ULCE 001
urban livabilty collective exhibition
design for the everyday
Catalogue Design: Saskia Schut & MIllie Cattlin Proof reading: Naomi Barun Exhibition Yarra Sculpture Gallery 01/10/08-21/10/08 Curator: Sue Anne Ware Production: Saskia Schut & Helen Walter & Millie Cattlin We would like to acknowledge the following for their support RMIT School of Architecture and Design Urban Livability program program directors: Sue Anne Ware & Nigel Bertram Special thanks to all studio leaders and students for their amazing contributions copyright of all images and articles is held by the individual authors
Urban Liveability Collective Exhibition 001 Design for the Everyday Sue Anne Ware Cultural Geographer, J.B. Jackson’s ability to see the effort ordinary people put into shaping their worlds continues to challenge designers of the built environment to think outside the conventions of design disciplines. Jackson writes that every day life is an inexhaustible resource for character, dignity, competence, emotion, meaning, knowledge, and new functional and aesthetic forms.1 The first collective exhibition for the Urban Liveability Program explores and celebrates the design of and with ordinary spaces, places, and objects in which we live out our lives. We see our work places, our homes, our play spaces, our transportation and more importantly our values, and our assumptions anew through the work in these design studios. Many of these projects challenge an unwillingness to draw inspiration from the pervasiveness of popular culture, vernacular, and ordinary lifescapes. This design work allows us to see our built environments through a new lens, a lens less enamoured with a designed, utopian ideal and an unattainable outcome and more accepting of the real place or thing in all its nitty-gritty-ness, Arthur C. Danto, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, contends that beauty “may not have a descriptive value, but may be encoded in one’s relationship to the world, and may be a function of what one’s beliefs about an object (space / place) are.”2 This first exhibition hopes to elicit a plurality of ways that we might re-think our values in terms of the design everyday objects, sites, and materials; as they hold significant powers as well as are a reminder of human experience and frailty. The students involved in these works are to be commended on the plastic transfiguration of the world as it appears. In some examples they transfigure the familiar into the de-familiar. In others it is the ordinary into the strange or the simple into the difficult and the clear into the ambiguous. In the most inspired it is the conventional into the inventional. In all instances they consider and define what it is to design in and through notions of urban liveability. 1. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1984) p. xii. 2. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1981) p.95.
Shared Space Hobart Nigel Bertram Augustine Savage & James Jamieson Kylie Freeman Marcello Donati Ground Moves Gretchen Wilkins Allison Claney Ilani Hana Masturah Nor Aziah Hassan Flower Tower Sand Helsel DayneTrower Tarryn Boden Millie Cattlin Green Green Mr Sheen Michael Howard Emma Lue Allan Sarah Borg Sascha Martin 37 North Sue Anne Ware Adrian Marshall Nick Rose Nicolette McNamara Newport + Mosque Jane Shepherd Emily Dodds Rowan McLachlan Kevin Lee & Neara Tang Co-Housing Louis Sauer Mark Hocking & Alex Hore Nik Elani Nik Aminaldin & Vanni Meozz Simon Wright & Adrian Banuelos Derive Naomi Barun Ching Fung Hui Jamie McHutchison Louise Chiodo Event Melanie Dodd Carolyn Wong & Renato Liucci Dillon Lim & Ricky Lau Grace Hung & Sasha Hadjimouratis Melissa Thong & Vanessa Gugliotti Live House Vehicle Mick Douglas Matt Browne & Jason Wylie & Steve Auchetti Austin Thomas & Kay Kei Fung &Yuk Fai Tsui
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1. through tower bridge 2. bridge to garden path 3. garden path/claw 4. small foor bridge 5. tasports 6. terminal 7. access to terminal 8. middle bit 9. pedestrian overpass 10. train station 11. platform 12. platform walk 13. publuc/private intersection 14. tower 15. submerging path
Augustine Savage & James Jamieson
Shared Space Hobart Nigel Bertram RMIT Architecture Upper Pool Design Studio Semester 01, 2008 Tutor: Nigel Bertram Sponsoring partner: Sullivans Cove Waterfront Authority, Hobart Exhibited Students: Augustine Savage & James Jamieson Kylie Freeman Marcello Donati
Hobart’s Sullivans Cove and the remarkable urban topography of its hinterland have been the subject of numerous urban and architectural studies over decades by architects, academics and students. As such, there is a considerable body of sophisticated local knowledge and urban analysis which lies behind the Cove’s current strategic planning guidelines and Urban Design Framework. At the present time, there is strong private sector and governmental interest in developing key sites in the Cove to capitalise on its accrued role as the natural gathering point, entertainment and social melting pot of Hobart. It is the primary public domain of the city. This is fairly standard fare for contemporary waterfront city precincts – to focus on providing spaces for entertainment, festivals, tourist attractions and visitor accommodation while also boosting local residential capacity with the aim to create a 24-hour mixed use precinct. What is particular to Hobart’s situation, however, is that this development has not yet substantially occurred. At the same time as being the city’s premier entertainment destination, the physical environment of the Cove maintains a strong sense of its industrial origins – wide flat concrete apron spaces scaled to the operation of gantry cranes, micro-infrastructure for refuelling and servicing fishing vessels spread throughout the public realm, long low storage shed buildings occupying 100m stretches of central waterfront surrounded by vacant apron space on all sides as required for loading and unloading cargo. This ‘paused’ and provisional state of the immediate waterfront area is one of Hobart’s greatest assets. Here we can find a true, if accidental, co-existence of diverse yet functioning urban activities and sub-cultural groups (port workers/ industrial vehicles/ up-market diners/ tourist campervans/ drunken youths/ ceremonial space/ vacant space). The broad expanse of flat concrete apron, referred to locally and in the UDF as the ‘cove floor’, has been protected from development at least in part by the steady trickle of revenue its operators receive from open air carparking, so easily accommodated on its surface, and so conveniently located adjacent to the central business district of the city. The official planning strategy for the apron/ floor is that it is to remain a ‘shared space’: shared between working port and public realm, shared between vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles, shared between locals and visitors, shared between temporary and permanent/ large and small scale activities. This unusually flexible strategic planning policy – taken as a conceptual framework as much as a literal one – was the starting point for the studio investigations. The notion of shared space on the floor is from the beginning a physical one, inseparable from the flatness and smoothness of this surface in contrast to the dramatic topography of Hobart as a city. Its breadth and scale allow large gatherings, its need to remain flexible for ship berthing and unloading promotes temporary and provisional occupations. The form and use-properties of this urban precinct are not able to be determined by urban design notions such as proportion, functional zoning, civic scale or concepts of beauty – but rather have been set up by the straightforward operational parameters of previous industrial activity and equipment1. That it now also plays a crucial social, commercial and symbolic role in the city demands that we find non-traditional urban strategies to engage with and actively share this strong space – without suffocating its raw and democratic openness. 002
1. As pointed out by Leigh Wolley
Hobart Line of Communication
Kylie Freeman
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Augustine Savage & James Jamieson
MONTAGE SHOWING TEMPORARY MARKET STALLS IN HIP DOCKING CONDITION VIEW FROM PRINCES WHARF 2 LOOKING AT PRINCES WHARF SHED NO.1
MONTAGE SHOWING TEMPORARY MARKET STALL IN UNDAY MARKET CONDITION
MONTAGE SHOWING TELESCOPIC MODULE DURING SUNDAY MARKET CONDITION IEW FROM PRINCES WHARF SHED NO.1 WEST ENTRANCE LOOKING EAST.
