Sky-high cities, megatall skyscrapers, hyperbuilding agglomerations, extruded coastlines, soaring infrastructural corridors, stacked farms—the twenty-first-century world is a radically vertical(ized) one. Yet despite the growing scale, pervasiveness, and complexity of these architectures, the design disciplines still lack a critical-speculative vocabulary capable not only of systematically mapping their environmental dynamics, volumetric urbanisms, and morphological models, but also of probing their capacity to configure more socially just, ecologically sustainable, and technologically progressive urban worlds. The Vertical Architecture & Science Fiction (VA&SF) studio argues that, given its double nature as both a critical and a projective spatial discourse, science fiction is uniquely equipped to cognitively map the towering contours of the contemporary built environment and to envision—and design—alternative horizons for it. The course adopts a methodology in which the boundaries between the analytical and the hypothetical, the real and the imaginary, and the built and the unbuilt are deliberately blurred and (literally) redrawn. Organized into discrete sections, each with its own techniques and representational protocols, and moving across a curated spectrum of sources, sites, and cases—from SF texts and films to utopian VA models—the studio unfolds as a sequence of micro-projects in which assembled materials are critically analyzed, systematically reinterpreted, and imaginatively recoded into a collective catalogue of speculative vertical forms.