SEMESTER 2 | 2022
BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN DESIGN STUDIO BALLOTING POSTERS
TOWER ECOLOGY PLANTS, ANIMALS, PEOPLE.
CALLUM FRASER, LINDA VALENTIC ARIF MOKHTAR, KEVIN HUYNH & GUEST CRITICS
MONDAYS & THURSDAYS 4PM - 7PM ELENBERG FRASER OFFICE LEVEL 01, 160 QUEEN ST
This semester we will be looking at rewilding the city we live in, Melbourne. We will be exploring the city’s demolished materials and renew their architectural projects within the pristine landscapes of their time for the purpose of establishing a newly imagined location for our towers. The commercial plot ratio of the city 18:1 will form a base commercial program which is to be subsequently renovated with a further 18:1 of additional program to be inclusive of plants, animals and peoples.
Primary architectural skill sets will be developed including structure, cores, enclosures and urban interiors. We will be working through Rhino, Grasshopper and Ladybug to develop familiarity and measure our projects for energy profiling. There will be posters and models. It’s brief - because I’m in another meeting
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Remedy II
Bachelor Design Studio Sem 2 2022
Can Architecture Affect Your (Mental) Health? This is the question posed in this studio, where we will engage in first-person research to understand the impact of the environment around us, to inform the design of a space for community based mental health care. The past two years of disconnection, uncertainty and reliance on the virtual over the physical has had a significant impact on our mental health.
What is the potential of these centres, and how can they be designed to facilitate positive encounters during challenging times? What is an appropriate precedent for this typology? We will look closely at domestic architecture, as opposed to instititutional, as a source for a new hybrid language.
As a result, the 2021 federal budget announced $487 million in funding to establish a national network of adult mental health centres.
This studio will include a weekly prescription of time intensive tasks to accompany the project work. Restrictions will be in place to limit your resources, narrow the focus and drop out from the frantic pace of the online, the immediate, the shallow.
These centres are an attempt to fill the gap of the ‘missing middle’ in mental health care, between primary care and crisis support.
Hand drawing + making exercises will be set to explore ideas of meditative reflection, observation and design expression.
Studio Times: Studio Leaders:
Mondays 3:00pm & Thursdays 6:30pm Claire Scorpo
MALBOLGE In 1998, Ben Olmstead concocted a maledictive programming language known as Malbolge, so named for Dante’s eighth circle of hell. Impenetrable in its complexity, it would be over two years until the first program appeared. That program would output the words “hello, world.” It was not even written by a person - it was developed by a genetic algorithm. Malbolge, the programming language, exposes something inherent about the devious, impish nature of computation. There is a disconnect between what humans understand to be logic and rationality, and what logic and rationality express themselves as in the realm of computation. Computers are not rational, at least not in a way comprehensible to a human being. The Malbolge language, and this studio, drawing their names from the Divine Comedy are not mere accidents. The Divine Comedy comprises a disposition. As much as the Malbolgian language lays bare computation, so too does the Comedia lay bare Florentine society. The studio draws from these two a single thing: torment. Not of the students, of course, but of your technique. If this axiom of rationality is struck, a realm of generative practice that needn’t justify its sophistication emerges. Libraries of digital techniques emerge, ones from outside the discipline begin to intrude.
Works from MOS, LADG, and First Office Architects typify this. Those who utilise simple operations of hard body physics, soft body physics, and a variety of other chance-based techniques that are already present in the library of digital techniques that exist inside and exterior to the architectural discipline. This studio is concerned with composition, so the program and typology of your built outcome are deprioritised. Compositions that favour play and happenstance are to be celebrated in this studio.
We hope this doesn't seem too far out or too extra disciplinary for most of you. We promise that the end game is a micro campus of very architectural ideas. Delivering a specific artefact of architecture. It will be an exploration of practice at either end of the discipline, from the highly generative, to the top-down. We both enjoy both these positions, and situate ourselves between them. In doing so, this studio may form a gentle critique of both ways of working. You will learn to situate yourself within a realm of digital practice in which you may feel like an interdictor. You will learn to critique your work as entries in a cultural milieu. Students will be taught Blender physics simulations and its internal sculpting tools - no prior knowledge is required, just a willingness to explore and experiment with these tools. Students will be provided with in class tutorials, template files and scripts to work with during the semester.
