Joshua Guiness is an architect and strategist based between Zürich and Berlin. His practice develops protocols: synthetic instruments for composing space across legal, ecological and material registers.

Working from inside the rules that hold a place or an institution together – such as property lines, zoning categories, statutes and administrative routines – his projects follow these rules to their edges, where they begin to permit other forms of ownership, use and organisation. Each project moves from close observation to proposition: field research and photographs, a rule-set or charter, and panoramic montages and texts that show the world that would follow. The result may be a building or a plan, and as often a charter, a governance model or a public scenario.

He works for cities, institutions and cultural organisations facing questions of land, governance and long-term change.

Joshua is co-lead of Architecture Land Initiative, a cooperative working across architecture, ecology and land policy, and a lecturer at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zürich, where his teaching explores experimental design and architectural worldbuilding. He holds a Master’s in Architecture from ETH Zürich and a postgraduate degree from the New Centre for Research and Practice. In 2026 he was a fellow of Organismo: Art in Applied Critical Ecologies at TBA21, Madrid.

His writing has appeared in trans, Scroope, Situation and Lila Strauss. Protocols of Another Berlin, a book of interviews and scenario fictions on the city’s contested edges, is forthcoming with Distanz.