This master thesis explores architecture as a critical and affective engagement with complex urban contexts. Focusing on the Palais du Midi in Brussels – a place of multiple histories and cultural transitions – the design studio examines how architectural practice can imagine new civic spaces. This studio approaches the present condition not just as a phase of transition, but as a moment in which time can be paused, reconfigured, and re-imagined, developing proposals that merely sit within a context, but that actively construct and interrogate it.