MALBOLGE WILL TAKE PLACE ON Mondays and Thursdays 6pm-9pm
MALBOLGE WILL BE LED BY Andre Bonnice | andre.bonnice@rmit.edu.au Bryn Murrell | bryn.murrell@rmit.edu.au
"BE NONE OF YOU OUTRAGEOUS: ERE YOUR TIME Dare seize me, come forth from amongst you one, Who having heard my words, decide he then If he shall tear these limbs."
Bachelor of Architectural Design Studio
SEMESTER 2, 2022
RADICAL ESTATE
Radical Estate studio will intervene in the static condition of collective housing in Victoria, and seek to disrupt and densify existing types that have failed to transform over time. The studio will focus on the many different states of housing that we, as architects, typically encounter in practice. The studio is organised through two principal means—design research/analysis and an architectural proposal—and will operate as a laboratory in which to explore new possibilities for urban living in Melbourne. Everything starts at home. What does it mean to live collectively today? What do we need for our comfort, health and happiness? How do we consider the thresholds between the home, shared space and public space? Students will design and develop a multi-residential building and its associated spaces that consider how we can live collectively, with equity and diversity in mind. As living requires a variety of spaces, of varying sizes and functions, the studio will investigate hybridity and overlap, compression and expansion, through an assemblage of architectural elements charged with utility, and ornament. Students will therefore need to consider the suitability of their outcomes against the scale of the site, the program, its use and habitation. Students will explore and investigate the parts and elements that constitute domestic life and interrogate the embedded histories in the fabric of the everyday, formed on an accumulation of architectural elements from housing (ie. window, door, balcony, etc). From the banal to the extraordinary, the obsolete and the emerging, the standard or the few things that can claim to be original, perhaps even unique; architecture continues to be in tension between unyielding persistence and constant change. These elements carry qualities established thousands of years ago, while others have undergone recent and radical shifts. This interesting tension between new and old, the contemporary and archaic, is not often recognised, nor celebrated. This studio engages a process of remaking. In this, we will not think of architecture as a static, singular object, or being only ‘of its time’ - but rather one that is accretive and in a constant state of flux. It is an architecture that will be changed, adapted, and re-built over time. Students will make and re-make developing a catalogue of works that are deployed to adapt, and accumulate into their final projects. The studio scale is Medium overall, but will consider urban conditions, alongside investigations into discrete and small scale components. Students will work in groups/pairs for weekly tasks over the first half of semester, to inquire, critically interrogate and amass a collection of work - before individually embarking on their final project.
Anna Jankovic
MON
2:30-5:30
PM
+
THU
2:30-5:30
PM
Anna is a practising Architect (ARBV), Director at Simulaa, and an Associate Lecturer at RMIT Architecture
Robin Hood Gardens, by Alison and Peter completed 1972, demolished 2017-2018.
Smithson,
NE GL E CT E DME L BOURNE
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How canar chi t ect ur ehar nes sandact i v at enegl ect ed ur bans paceswhi l ecr eat i ngawar enes sofhumani nt er v ent i on' si mpactont heur banenv i r onment ? PROJECT T oans wert hi sques t i on,s t udent swi l l des i gnacommuni t y cent r es ur r oundedbyact i v e,v i br ant ,andengagi ngpubl i c s pacesandameni t i es .Howev er ,t hepr oj ect smus ti mpl ementdes i gns t r at egi est hathar nes st hi ss peci f i cnegl ect ed ur bans pacewhi l eaddr es s i ngi t sal mos tf or got t enhi s t or y . Thes t udi opr ov i desanoppor t uni t yt ooper at eont he s out her nedgeofRi chmond,wher et hi sMel bour nei nner s ubur bendswheni tencount er st heYar r aRi v er .Byexpl or i ngdes i gnoppor t uni t i est or eact i v at eandcons ol i dat et hi s ov er l ookedur banar ea,s t udent swi l l beabl et oi mpl ement des i gns t r at egi est or eact i v at eandbet t erconnectt heMcConchi eRes er v e&Ur banWet l andt ot hef abr i coft heci t y
STUDI O LEADER I s abel Las al ai saDi r ect orofLas al a&Las al aDes i gnSt udi o, ani nt er nat i onal ,awar dwi nni ngpr act i cewi t hmor et han t went yy ear sofexper i ence.I s abel hol dsaBachel orofAr chi t ect ur ef r om Uni v er s i dadCent r al deVenez uel a,aMas t erof Ar chi t ect ur ef r om ETSAB/ Uni v er s i t atPol i t ècni cadeCat al uny a,andanMPhi l i nLands capeAr chi t ect ur ef r om t heUni v er s i t yofNew Sout hWal es .Herpr act i cebas edr es ear chi nv es t i gat esnew pos s i bi l i t i esatt hei nt er s ect i onofar chi t ect ur e andl ands capear chi t ect ur e.I n2014,Edi ci onesFAU/ UCV publ i s hedherbookCr eat i ngPl aces :Exal t i ngandOv er comi ngt heAr chi t ect ur al Obj ecti nt heWor kofPabl oLas al a. Bef or es et t l i ngi nAus t r al i a,i n2009,I s abel wasaSeni orLect ur eratt heFacul t yofAr chi t ect ur eandUr bani s m atUCV .I n Aus t r al i a,s hehast aughtdes i gns t udi osatMel bour neUni v er s i t y ,Monas hUni v er s i t y ,RMI TUni v er s i t y ,UNSW,andt he Uni v er s i t yofT echnol ogySy dney .Cur r ent l y ,I s abel i saPhD Candi dat eatRMI TUni v er s i t y .