Kylie Freeman sensor activated lights reveal axis in the water
SUNDAY MARKET CONDITION
PLAN
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WEEKDAY CONDITION
SHIP DOCKING CONDITION
Augustine Savage & James Jamieson
PLAN
PLAN
Marcello Donati
Allison Claney
Ground Moves Gretchen Wilkins RMIT Architecture Upper Pool Design Studio Semester 01, 2008 Tutor: Gretchen Wilkins Exhibited Students: Allison Claney Ilani Hana Masturah Nor Aziah Hassan
“Much of the landscape surface left in the wake of rapid horizontal urbanization is not a clearly defined, stable, and fixed entity. It is between occupancies and use, successional phases and (dis)investment cycles. The term in-between describes a state of liminality, something that lives in transition and eludes classification, something that resists new stability and reincorporation. The in-between landscapes of the horizontal city are luminal because they remain at the margins, awaiting a societal desire to inscribe them with value and status.”1 HERE The Ground Moves studio studied architectural propositions for edge sites within the industrial area of Port Melbourne. This section of the city, unlike the dense, vertical and tightly organised Central Business District, is loose, thin, and horizontal. Rather than being defined by landmarks, roads and cultural precincts this area is identified through industrial logistics, systems of exchange and information flow. It has no strong visual identity or recogni sable imagery, and is not dense with buildings or people. Rather density here is defined through rates of exchange, patterns of production and streams of movement. Even without the requisite characteristics “the city,” the industrial territory of Port Melbourne is urban. Indeed, in the polycentric Melbourne metropolitan area, this area is the logistical centre, managing the flow of nearly all goods and materials necessary for the livelihood of the city but doesn’t have room for. For example, every day this region, and the nearby Port of Melbourne handles 700 motor vehicles, 550 tonnes of tea and coffee, 750 tonnes of wood and timber, 1300 tonnes of chemicals, 2200 tonnes of fruit, vegetables and nuts, 2400 tonnes of dairy products, 5100 tonnes of cereals, and 10,800 tonnes of petroleum, alongside many other raw materials and manufactured goods.2 Passenger ferries, cruise ships, and visiting naval ships also dock here. It’s urbanism without the city. How one occupies this “city,” or operates within it, cannot follow the same organisational logic as conventional urbanism. Architecture here suggests a new set of practices – practices that recalibrate organisational logics and readjust how and where value is assigned. It’s not so much about the objects as the spaces between them and the systems which connect them. It’s not about density of buildings and images but the density of exchange and interaction. The focus is not on architecture but on the moments at which architecture intersects with other disciplines, such as landscape, industry or ecology. and THERE The Ground Moves studio considered architecture which responds to the unique urbanism characterised by our site(s) in Port Melbourne. This form of urbanism skims across the horizontal surface of the ground, organising infrastructures and enabling activities. It relies on elasticity, adjustability, slack, and multiplicity. It is programmatically resilient and formally mutable. It is populated with infrastructural dross, retail outposts, industrial machinery, distribution hubs, and residual, unclassified landscapes. It is off limits, restricted, under surveillance, and unclassified. It is neither the city nor the suburbs, it operates between consumption and production, it’s distributed here and there. If the city isn’t where we think it is, as the Ground Moves studio proposed, where is it? Has it dematerialised into information networks? Has it been absorbed by landscape? Is it scattered throughout highway space? To be sure. But architecture is not reduced or replaced by this resilient, unformed urbanism. It is positioned newly and squarely within it. WORK The first phase of work in the studio explored “slack” spaces within the industrial area of Port Melbourne. Slack spaces were defined as the underused, transitional or isolated areas between the interestingly diverse range of existing programs in this area, including: automobile manufacturing, a memorial park, international customs processing, an elevated highway, low and medium density housing, health and swimming facilities, go kart racing, aeronautical research and manufacturing, fishing, a rifle range, athletic fields, a marina, railway lines, a floating petrol station, a printing and packaging plant, 7 kilometres of waterfront, and cycling tracks. A short, team-structured research project early in the semester generated 6 project themes for the studio: Infrastructure, Production, Reclamation, Mobility, Leisure, and Event. Collectively these themes focus on the space and program of the ground, positioning architecture as a mediator between, for example, industry and ecology, land and water, production and consumption, or property and populace. Within the shared theme or site each project brief was determined individually. 1. Drosscape, Alan Berger 2. Port of Melbourne Corporation
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Ilani Hana Masturah
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Nor Aziah Hassan
Allison Claney
1980
Ilani Hana Masturah bridge
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2008
2030
Nor Aziah Hassan
Allison Claney
Flower Tower Sand Helsel RMIT Architecture Lower Pool Design Studio Semester 02, 2006 Tutor: Sand Helsel & Melissa Bright Exhibited Students: DayneTrower Tarryn Boden Millie Cattlin
The studio often sets projects that have no existing architectural typologies, or are set in industrial and agricultural environments where architects traditionally do not operate. We find this territory liberating and allows (or requires) our students to invent and appropriate from other disciplines. We privilege systems and operation over the object. The wholesale market is a distribution centre: a logistics operation where larger quantities of goods (flowers from the fields) interface with smaller retail outlets (and the vase on your table): from large trucks to vans and cars via forklifts and trolleys. The studio is about contrasts, from the tough (trucks) to the delicate (flowers); between heavy (earthworks) and lightweight (structures); between the mobile and fixed; from large (warehouses) to small (flowers); and from full (on market days) to empty. We encourage the poetic as well as the pragmatic. We have established design strategies over a suite of studios that enable first, second and third year students to engage in large scale and urban design projects, and that make the process less daunting. The studio works at three scales (small, medium, and large) through a range of (at least three) types of media and representation. (This conforms to our thesis that the architectural project exists ‘somewhere’ between 1:1 and the map of the world, so that we do not preclude the sites and scale of intervention). We focus on design processes through to detail design in three linked projects: Small: at the scale of the flower, container and stall; and at the scale of the truck, van, forklift, and trolley. We require the detailed and material design of a set of component parts and connections. This scale focuses on conceptual development, representation, and the development of a tectonic and material language. (There is a site visit to Kuoomen Flower Farm.) Large: at the scale of logistics and infrastructure, the movement of goods: parking lots, slip roads and loading bays. The exercise focuses on site planning and diagramming; the modelling of earthworks and urban landscape – sculpting the ground. This scale investigates the larger issues, sources relevant data, and is represented through diagramming and modelling. (There is a site visit to IPEC: Toll Logistics.) Medium: at the scale of the market building and ancillary programs: the mediation of the small and large scale designs. The existing programmatic requirements of the flower market are doubled; ancillary programs are added that respond to individual student interpretations of the issues arising. Density strategies include stacking, bending, extruding, multiplying, folding, compressing – flower towers, perhaps. (There is a site visit to Melbourne Wholesale Markets.)
