RMIT Architecture Bachelor Design Studio - Balloting Posters - Semester 2 2015 by John Doyle

RMIT ARCHITECTURE BACHELOR DESIGN STUDIO BALLOTING POSTERS SEM 2 2015

urban sample

bachelor of architecture design studio jane dash and paul dash mon 6.30pm -9.30pm thurs 1.30pm -4.30pm

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Site_Castlemaine Project_Library with workshop, archive + exhibiton spaces, public amenities + landscape infrastructure Unbound introduces students to a site-specific design approach, with a particular focus on the relationship between architecture and landscape. Within this framework building and site are brought together in a set of interacting processes of active exchange across time that propose other more meaningful, durable and sustainable ways of inhabitation than have been the norm. Project_Castlemaine, a peri-urban town in central Victoria, has itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s origins in the gold rush of the 1850â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. The period was relatively short lived as alluvial gold sits across and just below the surface of the ground. The consequence for the landscape and ecology were profound. The entire character of the landscape was radically reconfigured in an exceptionally short period of time: extensive Box-Ironbark forests were felled, the ground was ruptured and the terrain recast, waterways were checked, re-routed, silted up, and drained. Forest Creek is the main watercourse that runs through the remant goldfields into the town. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flows and course have been impacted by the diggings and engineered over time to check the natural flows and mitigate against flooding. The project site is the flood plain and section of creek located on the southern edge of the town. Largely disguised and peripheral to the everyday life of the town, it is a remnant and poignant reminder of the attitide of settlement to the landscape, and the ongoing disconnect that is a consequence. A hybrid constructed and natural landscape it is an urban/landscape intersection of rich promise. Rather than describing the flood event and the landscape prone to inundation as a natural threat to be controlled, and ground from which to withdraw human settlement, the studio asks what it might require to inhabit such a dynamic and shifting landscape. The project asks you, through the design of several interconnected architecture and landscape components, to re-connect the town to the flood plain/creek landscape. The intital design act challenges you to re-imagine the site as a once again dynamic ecological context by inviting the flood event back into the site. This will require you to consider the dynamic context of the site from the vantage point of large, medium and small scales and several spans and cycles of time: to simultaneously consider the local and the ecological, to remember the past and anticipate the future. You will then design a small library, as a companion to the main library in the centre of the town, with ancillary archive, exhibition and workshop spaces, so that it responds simultaneously to both normative dry conditions and an anticipated flood event, or wet, conditions. You are required to attend a two day site intensive on Monday 27 + Tuesday 28 July involving an overnight stay (cost approx $75). The semester is comprised of three interconnected and overlapping projects: Site_Designing a Shifting Landscape (3 weeks): introduction to the conceptual ideas of the studio through the study of art, architectural and landscape projects strategies for mappping and designing the site - 2 day intensive site workshop - site readings. Inhabit_Fluid occupancies (4 weeks): intital design proposal exploring ideas for inhabiting a dynamic flood plain, culminating in a design proposal for a small library with ancillary archive, exhibition, workshop space and in-between landscape spaces that responds to dry and wet conditions and reconnects the town and the landscape. Threshold_the edge between building + landscape (5 weeks): design development of the scheme to a medium level of resolution including exploration and resolution of a key architectural threshold â&#x20AC;&#x201C; additional architecture and landscape architecture precedents.

Teresa Moller, Punte Pite, Zapallar V Region de Valparaiso, Chile, 2005

Preparing the Ground ….site is a collection of scales, programmes, actors, and ecologies that includes past imprints as well as future changes (Andrea Kahn) A minimal intervention to trigger regeneration, the least possible to start the process….the essence of urbanism (Alison + Peter Smithson)