parallel’s
“Our cities are growing, pushing further and further to the periphery. Open space, commercial and production areas in outer districts are increasingly being competed for by business’s / commercial enterprise, home owners/ developers whilst councils battle to retain and manage land due to costs or lack of revenue. The fact that land is as necessary to life as air and water means its use should not be subjected to the glaring folly of free forces and individual will. What can we do ? Not much, because there is no alternative but to politcise land. A lot, because everyone else has failed to so until now ...” parallel’s is a studio that questions land use, ownership and a studio that wants students to contribute to changing the orientation and thinking towards our understanding of the ground we occupy. We will investigate how design, beyond architecture and urbanism alone, can address human made issues around density, urban growth, custodianship (private / public ), sustainable economies (food & water), health of all living things and social cooperation.
These preconditions ad observations will then be used as pro-active instruments or tools for design rather than obstacles. to design a village of the future … Students will work in teams and individually on 1 site. As a team we will establish key design agendas, to propagate a retrospective 30-year village on a riverbank. The village objectives and vision will be determined by negotiations of land use with fellow peers. In developing a project, three primary components will be addressed: .
Discovery Phase - Mapping & Stories Drawings/Graphics and physical models to communicate context, knowledge, define lazy land, density, scale, pattern, space, land use and the nuances between these “things”. We will look at the land we occupy and how it is under utilised OR over worked by exploring these aspects of the site.
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Technique The use of iterative design techniques and comparative designs, to review, critique and analyse to discover a suitable division of space, create new models of density, and how architecture as a framework can exploit the nuances between things
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Time Proactive and generous design solutions for the youth and land we occupy.
future of the
Group work: students will work as a group to build a model of the existing site and define it as an existing “framework”. The model will be both a physical model to aid massing and density studies supported by drawings to articulate items that are specific and nonspecific about the site As a group you will then create a village of the future. The village will engage with specific contextual issues and urban thinking and develop via group negotiation and discussion. Such as land use, ownership, and custodianship. Individually: students will design one part of the village and your design will need to explore and engage with more detailed design that complements the village as a whole. time: 2:30pm to 5:30pm , mon & thur studio leaders: Lucinda Mason & Matthew Herbert
Afterlife “New, newer, newest. But what is new? New is relative. Or better said: everything has a predecessor.” Winy Maas – Space Fighter The landscapes of cities and architecture are ever-changing. Shifts of historical narratives, culture and economy leave us with decaying structures, exodus of population, unemployment and more. As topical examples: the impact of COVID-19 pandemic; high numbers of regional and overseas migration; flexibility of working from home all resulted in high vacancy rates. This studio is interested in the unpredictable, not the permanence; the adaptive, not the formulaic; the emergence, not the monumental. How can we explore the continuous evolution of architecture through relationships, time, scale? How can we breathe new life into architectural propositions and ideas through the understanding of contemporary culture and issues? What would it all look like? This studio will explore a variety of drawings (notational, orthogonal, projections, hybrid, mixed-media, moving, static) as projective and operative methods to help generate, document and develop architectural ideas. We will critically look at a series of precedents and case studies of abandonment and readaptation at a variety of scales, drawing types and narrative to assist in exploring architecture and urban effects, materiality, and spatial experiences. There will be interchanges, negotiations and dialogues working across the urban and architectural scale, allowing constant feedback loop between extremes. Site: Melbourne CBD. *This studio will generate a conceptual focus and thematic on the varying modes of representation and communication of architectural ideas with Fear Awe Wonder: MatterMeta. Studio Leaders: Vei Tan and Jan See Oi Studio times: Monday 5-8pm Thursday 5-8pm
ON THE ROAD
We are interested in designed things; things that w ork,things that are constructed, found things and things that need to be found. The studio will explore the nature of design through the many lenses of the Great Ocean Road. We will look at how the road could be read as a single thing, the sum of its parts, and as single things that relate to particular projects. As well as how it is read by multiple parties; local landowners, the state, tourism operators, local farmers, surfers, visitors, fisherman, ecology enthusiasts and so on. The lens in which we see a site shapes the way we choose to intervene. We will use our multiple readings of the Great Ocean Road to determine what it is we design and to ask ‘who we are’ when we design.