‘Flower Tower’ is an issue-based studio that requires students to take a position – on social and environmental issues – and to speculate on the future shape of our cities. The brief was inspired by a local newspaper item and a report on ABC Stateline: stallholders angered by the proposed relocation of the wholesale fish, flower, and fruit and vegetable markets. The poster mounted on the accompanying image of a forklift read “WE ARE NOT MOVING”. We phrase our brief (similarly) as a polemic, or battle cry, to provoke response. We respond to the plans to move the Melbourne Wholesale Flower Market from its central location in Footscray to the suburban fringes of Epping. “WE PROPOSE THAT IT STAYS”. We believe that these ‘large’ programs should continue to exist within the city and not be continually pushed to the periphery for a number of reasons - social, political, economic, and environmental. There is a need to maintain jobs and a cultural mix, and to preserve public (or state) ownership. There are environmental imperatives to save on fuel and road use; logistics considers the most economic and efficient distribution of goods and services. We seek to arrest urban sprawl and the move to the periphery; and to maintain the ‘big’ things that allow the city to function, and are a key component of the urban landscape. We consider issues of density (or the lack thereof) and propose new typologies for industry in addition to the existing residential models. We plan to meet the demand for expansion space from both the port and the wholesale markets by doubling the density on the site. We maintain the existing footprint of the site and reinvent the shed and the parking lot.
It is interesting to note how the students found their individual trajectories at varying phases of this process. Tarryn Boden (illustrated) found a design language and method through the unfolding and unpacking of a flower stall in the ‘small’ stage of her project. She was able to develop this over the subsequent scales of investigation with a program and site strategy that unfolded and unpacked over a 24-hour cycle. Dayne Trower (also illustrated) found a resonance between a folded flower container and the complex infrastructure on the site – trains, highway, and access roads – which encouraged him to take on the port expansion along with the market densification at the ‘large’ scale. Jock Gilbert’s fastidious research and data enabled him to redesign the market operation into a more effective auction system that cut out the wholesalers completely (and the requirements of the brief!); and Bo David Chu rigourously took on logistics (as a first year student) and incorporated the operations of IPEC in addition to the market requirements. (There were no dumb sheds set in an expanse of tarmac to be found.) One can question the validity of such a design studio. How often (if ever) would one be called upon to design such a building? Probably never, but through the process of designing the studio we necessarily become more conscious of the skilling agendas that we set (in the context of an architectural school): a critical approach to and use of representation, site analysis and design strategies, research and data techniques, and the ability to negotiate a series of scales to a material resolution. Furthermore we believe that there are conceptual agendas that require us to shift from the object-nature of our traditional activities as architects. The complexity of urban and environmental issues that we face today necessitates that we cross disciplinary boundaries into landscape architecture, urban design, engineering, and in this case, logistics. Our studios attempt to preclude the fact that the answer is a building (as in Jock Gilbert’s case) in the hope that we might be able to pose better questions, such as how, why, and at what scale we operate.
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resting stop
night marke
cafe unit
table unit
display unit
night market attachment
Lift entry
Entry
Bikes
Forklift / Pallet s
City bound traffic
Proposed port storage site
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Parking and lift
SECTION E
Lift entry
Market entry
Bikes
Forklift / Pallet s
City bound traffic
Proposed port storage site
Market
Proposed port freight train Line Bikes
SECTION D
Lift entry
Entry
Proposed port storage site
Parking
City bound traffic
Bikes
Cafe an
et
flower market
footscray road connection diagram
Tarryn Boden
Lift entry
Lift entry
Bus pick up
road
flower market
carpark
subsidiary program
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West bound traffic
storage
Existing Port storage site
Lift entry
storage
nd toilets
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Lift entry
Market
West bound traffic
Existing Port storage site
Lift entry
Entry
West bound traffic
Existing Port storage site
Millie Cattlin
DayneTrower
Sarah Borg
Green Green Mr Sheen Michael Howard RMIT Landscape Architecture Vertical Design Studio Semester 01, 2008 Tutor: Michael Howard Exhibited Students: Emma Lue Allan Sarah Borg Sascha Martin
A continual interest in landscape as way of ‘decorating’ space whether it is public or otherwise, has lead to new ways of providing ‘green’ in our cities. The installation of green on vertical landscape spaces, on vertical planes, has occurred through a combination of both intended and nonintended landscapes. The success of the non-intended landscapes has relied on the geographic location of the space and imbedded climatic conditions occurring as a result of its location. The further ephemeral success of these particular landscapes varies according to exact spatial conditions or microclimates. In places with high humidity, ambient temperatures, and excessive rainfalls the frequency of occurrence and success of non-intended landscapes is high. They are also often more successful when the plant material reproduces in a highly mobile manner, that is when the dispersal of seed is highly successful. These landscapes have then been mimicked in a constructed manner to explore such occurrences. The replication of the intended and non-intended vertical occurring landscapes, such as Patrick Blanc favoured waterfall vegetation type, contributes to the ambition of purposefully replication of the green wall or the vertical landscape. In recent years there has been a great deal of development in the area of ‘green walls’ or ‘vertical landscapes.’ For instance Patrick Blanc, a Frenchman, has mastered the technology and constructed a large number of projects across a range of international sites which have all flourished and set a bench mark for design and installation success. Success of his projects in a longevity sense is the key. His vertical landscapes are green, lush, compositional, internal and external, part of buildings and facades to buildings, and installations in retail shops. The research studio ‘green green mr sheen’ investigated a shift from the current thinking of ‘green walls’ or ‘vertical landscapes’ such as Patrick Blanc’s, towards a more spatial outcome in similar circumstances. The studio project involved developing a landscape that is epiphytic on the site provided, while still operating in a similar genre to what we now know as the ‘green wall’. The studio involved designing structures with plants and understanding the relationships that the landscapes could begin to offer within an epiphytic ecosystem. The studio looked at international and local projects and research around ‘green walls’ or ‘vertical landscapes.’ Further more the studio sought to approach the landscape types through ecological ephemerality. Ecological ephemerality provided an additional edge to the approach by setting up new relationships with the landscape aesthetic whereby the climatic condition reflected on the condition of the landscape. In times of high rainfall the landscape could flourish. In times of no rain the landscape would shift into forced dormancy or potentially death allowing for the next cycle of regeneration and a change in the landscape to occur. The current designed green walls or vertical landscapes avoid this. The studio furthered its own brief in a number of ways through the range of vegetation types or materials explored which included moulds, fungi, food crops, and lichens. Students explored increasing the number of plants through methods of dispersal and the manner in which the green installations allowed engagement, whereby users were invited to engage in the relocation of the plant material. Finally through manipulation of light refraction, playing on the direction plants naturally would like to grow; students could explore means of transforming the shape and form of the structure of the plant and the space it filled. The studio will continue through the construction of a vertical landscape as part of an inner city art exhibition. Turf, the great Australian landscape, will be shifted in axis and access, subjected to ephemerality and manipulated through growth polarity in an attempt to experiment with the meaning of landscape.