Architectural Agenda: sites are considered to be spaces full of meaning. We endeavour to uncover their thick description imbued with past imprints, histories and narratives made by those who have been there before us, by geological and environmental forces, and from memory and desire. There is no such thing as an empty site. We design the site as our first move – to prepare the ground and the context for our actions. The subsequent marks that we make mediate between architecture and landscape, the body and the environment, between inside and outside, and occur between, in, on, above, and below the skin of the earth. The responses we make become reintegrated into site to become a newfound terrain that will generate new narratives, be weathered by time and the environment and become memories of the future. (Sand Helsel and Richard Black, X Field Exhibition, Melbourne 2013) https://xfieldexhibit.wordpress.com/introduction Issue: “Saving Small Towns from Fading Away…. There are towns like Nyah West all over Australia, once bustling but now dying a slow death. Should they be saved or allowed to disappear?” (The Age, Tuesday 23 December, 2014, p12-13). The studio will explore design strategies for a small rural community: a hands-on-urbanism, to plot a sustainable future; “a regime of care” (Leon van Schaik); small scale actions to facilitate regeneration. Site: Maldon (population 1000 people, 130kms northwest of Melbourne) is a small town situated on Mt Tarrengower – it is a case study location to explore strategies for small town regeneration. The site is on the edge of Maldon’s Historic Reserve and the town’s main street. The Historic Reserve is a terrain vague, of ruined mine sites dating from the gold rush period: a landscape evoking the complexity of Andrea Kahn’s quote (above). It is a place scarred by past mining excavations, contaminated ground, scattered with remnant buildings, fragments of industrial infrastructure and a still functioning mine site. The site is part of a much larger network of nationally significant gold rush heritage sites identified by the State Government as having significant tourism potential. The studio will explore this this potential for a longer term sustainable future for Maldon.. Tools + Techquniques. The studio will introduce you to a range of design strategies and techniques around the theme of site scholarship. This will include: on site and off site operations, careful observation informing action, the section drawing and model making as key design tools, processes of subtraction and addition, displacement, layering, accretion, slippage, designing at strategic scales to address a range of siting relationships. Key case study projects by architects: Carlo Scarpa, Enric Miralles and Sverre Fehn. Project: the design of a hybrid …museum / education space / community infrastructure…building. Your design response will be derived from a careful reading of the town and its landscape as well as the opportunities afforded by the overlay of site based design strategies. The overlay of Preparing the Ground – is a siting strategy to forge common ground between the past, the present and future reading of a location. It is a process that privileges siting as a way of bringing a range of things into relationship over time. This studio challenges you to develop a design response that is derived from a careful reading of the sites full complexity. The semester will be structured into 3 parts Weeks 1-3 introduction into the conceptual concerns of the studio, through on site and off site operations, key texts and case study projects. Weeks 4- 7 develop a design strategy for the hybrid museum / education / community / building that addresses the architectural agenda of the studio. Weeks 8-12 detailed design of a fragment of the building –a threshold between inside and outside

Michelle and Richard Black, RMIT University, Bachelor of Architectural Design, Design Studio, 02 > 2015

Gwyllim Jahn Mondays + Thursdays 2-5pm Building 45C Paramnesia is a design studio interested in formal languages that arise through conflations of digital and physical material, volumetric sculpting and algorithmic design. Key words: algorithmic design, voxel modelling, sculpture, pattern, emergence, complexity, novelty AGENDA With the recent explosion of commonly accessible computational techniques, algorithms and tools, deja vu may be familiar to those casting a discerning eye towards a parametric design proposal, as students struggle to overcome steep learning curves, limited numbers of exemplary case studies, and dogmatic performance criteria. Paramnesia is fundamentally about open ended exploration of digital design tools, free from the constraints of fabrication, performance, cost and critical theory. Instead we will develop methodologies for observing, characterising, judging and curating the outcomes of generative algorithms in order to build an argument for design agency, novelty, wonderment and delight. This will form the basis of esquisses, precedent studies and readings during the first 5 weeks of the studio.

APPROACH In contrast to a parametric process in which outcomes are typically the result of a linear and deterministic sequence of operations, Paramnesia will develop tools (in grasshopper) that are non-linear and exhibit unpredictable effects, forms and organisations. In so doing we must reject the idea of design as a simple process of problem solving, and expose ourselves to the greater challenge of problem discovery. We will articulate, synthesise and analyse the artifacts of our generative tools though 3d-sculpting software (as a means of engaging with design objects in a tactile and top-down fashion) and pattern generation techniques (that draw out implicit qualities in objects and processes without subjective direction from a human designer).