MONDAY 2:30PM + THURSDAY 6PM with Peter Brew + Mietta Mullaly
1 | SOUVENIRS FOR THE END OF THE CENTURY BOYM PARTNERS
2 | THE STUDIO OF MADELON VRIESENDORP
THE DEMOCRATIC SOUVENIR
Together we will embrace the rules, stupidity and secret joys of bureaucracy. We will investigate how architecture can establish cultural capital for public institutions and leverage humour and familiarity as devices to make the municipal interface more accessible. The studio will be organized into two parts.
DESIGN BY COMMITTEE will test your ability to work, present, critique, joke, rally and negotiate within a series
of [often disparate] agendas and [at times absurd] biases. Reminiscent of the prolific work of the Government Architect’s Office, which outlaid an unprecedented quantity of public programs, we will work in groups toward a comprehensive shared studio library of details and architectural follies. Only to later amalgamate, bend, scale, inflate and intentionally misinterpret them into civic typologies ready for deployment.
PROPOSITIONING THE PUBLIC MEMORY will question the significance and/or success of landmark
architecture against a distinctly regional backdrop. Projects will be distilled and immortalised through the production of individually crafted Souvenirs. The Souvenir presents the opportunity of built-in emotional value, such as the blurred memory of an earlier journey or the affection of a faraway friend; a hard working object that evokes an understanding of larger places or events. Perpetually imbued with new meaning, objects and narratives will continually re set the agenda for architectural resolution and establish opportunities to drastically transform earlier proposals. When only the most valuable buildings deserve Souvenirs, how can we champion the municipal interface as hero...
MONDAY 14:30 | and THURSDAY 18:00 | ALEXANDRA KEMP
RMIT University Bachelor of Architecture Design Studio
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Brunswick PlaceLab mondays and thursdays 2.30-5.30pm
…the ville(city) becomes more complex via creating synchronicities, less determinate, thanks to incomplete form, more socially interactive due to its porous edges, punctuated by will: the tie between form and function loosens for all Lorem ipsum these reasons, and the city becomes free to evolve. It opens up. Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling, Ethics for the City, p289. Studio Agenda: it is these thoughts and more about the city and the life led within it that frame the agenda of this studio. For this architectural practice, a buildings capacity to belong to a wider territory – an expanded field - is a given. This can also be considered as a relational condition, extending beyond the built context, to include ecological systems, place, time, culture, nature and the land – a form of urbanism, but one that is free of the conventions of seeing buildings as the only reference point. Research projects (as background to this studio) – have explored architectures engagement with context in projects that work from rural and city landscapes and in the context of the cultural and environmental. Project: this studio explores a new housing typology for Brunswick, one that emerges from a reliance upon shared amenity. Sharing facilities – within the
interior where residents share a laundry, a meeting room (Nightingale housing model) or more. And then to the urban scale where the sharing of air rights above an existing building may enable more opportunistic additions to the urban fabric. What other opportunities for sharing can you imagine - from the small-scale architectural moves to urban gestures as a basis for a new housing type? Brunswick is undergoing significant urban transformation particularly along the Upfield train corridor and its existing character is at stake. Assessing the character of place forms the initial way into the housing project and a key reference being the ‘Brunswick and Black Street Journals’ by artist Peter Atkins. What are the opportunities to borrow and extend from your readings of place? How can a new incoming building intensify a reading of place, and make a significant contribution to its urban grain? At the core of this studio will be the design of a new urban housing type – but one that responds to the emerging urban forces at play in this inner northern suburb notable for its mix of industries, manufacturing, creative practitioners and currently undergoing large scale urban change through housing densification and transport infrastructure. As a backdrop the studio overlaps with PhD research by Rebecca Roke and RMIT’s PlaceLab.