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mould colonisation
Sarah Borg
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Sascha Martin
Emma Lue Allan
mexican US border
37 North Sue Anne Ware RMIT Landscape Architecture Vertical Design Studio Semester 02, 2007 Tutors: Sue Anne Ware Bridget Keane Cassandra Lucas Exhibited Students: Adrian Marshall Nick Rose Nicolette McNamara
In 1994 President Bill Clinton began a new border strategy, strangely enough it corresponded with The North American Free Trade Agreement, (NAFTA), which supposedly sought to remove barriers between the US, Mexico, and Canada. Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, Operation Safeguard in Arizona, and Operation Gatekeeper in the San Diego area seek to effectively, physically block any possibility of immigrants crossing into the US in urban areas.1 The U.S. Border Patrol’s blockade of the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Operation Hold the Line, was extended 10 miles west along the border into southern New Mexico, in 1999. The extension of the blockade increased it to 30 miles long and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents currently are stationed every quarter mile along the El Paso, Texas - Ciudad Juarez border.2 All in all it is estimated that between five and seven thousand migra, (Immigration Agents) patrol this particular part of the border at any one time. (These include: the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the National Guard (introduced recently in June 2006), and law enforcement officers from both nations in both state and federal capacities.)3 A University of Houston study estimated that over 10,000 people have died crossing the border from 1993- 2002. According to records kept by the Mexican Consulate in Houston, 1,020 border crossers have died in Texas and New Mexico since Hold the Line began.4 These recent efforts by the US government which include large scale physical barricades in urbanised areas, increased funding for border patrol agencies, as well as the posting of significant numbers of National Guard troops to the border region, have made illegal crossing of undocumented workers a life-threatening endeavour. Various non-profit agencies and dedicated individual land holders have placed water containers to try and mitigate suffering and reduce the number of deaths of those crossing illegally. In July 2007 RMIT Landscape Architecture students spent ten days travelling in the border region. Working with Humane Borders, a non-profit agency, they volunteered to refill water containers and
dismantle makeshift camp sites. Essentially, erasing the evidence and traces of undocumented workers so that authorities could not trace their routes. In their design speculations they utilised an intimate understanding of the harsh desert conditions to design the most suitable points for placing water, shelter, and navigation markers in the border area of El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. The studio work highlighted in this exhibition and catalogue explores the possibilities and specificities of site and landscape occupations. Each student learned how to read the desert landscape and think through how and where undocumented workers cross the border in this harsh environment. Much of the design work is precisely located in washes or slight swales, mirroring the way water flows across this desert plane. All of the students were struck by the pieces and fragments of the border crossers lives left behind in the desert camp sites. Seeing and collecting the discarded personal items made these migrants real, and even more human… the students glimpse into the journeys that the undocumented workers make. More specifically, Adrian Marshall’s work examines providing temporary and permanent shelters with access to water. His materials are simple and robust, gabions which fill with discarded items left behind on the journey and sandbags. They are both cleverly sited within the desert crossing zones but can shift with changes in routes. They utilise solar orientation and slightly dug-in shelters to protect their inhabitants from the extreme temperatures. Similarly, Nick Rose’s propositions also provide temporary and permanent shelter with water collecting sites. Nick cross programs cattle and sheep ranching operations and the provision of water for stock which graze on the site with opportunities for migrant workers to find shelter and water. His constructions are of the same ilk that we see on desert pastures, with modifications to allow other types of inhabitations. Simple concrete drainage channels, watering troughs, and flatbed-trailers are converted into sites for temporary appropriation during the migrant workers’ journey. Nicky McNamara utilises a slightly different tact; she employs desert plant materials and the action of self seeding to mark passageways and water sites. She suggests that desert landscape ecologies be manipulated to become wayfinding devices and subtle markers for those seeking shelter. Her gestures are slight and restrained but effective. Water for this community is essential to survival. Whilst not a conventional community those that attempt to cross the border are a community through a shared experience and desperation. Their exchange is silent unlike most community interaction and seen only in the discarded and remnant tracks that serve to guide those to come. Whilst seemingly barren, the characteristics of the desert provide them with the only form of security and protection from the authorities. With that also comes the harsh climatic conditions coupled with the distance that needs to be travelled resulting in a journey that is determined on a basic element. For many communities water is a central focus for gathering and entertainment, for this community it symbolises an opportunity. As a common element amongst the desperate identities that traverse this border water through it very nature and properties also becomes their greatest vulnerability. Beyond grappling with temporary or ephemeral landscape gestures, the work presented here engages in a kind of design activism. The design work proposes physical catalysts for social change. Harrison Fraker writes ‘Design Activism is problem seeking, it is proactive, it chooses an issue (or set of issues) and explores it (or them) from a critical, sometimes ideological perspective. It uses design to recognise latent potential and make it visible. It explores ‘absences’ in everyday life and gives them a ‘presence.’ It reveals new ways of seeing the world and challenges existing paradigms.’5 The life-worlds of those affected by these tragedies and the everyday context of this realm are significant settings for these attempts to bring about change. The resolve of the work to comment on issues within contemporary society is vital to its effectiveness. However, the work also speculates beyond comment or concerns into challenging ideas about international borders and their static nature. Landscape is vital in this sense in that it is both emergent and a complex political entity. This studio work offers ideas about democracy and humanity that embodies certain types of social, environmental, and cultural responsibilities. 1. US Customs and Border Protection Website, http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/border_security/border_ patrol/overview.xml, accessed 10 June 2006. 2. Jose Palafox , http://mediafilter.org/CAQ/CAQ56border.html, ‘Militarizing the Border’, Covert Action Quarterly, Accessed 11 June 2006. 3. US Customs and Border Protection Website, http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/border_security/border_ patrol/overview.xml, accessed 10 June 2006. 4. K Eschbach, JM Hagan, NP Rodríguez, R Hernández-León, and S Bailey, ‘Death at the border.’ Interna tional Migration Review, 1999 vol 33, no2, 430-440. 5. Harrison Fraker, ‘Message from the Dean, The College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley’, Frameworks, issue 1, Spring 2005, CED, Berkeley, CA, 3.