BRIEF / OUTCOMES Paramnesia will ask you to speculate on the design of a small building to a high degree of resolution. This may involve the construction of small physical prototypes and exploration of fabrication processes. The studio will ask you to consider fundamental challenges of designing at material scale, resolving relationships between elements and wholes, considering strategies for expressing envelopes, and pondering structural concerns.

THE LAKES PROJECT CLAIRE SCORPO + NIC AGIUS - MON & THURS 6:30-9:30 8.12.39 Beeac is a town in the Western District of Victoria. The town is located on the shore of the hypersaline Lake Beeac in the Colac Otway Shire local government area, 160 kilometers south of Melbourne. This is the second iteration of a studio that aims to foster a relationship with the local community of Beeac. The interest lies in uncovering the value of site through thorough investigation of local archaeologies. By means of a parallel investigation of local tectonics and site histories we aim to tease out vestigial narratives that give us agency to develop a brief for a short stay residential artist retreat/research post. We spend an entire weekend in Beeac in the first half of the semester where students will immerse themselves in the town and its locals and gather first hand research through measured drawings, site analysis and a guided tours. There is a focus on developing material understanding through rigorous model making exercises and testing broader contextual relationships through considered drawing.

Image: Murray Fredericks

Chris Gilbert

By-product

This studio engages in entrepreneurial architecture. Architecture that investigates industrial, spatial and procedural By-Products to uncover opportunities that can only be materialised through the fundamental skills of the architecture profession. This entrepreneurial approach is used as a means to ďŹ nd opportunities within social structures, urban environments and economics systems that are centred in commercial reality yet can only be realised through creative, architectural questioning of existing norms. It is this creative process of opportunity identiďŹ cation which becomes as important as the designed outcome which spatially realises it.

Jas Johnston

CAMPAIGN

New facility for Mornington Sea Scouts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Mothers Beach Mornington Tutor Peter Brew Monday And Thursday Afternoon RMIT has been approached to develop concepts for new facilities and a clubhouse for the Sea Scouts at Mornington The studio will explore the design and functional requirement for an apt building on a sensitive site for a real client with real needs, A further consideration is the process of realising a project . The Sea Scouts will run a public campaign for an new building concurrently with our studio, and they hope that us running a studio will, and the way we work will contribute to that campaign , We accordingly will look at ways that we might be able to use this as part of our process, ways of engaging directly with the community and ways of making our works public. During the semester we will liaise with the Sea Scouts and other key stakeholders including the neighbouring land users- notably the Mornington yacht club, who may become a co tenant, the Mornington council whose amenities building we might incorporate. The community that use the beach , Parks Victoria who have oversight of the bay etc

What architectural rules should you break?

The Difficult Whole”

Why doesn’t anyone talk about Architecture Anymore? DOES HISTORY MATTER?

Referencing, Sampling, Borrowing Assemblage and, Aggregation and, Association

Architecture by Numbers!

The

HEDGEHOG and the

FOX

“The Fox knows many things, but ut a H Hedgehog edgehog kknows nows oone ne bbig ig tthing” hing”

In their seminal book Collage City Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter drew upon the Greek fable of the Fox and the Hedgehog to try and define 20th century architects’ most basic ethical standpoints. Architects had been compelled to be “hedgehogs” in their supremely self-confident and utopian applications of modernism. Rowe and Koetter proposed a new ethos that would surely favour the “fox”, who is an improviser, resourceful, a pluralist and, of course, highly aware of its territory. This studio will apply this thinking to critically analyse canonical 20th century buildings from their most simple to the most complex elements, to understand their meaning and to collage and aggregate into new buildings. We will endeavour to discover lessons that can be applied to contemporary architectural problems of form, space, ornament and program. To be cunning, just like the Fox.

HELEN DUONG & TIM PYKE MONDAY & THURSDAY EVENINGS

Tutors: Anna Jankovic & Andre Bonnice

Image: the late Einar Thorsteinn in his Finnish studio.

