spatial priorities are established, and how different forms of interior life might be imagined if these priorities were reconsidered.
To make the scale of these allocations more tangible, the project translated the volume dedicated to control into human terms. Based on the minimum requirement of approximately fifteen square meters per student room, the volume dedicated to environmental control could correspond to space capable of accommodating around 755 students.
This comparison is not presented as a housing proposal. Rather, it functions as a speculative lens through which to understand how large volumes of interior space can be reserved for infrastructural functions while other collective needs remain difficult to address.
The project therefore shifts the discussion from technical performance to spatial priorities. If buildings can allocate substantial interior volumes to maintaining environmental stability, it becomes possible to ask how other forms of collective use-spaces for gathering, living, or community, might also be imagined within similar spatial scales.
Ultimately, the research returns to the everyday journey that inspired it. Each day, students move from an unpredictable outdoor climate into a carefully stabilized interior. What feels natural and comfortable inside the building is, in fact, the result of complex spatial arrangements and infrastructural priorities.
By making these arrangements visible, “Beyond 23°” encourages a broader reflection on the relationship between architecture, technology, and the human experience of space. Comfort, the project suggests, is not simply a condition we inhabit – it is something that buildings actively construct, maintain, and spatially organize around us.