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water stations
survival kit
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water station mappings
Nick Rose
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gabion
Nicolette McNamara
Adrian Marshall
Rowan McLachlan
Newport + Mosque Jane Shepherd RMIT Landscape Architecture Vertical Design Studio Semester 01, 2006 + Semester 02, 2006 Tutor: Jane Shepherd & Jonathan Carter Exhibited Students: Emily Dodds Rowan McLachlan Kevin Lee & Neara Tang
“I am not racist but . . .” An array of choices commonly follows this preface: too many cars; the disturbance of car headlights at night; anti-social prayer hours; inappropriate selection of site. NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) reasons predominated in the long list of objections to the proposed new mosque. The very stuff of Landscape Architecture; site selection and planning, car parking, circulation, and landscape amenity, skillfully deployed against a group of people simply wanting to build a place for prayer, community, and future generations. RMIT Landscape Architecture accepted an invitation from the Islamic Society of Newport (ISN) to undertake a design studio project for students to prepare landscape concepts for the Society’s proposed new mosque in Newport. The ISN invites universities to work on this project as they perceive education to be an important part of cultural exchange between Muslim and non Muslim Australians. The Islamic Society of Newport’s current mosque is a converted old hall ill-suited for its purpose. Supported by the local government – Hobson’s Bay City Council, the Society, in an exhaustive and convoluted process found it necessary to consider 30 sites before finally being able to settle for a piece of unbuilt public land zoned for educational use and in excess of the needs of the adjoining school. The back half (including a connecting driveway) of this two hectare land parcel is to be sold to the Society with the front to be rezoned as public park. The first of the three studio projects; Mosque ran in semester 1, 2006, followed by New Park, semester 2, 2006, and The Paisley Interface, semester 1, 2008. By the autumn of 2006 the appointed architects, Glen Murcutt and Hakan Elevli had prepared an initial concept plan in response to the brief. This brief required a building design with a distinct Australian identity set within grounds that are clearly “Australian in its flora and design.”1 The selection of
architects intentionally, combined an architect internationally renowned for production of buildings with iconic ‘Australianness’ with a Melbourne Muslim architect keen to explore a non–traditional expression for a new mosque. The brief acknowledged the difficult contemporary cultural context: We see ourselves as Australian Muslims living in an Australia committed to multiculturalism and acceptance of difference. We feel that a large contributor to the current cultural divide is simply ignorance that is not particularly the fault of anyone. Muslims have a history and culture of hospitality. However the clear and marked cultural differences from the Australian norm means that there is often a fear of difference and the unknown by non-Muslims so they do not generally inquire or seek knowledge about Muslims. And the post September 11 environment has meant a heightened sense of suspicion between Muslim and non-Muslim. We seek to in some local and practical way to help bridge that divide. The initial Mosque studio brief required students to design the landscape architecture for the mosque grounds. However it quickly transpired that the substantive portion of site would be occupied by buildings and the majority of the students choose to ‘leap the fence’ and proposed designs for the adjoining new park. Rowan Mclachlan was one of the students who remained inside the mosque grounds. In his project Rowan responded to the cultural specific needs of women and men for gender separated contemplative landscape spaces for use preceding prayer. The project was driven by a self conscious feminist agenda to redress the inequity in the quality of outdoor spaces proposed for women in the concept plan2. The poetic potential for material and spatial realisation of his project was explored through a series of charcoal hand drawings. In comparison, a deep unease pervades the new park design by Emily Dobbs. Through her project Emily contemplates the veracity of encoding the design with an ‘Australian identity’. For the ISN this became an issue of inter-generational contention where many of the older members where deeply perturbed when presented with a concept for a mosque that did not look like a mosque3. In Emily’s proposition a grassland rises from the Blenheim Street proposed park frontage along two-thirds of the length of site to abruptly terminate with a perilous cliff-like retaining wall. Behind this wall and in front of the proposed mosque is a contemplative garden including palm trees, intentionally symbolising that issues of race relations cannot be erased simply by shifting to a planting palette of banksias, casuarinas and eucalypts. The third project selected for this exhibition is from the New Park studio. In the Mosque studio the extensive community consultation was focused on different groups within the ISN. For New Park the consultation was with stakeholders adjoining the proposed New Park. Neara Tang and Kevin Lee’s proposition is one of a number of projects that express this change of emphasis. The new park is perceived as having the capacity to provide for multiple community events that might through time and circumstance help to break down the ‘Muslim/non-Muslim’ divide. Neara and Kevin’s project is formulated through elaborate event programming across the annual calendar to encourage diverse user groups into the park. In the final studio in the series: The Paisley Interface the majority of student projects placed an emphasis on programming and facilities, optimistically hoping that a variety of shared and separated activities might enhance inter-religious and inter-racial tolerance. The developed design for the mosque was on public display for the land rezoning and planning application approval process until mid April 2008. Council received 240 objections. The formal consultation processes are completed and the ISN is currently waiting to hear the outcome of the ministerial panel who determines land rezoning applications. On the surface it appears we live in calmer times than during the escalating racism encouraged by the media and through fearbased politics promoted by the federal government after September 11, 2001. Unfortunately though, in mid August 2008, residents in the neighbourhood received anti-mosque racist propaganda through a letterbox-drop. Despite these circumstances that consistently fall short of our mythical rhetoric of ‘the land of a fair go’4 the Islamic Society of Newport steadfastly works towards turning their dream of a new mosque into a reality. Education through involvement of non-Muslims in their project will continue to play a central role in their vision for the future. Speaking personally, the enduring memory of this project will be of working with a group of people for whom faith, hope and hospitality remains undaunted. 1. Islamic Society of Newport, 2006, ‘Design Brief for Newport Mosque and Education Centre’. 2. These concerns have since been addressed in the further development of the design. 3. After lengthy negotiations the building remains the same but in a concession to accommodate members with a preference for a traditional mosque the side flanking wall enclosing the courtyard to the eastern front of the mosque will now rises to terminate with the Islamic crescent symbol. 4. Davis, Mark, 2008. The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
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Emily Dodds
Kevin Lee & Neria Tang
Nik Elani Nik Aminaldin & Vanni Meozz