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 5.6, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) This studio is about developing a formal vocabulary. It is a form trade. An understanding of the innate qualities of form are fundamental to the formation of architecture. Starting with the life and work of Einar Thorsteinn this studio will explore various types of form, geometry and mathematical ideas to expand your spatial capabilities. We will explore form both logical and illogical through a series of esquisses looking at, the function of form (in architecture), geometric systems and structures, patterns, found form and translated form. Students will interrogate these types of form to uncover and understand their architectural opportunities. 3GD jQRS G@KE NE RDLDRSDQ VHKK ENBTR NM QDRD@QBG @MC CDUDKNOLDMS DWOKNQHMF CHFHS@K SNNKR @MC OQNBDRRDR QDK@SDC SN ENQL @MC ENQL L@JHMF 3GDX will be composed as a ‘triptych’ of digital craft, history & architectural elements; by way of exploring the fundamental forms that comprise a building. Outcomes will be communicated through drawings and formalised with both physical and digital models. In the second half of semester, students will develop a building design for an assigned brief and site, incorporating the strategies explored earlier in the semester. Monday 6-9 (Room 8.12.38): Workshop of software, tools and techniques. Thursday 6-9 (Room 8.12.38): Review of previous week’s task in pin-up format. Introduction to task/themes. Software covered: Rhino, Grasshopper, 3D Scanning, Meshmixer, 3D Coat, Vray, Photoshop. No previous experience in these programs is required.

RMIT Bachelor of Architecture Design Studio - Semester 2 / 2015

Tutor: Anna Tweeddale

Concrete Manoeuvres Most of all you do it for the concrete, because it is delicate as blood. Extract from ‘Locke’ script (2014)

Image - “Untitled” from photo series “Wiederaneignung / Reappropriations” by Anna Tweeddale & Javier Callejas Sevilla

This studio will ask students to take a deep exploration of concrete - its material properties, working processes, aesthetic and sensorial qualities, manufacturing, logistics, and broader cultural interpretations - as the foundation to construct a design process, develop communications skills, and as the formwork to resolve an architectural project. Workshops and esquisses run within the studio will be used to generate individual design approaches and develop communication skills for engaging with the dynamic processes and outcomes of liquid construction.

Class times: Monday 2 - 5pm Thursday 2 - 5pm Location: Building 45 Studio D

The material, formal, spatial and aesthetic expressions of these processes will be developed through a medium-scale architectural project with a focus on resolution of design concepts across scales. Students will analyse key concrete precedents as well as investigating how the material has permeated our cultural psyche.

Anna Tweeddale is an architect, urbanist, and artist. She has a Master of Architecture and Urban Culture from the Metropolis Postgraduate Program (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and CCCB Barcelona). Anna is actively involved in research and writing on architecture, cities and urban culture. She has taught architectural design at RMIT, Monash and Melbourne University and has been an invited critic at schools in Australia, Canada, Germany and Spain.

Anna is director of architecture and urbanism practice Studio Apparatus www.studioapparatus.com

INFRASTRUCTURES This studio will investigate the role of infrastructure in architecture.

At a basic level, infrastructure refers to the ‘physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.’ In architecture, the term is commonly associated with large scale civil works, systems that exceed the scale of architecture and serve a primarily utilitarian role in enabling flows of people, vehicles, energy, capital etc. The discipline usually engages with infrastructure either as a thing to be integrated and absorbed into architectural and urban assemblages, or as a by-product that fetishes the beauty of the un-authored object. This studio will look beyond these understandings and begin to explore how architecture can play an ‘infrastructural’ role through the organistion of built form. Architectural form will be interrogated, both as a physical outcome that structures and enables patterns of occupation and inhabitation, and as a device that enables the production of further iterations of architectural form itself. The studio will engage with design infrastructures – virtual structures that enable the production of architectural design – looking specifically at computer aided generative techniques, such as scripting, algorithmic processes, and associative modelling. In particular, the studio will engage with the idea of architectural design as an ‘open source’ enterprise, in which the means and methods of production, as well as the built outcomes are considered as drafts – open for editing and able to be exploited for further use. The ultimate aim of this studio is for students to develop a series of tactics for developing new architectural ‘types’ through speculation on architectural form, the skills to work in the medium, and the ability to judge architectural form in a propositional manner. John Doyle | Evenings | No skills required, but a familarity with Rhino + Grasshopper + Python will be an advantage

Due to ever increasing imports and no definitive short term solution associated with relocating the Melbourne Docks infrastructure, truck routes are still very much a part of the inner west suburban condition. The petrol station and truck stop form an important place of rest, gathering and pausing. The building typology is considered an appendage to the road network. A utilitarian structure, one that is instantly recognisable. There is a rich culture and community associated with â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;truckingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. How does this translate into architecture for an industry operating in transit? Students will be engaged in understanding the nuances associated with the prescribed program and will be reviewing through architecture the combining of varying programs to arrive at a new typology. Students will be engaged with model making, rigorous site, program and precedent analysis reviewing the role of the civic gesture verses that of the canopy archetype synonymous with petrol station design. Sections, sections, sections.