Co-Housing Louis Sauer RMIT Architecture Lower Pool Design Studio Semester 01, 2008 Tutor: Louis Sauer & Hans Tilstra Exhibited Students: Mark Hocking & Alex Hore Nik Elani Nik Aminaldin & Vanni Meozz Simon Wright & Adrian Banuelos During the fall of 2007, the RMIT Cohousing Forum and a RMIT undergraduate architectural design studio collaborated to produce a range of spatial alternatives to help define (or re-define) the characteristics of cohousing. Also, it was hoped to demonstrate that physical examples of housing design alternatives might increase the participants’ interest and involvement in developing a specific Cohousing site. The key issues addressed were: privacy and shared places, aesthetics, affordability, sustainability and management. Although there was broad agreement that cohousing could offer advantages over the normal marketplace, there evolved strong differences about the size and character of the private homes, what communal activities and services would be useful and how these would be paid for in both the initial purchase as well as their day-to-day management. A most interesting finding was that the brief of some participants essentially resulted in a re-interpretation of cohousing development to provide them a physical form to isolate them from the surrounding neighbourhood. The Cohousing Forum facilitator selected three sites and provided individuals who participated as clients for the students. Participant households met with a student team in their homes and the students redesigned the home to the participant’s desire. The student cohousing site designs were reviewed at three Forum meetings: at the beginning, the mid-point and at the semester’s completion. At these reviews the participants discussed their thoughts and gave the students direction for the kind of houses, community building and for the overall site. During the first Forum meeting, the participant and student dialogue produced a range of issues and concerns. This provided guidance for the students’ spatial design but they also served as a framework to focus the participant’s discussions. Interestingly at the Forum reviews, a few outspoken individuals most often commanded attention and overwhelmed differing thoughts. As a result, it was difficult to ascertain whether the verbal decisions were representative of all Forum participants. The decisions were organized around the participants for each specific site. The three selected sites are in the Melbourne metropolitan area: Preston, Belgrave and Hastings. Each site had unique physical, programmatic and participant characteristics. The participants for all sites wanted a community building with at least a kitchen and dinning room to accommodate all residents at a sitting plus some guests. They desired additional rooms for a separate children’s play, a small office, toilets, a combined workroom, tool storage and resident lockable storage and a building-site maintenance room. All participants want at least two motel-like rooms for hire in each site’s community building. Preston’s site is vacant, flat with no trees and is in an established single-family-detached housing neighbourhood characterized by
California bungalow house types. A public bus stop is on its main street. The designs acceptable to the Preston participants accommodated 22 terrace houses lining three of the site’s streets. Parking is to be combined in lot separate from the houses. Each two-story house should have minimal private yards. The participants want a single community open space with all houses facing it. Visitors are to access all of the residents’ houses from the community building and not from the adjoining streets, which the houses face. The Belgrave site is full with mature trees, very narrow, long, and steeply sloped, The owner of the site occupies a single family detached house on the site and is actively promoting the site’s use for cohousing. Council will restrict the site’s development to add an additional 10 houses. The participants want the houses to be one and two stories high with each to have direct car access, parking and private yards. The houses should be as isolated from one another as possible. The large and flat Hastings site is on the outskirts of the town and adjacent to a caravan park and two-story established single-family detached houses of various conventional developer/builder styles. Unlike the other two sites, there were no participants for the Hastings site who were interested in living there. Its participants represented various Mornington Peninsula Shire’s council staff and one person advocating senior housing. Thus, the senior housing use for this site came from council and not from any future users. In spite of four distinct designs prepared for the Forum’s review, no articulate brief was established. A striking feature was the Preston participants desire not to have any front doors facing public streets in order to separate themselves from visits from unknown people. They did not want their mail to be delivered to their front doors. They stated they did not want anyone knocking on their front door. Although they did not state it directly, this strongly suggests a desire to avoid participation with their neighbours. It is clear that for this group of participants, cohousing is perceived as a way to separate themselves from people different from themselves. In a similar vein, the Belgrave participants wanted to live in the site’s heavily landscaped environment but not see others, or be seen by others, living on the site. Although not spoken, one got the sense that they felt any oversight would intrude upon their appreciation of nature. Thus, with the Belgrave as with the Preston participants, for them to obtain a sense of physical isolation appears to be a dominant value for the development of cohousing. Although the participants for the Preston and Belgrave sites’ were very interested in the possibility to live in their selected cohousing site, no statements of positive shared community values were enunciated. This was a very surprising result because the normal understanding of what distinguishes cohousing from the conventional marketplace housing is that the people who desire to live in cohousing typically hold a common vision for social, political and/or spiritual values. It is interesting that the shared values binding a group of cohousing participants together should seek to the negate neighbouring and isolate themselves. Cohousing in this context takes on an essentially antisocial bias and the buildings become a kind of a fortress. Could it be that the typical suburban house plan, where the areas for active family socialization is designed to take place in the back of the house and in the back yard, is a very basic part of our contemporary culture? In past times, the street was the place for the celebration of community life and the house acted as a transition, and not a barrier, between public and private life. Could cohousing here in Melbourne be transforming its traditional value of engaging and sharing together to a defensive idea of protection from any others? Regardless of this unexpected interpretation of the co-housing idea, it is clear that the use of architectural design is an excellent device to obtain dialogue and to uncover the characteristics that people would like to have for their housing.
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Simon Wright & Adrian Banuelos
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3 bedrrom dwelling
Mark Hocking & Alex Hore
Nik Elani Nik Aminaldin & Vanni Meozz
Louise Chiodo
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that is largely ethnic. The culture is about socio-organic processes and evidence of cultural evolution and an ‘unconventional’ demographic… so...
Naomi Barun
How can we come to know and be intimate with space? and how critical is this intimacy in structuring a future vision of such a place?
RMIT Landscape Architecture Vertical Design Studio Semester 01, 2008 Tutor: Naomi Barun
The Dérive studio was positioned within a backdrop of psychogeography, situationalists and strategic policy. Students were given the opportunity to explore and develop skills of how to understand a place and make design decisions whilst being there. Like the flaneur who had a dual relationship with those around him and his environment that allowed him to morph his position between observer and contributor the students were asked to consider the broader strategic context of the area through an intimacy that potentially only they would have experienced.
Exhibited Students: Ching Fung Hui Jamie Ian McHutchison Louise Jane Chiodo
Guy Debord, French philosopher and Situationist, introduced and used the concept of the dérive to make people revisit the way they looked at a space. He encouraged people to break their daily routine where their perceived knowledge of a space is based on repetition, going through the motions. These dérives were about being aware and following an emotive response to space which would ultimately enable a deeper understanding. The idea was based on the preposition that most of our cities were so thoroughly unpleasant that the emotional impact that design had on people was ignored, or there was an attempt to control people through design. The basic premise of this theory and this studio was for people to explore their environments without preconceptions and understand their personal responses in order to appreciate the impact that design has on people and communities in general. Whilst this concept largely relates to the everyday users of space, it was considered in this studio context that in order for a strategic direction to be prescribed for a place this understanding of preconceptions and how to potentially shift them may well be a critical knowledge in order to create meaningful spaces. The meaning or quality of a space is perhaps the most elusive and ubiquitous commodity in the urban environment. A space that can be understood as a combination of the conceived (abstract) and perceived (concrete) landscape of a place. The material landscape is actively compared with the experiences of everyday life. Therefore does there need to be mediation between the planned and lived?