Bachelor of Architecture Design Studio S2 2015 Monday 6.00PM-9.00PM Thursday 2.30PM-5.30PM

PAUSING

Urban Environment â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Medium Scale Amy Muir

VOID FORMATIONS tutor: Peter Charles

Void Formations will look at digitally scripted emergent urban form, that focusses not on objects but fields of voids as organizational armatures, which combine a range of void scales, topologies and performances for new speculative but critical engagement with both the city’s complex accretive programmatic economic nature, and recursive spatial morphological nature. SITE & BRIEF The studio will look at the conflict inherent in the transition of Fisherman’s Bend from a logistics and manufacturing precinct with existing grain, connectivity and viability and its potential value to the speculative property market, and its larger role as a growth stimulator. These voids need to take on new civic roles within the private realm. VOID TOOLKITS Students will be provided with scripting strategies and techniques using Python within Grasshopper in order to build up this repertoire of void to solid relations and proximities that accrete in unexpected larger urban behaviours. No experience in scripting is necessary. Students will develop Void toolkits from key precedents by developing their own individual frameworks for curating and categorising their qualitative characteristics in combination with topological/geometric and performative criteria such that they can be projected in a variety of combinations onto specified strategic blocks within Fishermans Bend. Coupled with these void tactics, students will map local industrial ecologies and latent ground conditions layered within Rhino to map spatial and non-spatial data providing performative trajectories for alternate speculative figure ground configuration.

image: Model of Free University Berlin by Candilis-Josic-Woods-Schiedhelm from “Mat Building Exhibition” source: http://www.abalosllopis.com/research-on-mat-building/

original term by Alison Smithson

This studio will be revisiting Lyons’ 1997 un-built proposal for the design for an RMIT sports and recreation centre on A’Beckett Street, Melbourne. In its new form, we conceive this to be a combined initiative between the City of Melbourne and RMIT to provide both RMIT students as well as the general public with sports and leisure amenities, currently not well serviced in this area. This will include a variety of sports and recreational facilities including basketball and netball courts along with athletic facilities and swimming pool. RMIT’s city campus has undergone a major redevelopment in the past two decades with many significant buildings adding to our rich urbanenvironment such as Edmond & Corrigan’s Building 8, Peter’s Elliot’s many urban and building contributions (including the proposed site for this studio), ARM’s Storey Hall, and more recently, Lyons SAB and Sean Godsell’s Design Hub buildings. This new sports and recreation centre will be an important addition to this suite. The mega sports building type is prevalent within our suburbs, usually sprawling itself horizontally, but not so common within our denser urban areas. How can the large horizontal suburban sports building type be adapted to suit a tight city site? The studio objectives are: • Analyse and respond to the complexities of the brief. • Research and develop a critical architectural response to the sports centre as a type. • Research and respond to the cultural and historical context of the city and RMIT campus. • Research and respond to the civic and social conditions of this city site. • Research and respond to public space in a multistorey building. • Research and explore the rich history of sports in Australia how this might inform an architectural proposition. • An investigation on materiality and façade treatment. • An investigation on sectional and circulation approaches to designing a multi-storey building. • An investigation of sustainable design & passive systems of thermal comfort for multi-storey design. • An investigation of the formal possibilities for a multi-storey building. The studio will be structured around the production of bi-weekly esquisses that will be carried out by students both collaboratively and individually. This model replicates the work environment of a medium to large practice to teach students key skills about working.

Tower of Muscles A’Beckett Street Multi-Storey Sports and Recreation Centre A Large Scale studio by Stasinos Mantzis Classes will be held Monday & Thursday evenings 6pm - 9pm