“to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It was very much a matter of using an environment for one’s own ends, seeking not only the marvellous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world.”1 Dr. Sadie Plant Smith Street is a central thoroughfare, a conduit and a catalyst for social change. That is, people, classes and demographies move through it and out to other places. This is the key to understanding the inherent tensions in and around Smith Street, particularly its location in the centre of what has always been a set of rarely harmonious, always changing, contested spaces. The structure planning process for Smith Street a designated Major Activity Centre began early 2008.2 A structure plan focuses on land use, built form, transport and open space. These structure plans have little ability to evaluate the existing or future quality of a place. It’s only inferred or implied through volume of green space (assumed benefit), transport connection (function), heritage (perceived architectural value) and height (volumetric reasoning) all which are determined in a space far from the actual. There is no evaluation of those spaces in between which have ‘contributory’ or ‘non contributory’ qualities let alone a human perspective focus or real cultural values, whatever that may be. This studio attempted to breach the distance between the ‘office’ and the ‘site’ in order to understand the relevance of cultural and social specificity of this area and the impacts that may have on strategic planning. It is obvious that the quality of Smith Street is not its architectural heritage but its personality, its degenerate nature, the type of café and bars, even the type of bakeries and supermarkets, not its quality in terms of its finish but its distinction. Its soul doesn’t come from the heritage buildings it come from the cultural makeup which is only partly defined by the indigenous community, in fact a community
Jamie McHutchison explored the possibilities of a single module that could, through the everyday practices of the street, act as the catalyst for design which would form spaces, relationships, and attempt to remove the static-ness of the plan by transferring the ‘power’ to the street and its dwellers. Often we perceive maps as static sources of 2-dimensional information, defining a space through a street name or boundaries of a building, zone of governing power. In fact, our understanding of spaces is largely shaped by fleeting events. We read the street through indicators such as conversations we hear, flyers and graffiti that catches our eyes or smells that waft along the street. Why then is our strategic direction for place undertaken in a space removed from the place with limited connection to the place, its story and its people? Louise Chiodo challenged the orientation of the structure plan, working in a vertical space and testing the ideas proposed by the plan in conjunction with her own observation and experience of the street. This project spatially challenged the broad brush ‘strategic visions’ that are commonly accepted practice in a fashion that privileged the pedestrian and their experience of the street whilst paying homage to the Situationists through a series of parodies located along the street. Ching Fung Hui took a less resistant way to the current structure planning process in that he still applied a very generic broad scale infrastructure that allowed for the glitches and cultural twists that was a constant attractor to the street. His strategic approach built in the ability to manipulate public space locally through use and appropriation through a series of light screen poles as the base infrastructure and whilst quite formalistic in layout through public interaction spatial composition could be manipulated by the user. This project in a sense tried to breach the gap of ‘the planned’ and ‘the lived’ by allowing the public to contribute to the production of space through what Michel de Certeau calls ‘the secondary process of utilisation.’3 1. Plant, S. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationists International in a Post Modern Age. Taylor & Francis, 1992. p59 2. Melbourne 2030 3. de Certeau, M, S. Rendell. The Practice of Everyday, University of California Press, 2002, pxiii
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Ching Fung Hui
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Louise Chiodo
Jamie Ian McHutchison
Grace Hung & Sasha Hadjimouratis
Carolyn Wong & Renato Liucci
Melissa Thong & Vanessa Gugliotti
Dillon Lim & Ricky Lau
Event! Melanie Dodd RMIT Architecture Upper Pool Design Studio Semester 01, 2008 Tutor: Melanie Dodd Exhibited Students: Carolyn Wong & Renato Liucci Dillon Lim & Ricky Lau Grace Hung & Sasha Hadjimouratis Melissa Thong & Vanessa Gugliotti The Event studio at RMIT is one of a consecutive series of studios in the architecture program which has an explicit social agenda, as well as real context and client frameworks: utilising ‘live’ projects, in other words. The studio worked as a collective to curate a public event in May 2008 that involved the design and construction of small interactive installations on a social housing estate in outer Melbourne. The West Park estate was designated a Neighbourhood Renewal area in 2007, a state government social policy initiative which attempts to tackle persistent social and economic disadvantage through a wholeof-government response ranging from education, employment, housing, environment and community capacity building. The event was scheduled as a community engagement exercise to contribute to a strategic design framework for improvements to public space on the estate. We sought to engage with the temporal qualities of social space and event, considering temporary and interactive insertions for a community as a way of articulating and revealing the relationships between the lived and the built, as a device for building relationships with local residents, and as provocative propositional devices in their own right. Engaging in real lives (social infrastructures) involves uncovering the invisible aspects of a site - a sort of non-physical site survey and bringing this often marginalised and ordinary realm to bear on proposal, however absurd, frivolous or transitory the outcomes might be. It is about noticing the minutiae of social situations, and valuing equally slight adjustments to that situation. It is about engaging in the everyday structures of habit and routine, and understanding them as profound stabilities for social life, both ordinary and extra-ordinary in equal measure. Our studio method stands in contrast to methodologies of other urban strategists, who move from the general to the particular. We tend to develop from the particular to the generic and back to the particular: an interrogation of the up close and personal in social space. In an attempt to do this creatively we utilise methodologies of contemporary socially engaged art practice, which is characterised by the desire to record minutely what is while remaining unworried by what should be. The ambition of the studio constructions was to avoid a pathological focus upon problems and solutions within community contexts, but rather to reveal latent meanings within social and cultural landscapes, and expose them provocatively for public airing and argument. Public space can be seen as the place where ‘public life’ is enacted. In broad terms, the studio questioned how and why the quality and design of public space has a correlation with the quality and processes of active citizenship. Because of the strong relationship between public space and public life, architects, urban designers and also government planning and social policy agencies believe that improvements to the built environment may reap wider social rewards. These ambitions by government link closely with wider cultural trends observed by social commentators1, which reveal what can be seen as a dissolution of ‘community’ in the capitalist West. They are also integrally linked to the current understandings of ‘sustainable communities’ and the need to have resilient and robust social networks capable of responding positively to change and growth.2 Recent social policy in the UK and Australia focuses on social
capital building and community strengthening initiatives which have a ‘place-based’ spatial policy utilising ‘place-management’ principles. But conventional design methods often focus on generic assumptions about the use of public space. Urban design theory and methodology, at least the type adopted by government departments and large-scale planning practitioners maintains a critical distance from the ‘ground’ conditions of everyday life and occupation. This distance – a gap - represents an inability on the part of political institutions to descend to the level of reality and absorb, understand or even speculate on what relevance this social and cultural specificity might have for larger scale strategic planning. Equally there is little interest in how we, as designers, can involve the user in the design process, beyond undertaking the most basic and un-ambitious type of consultation process (forums and focus groups). Yet, in terms of the future for sustainable communities, there is an ever greater acknowledgement of the need for, and benefits of ‘personal action’ in society; for decentralised systems of production and consumption; and for an emphasis on the ‘local’, albeit a networked local. A blinkered focus on problem-solving, the valorisation of expertise and the distancing of expertise from community means we can lose sight of how to embed expertise within communities in order to explore and define the communities own requirements and priorities. A useful theoretical reference to this dilemma or gap is also defined by Michel de Certeau, In ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’. His thesis of tactics and strategies postulates that strategies are the tools of the dominant elite, in contrast to which, tactics work in the shadow of strategies and are ‘an art of the weak’3, which form mute but powerful processes utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments. With this social, political and cultural context as our background, the studio asked : how can architectural practice include, support and surface the user? How can we (as architects) support active citizenship, social action and micro-democracy through the process of design? During the semester we investigated tactical design devices which explored ways of engaging people; experimented with the idea of the playful, the temporary, the ephemeral in architecture; exposed the invisible and underlying uses of space; and developed participatory community engagement methods that utilised interactive techniques. This included making a website - a Digital Map - entitled What do you do and where do you do it? which presented geo-placed digital stories that were made by local school children. Final installations were constructed in the RMIT Workshops and transported to site for the one day event, which attracted a wide range of local children whom the students had built relationships with over the course of their research. Outcomes included a visual report of the day, including consultation and community responses, which contributed to an urban design brief for the estate. How did we answer our own research questions? Defining the value of undertaking live projects in design studio, means understanding the complex reciprocity of ‘give and take’ that characterises this mode of teaching practice. The slippery conditions of operating in a real community confound any conventional definitions of expertise in terms of the professional (architect) versus the amateur (citizen). Is the expert the architectural student, the lecturer, the local council, or the child aged five, who has lived in a place all their lives? Roles metamorphosize precisely because of the rich diversity and lack of conventional hierarchy that is enabled by this model of design action. Who values most from the project; the student, the community, the council, the child aged five? All of these players take their turn as expert-citizens/citizen-experts, alternately giving and receiving skills and knowledge. The student’s studio work argues in favour of this messy ambiguity as a key to innovatory practice in community engaged design, well suited to addressing contemporary dilemmas in the making of the public realm. The undertaking of public space projects through the live project model of design studio teaching, questions and subverts conventional hierarchies of control and placation inherent in public consultation and design process. Levels of expertise are relative, or in free-fall. Here, architectural students become creative enablers. The facilitation of this dialogical model - an expansion of the role of the architect - can be directly attributable to the live project model and its ambiguous structures of so-called ‘expertise’. 1. For example Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man 1974, and The Culture of New Capitalism (2006), Robert Puttnam in Bowling Alone (2000) 2. Refer to the RMIT Global Cities Research Institute Key Research Theme: Community Sustainability and Social Infrastructure ‘What is the impact of social change on communities? Our research works from the ground up and is motivated by the pressing need to understand how local communities are cur rently negotiating the challenges and opportunities of globalization.’ 3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
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Austin Thomas & Kay Kei Fung &Yuk Fai Tsui
Matt Browne & Jason Wylie & Steve Auchetti
Live House Vehicles Mick Douglas RMIT Industrial Design Upper Pool Design Studio Semester 01, 2008 Tutor: Mick Douglas & Jason Parmington & Andy McKlusky Project partners: City of Melbourne & Office of Housing & 3CR Radio Exhibited Students: Austin Thomas & Kay Kei Fung &Yuk Fai Tsui Matt Browne & Jason Wylie & Steve Auchetti
Increased global migration and rising urban population are significant contemporary forces of mobility shaping a city like Melbourne, where new migrants are amongst the highest proportion of residents in state provided housing. Add to this situation shifting economic structures that are establishing public-private partnerships to deliver many once-considered responsibilities of the state, including low-cost housing, as well as social policy debates negotiating differences between models of multiculturalism and the integration of cultural groupings into the mainstream. As part of the Carlton Housing Estate redevelopment being initiated by the Victorian Government’s Office of Housing as a public-private partnership project, long-term and newly-arrived residents and migrants at the Estate are being relocated; some new and existing public housing residents will ultimately be housed in the redeveloped estate, along with a proportion of residents in privately-owned housing on the estate. There are many ‘stakeholders’ in this contemporary condition, and many global and local forces reshaping individual and collective lives. The Live House Vehicles studio aimed to contribute to the formation of a collaborative practice-based arts research project on the Estate that seeks to enable stakeholders to take an enlivened engagement in this contemporary condition. This larger LIVE HOUSE research project is departing from two premises. Firstly, an intention to operate in a ‘live’ sense: enabling, amplifying, and enriching capacities of expression in the existing practices of living and working through the case study issues of redevelopment; and secondly, to ‘house’ a physical, conceptual and experiential engagement in questions of ‘house’, ‘home’, ‘to house’, ‘housing’, ‘belonging’, ‘residence’ and ‘tenancy’. Within this context, the Live House Vehicles studio was focused on exploring land-based designed things between the categories of smallscale buildings and transportation vehicles: that is the strange creative world of mobile homes, transportable buildings, theatre-set designs, nomadic lightweight shelters, disaster relief shelters, caravans, music travelling shows, trade exhibition stands, tents, temporary improvised ‘slum’ dwellings, customised buses trucks and vans, purpose modified shipping containers, TV media camera and transmission vehicles, vendor carts… and more. The learning experience of students was structured around making a collection of working prototypes of mobile performance vehicles to be developed and tested with estate stakeholders and users. Each vehicle was developed to perform one role that could contribute to a collective capacity to enable social gathering in flexible, mobile ways. The Sorghum Sisters is a social enterprise of African women of the Estate making food from the Carlton Primary school for children and commercial catering jobs. The Food Vehicle sought to provide a capacity for the women to offer food on a mobile basis for events. With strong social rituals around Ethiopian coffee and a rising appreciation for it amongst Estate residents, the Coffee Vehicle intended to provide a micro-environment that could further enhance the social appeal of temporary gathering around coffee, and extend the capacity of those women serving it who currently transport their equipment in generic shopping-centre trolleys. With communication amongst stakeholders a fundamental necessary condition in the redevelopment context, and with Radio 3CR as a partner in the larger project, a Communications Vehicle was developed that could enable flexible audio and visual functions varying from local area ‘narrow-cast’ broadcasting, sound-mixing desk and live video interaction. Performing artists are amongst the Estate residents, so a Performance Vehicle sought to provide an informal and variable way to focus attention within a social setting based upon the circumstantial needs of event and performance expectations. Other Vehicles included an Information Vehicle for visual interactive exhibition purposes, and a Play Vehicle to entice the interaction of children but also drawing in the engagement of people from multiple age and language groups to simply be together without dependency upon verbal understanding. Students experienced much anxiety through the course, half of which was conducted on the Estate. Yet the experience of making the vehicles actually work and employing them in a culminating event on the Estate alongside residents prompted students to express appreciation for a tangible community-oriented studio where their worldviews came into question. The Sorghum Sisters cheekily express desire to run away to work the festival circuit; resident performers claim to have been inspired; 3CR radio want to put the Vehicle into regular service, and the Coffee Vehicle simply attracts. The studio managed to focus and reveal potential for participative creation action on the estate at a time of uncertain change. From these beginnings new relationships and trust have been able to be built amongst stakeholders and a larger arts project on the Estate is emerging.
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