Syllabus: several studio visits to Brunswick early in the semester with esquisses to imagine the site and its relationship to the wider precinct, its character
and place – and how these are grounded within the architectural issues framing the studio. Secondly, using this site knowledge you are to focus on the major design project responding to the brief and studio agenda. This will include esquisses translating your site work into formal and architectural potential, leading towards more developed architectural resolution of the building, its interior and exterior as well as how it contributes to Brunswick urban fabric. At the completion of the semester, you will have a resolved project – one that works poetically to embed and hold complex narratives of place by working through abstract and more literal design methodologies and processes of translation (all embedded within the studio syllabus), but at all costs avoiding the nostalgic. You should expect to imagine the site and its relationship to the street and urban territory as well as opening this to cultural and architectural references – equally immersed in the Richard’s previous studios from 2021 are here: https://issuu.com/rmitarchitecture/docs/black_richard_rewilding_castlemaine https://issuu.com/rmitarchitecture/docs/black_richard_upside-down_country Richard Black is a registered architect, educator, author and Associate Professor with RMIT. His teaching, design practice and research activities explore overlaps and adjacencies between architecture, landscape and urbanism. With Anna Johnson he has co-authored several publications, most notably Living in the Landscape, Urban Sanctuary, and Neeson Murcutt Neille: Setting Architecture, all by Thames and Hudson. Richard’s mapping of the Murray River floods, fieldwork and associated design projects, have been acquired by the Centre for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, USA. Other places of note where his work has been exhibited include the Venice and Rotterdam Biennales, Berlin’s Aedes Gallery, Architekturforum Innsbruck and Galerie-am Weissenhof Stuttgart.
Through an exploration of the generative design processes, this studio explores how alternative architectural languages and advanced fabrication techniques could conceptualize a new design culture in architectural discourse. Design principles: Process-based and iterative design process Environmentally informed approaches with a focus on the application of sustainable materials and construction methods in architecture Interest in materiality and digital fabrication methods Narrative-based design, and interest in story-telling and culturally informed design approaches Field of architectural design is a multifaceted environment where students’ learning experience can be benefited from exposure to different inspiration resources and design principles. The studio is part of a group of studios and electives run this semester that are aligned with the RMIT Architecture | Tectonic Formations Lab, which will collaborate through combined reviews and symposia.
PARASITIC TECTONICS BACHELOR DESIGN STUDIO HESAM MOHAMED TUESDAY 5PM - 9PM STARTING FROM WEEK 2
e[scape] RMIT BACHELORS STUDIO SEMESTER 2 2022 Studio Leaders: Mary Spyropoulos Joshua Lye Due to the imminent population growth, we will continue to build new cities at high density. In this context, the studio will be looking at new models for future hybrid programming. Interfacing notions of co-living, working and industrial 4.0 programming within architectural space. Students will investigate the current development patterns of high-density residential tower design. Specifically students will be interrogating the student co living model Scape. The studio will look at the potential for future living beyond established models, connecting its morphological patterns directly to local physics, exponential technologies, construction methods of CLT prefabrication, disruptive patterns, emerging community spaces and social dynamics. Students will investigate the current development patterns of high-density residential models, co-living, industry 4.0 and sharing economies. Providing an opportunity to wrestle with basic questions of how we live, what kind of spaces we need and want, and how this affects the dynamics between architecture and social inhabitants in an urban environment. New high density developments must engage with the complexities of contemporary practice by generating alternative design models and processes that are capable of responding to different conditions and challenges. Students will learn about design systems that are deeply computational and universal through the simplicity of discrete building blocks, connection logics and complex aggregations. Students will explore a platform of architecture that allows for virtually infinite combinatorics and emergence of complex tectonic states through the collective action of underlying elements. Critically students will gain an understanding of how to design through development of plan, section and its manifestation as architectural space. Students will critically examine historic and current works of architects such as Moshe Safdie, Jean Renaudie, Daniel Kohler and others that begin to offer rich tectonic models of architectural production. Through these investigations, students will produce proposals for high density residential towers located on different scape sites within the Melbourne CBD area.
Studio Times:
Mondays and Thursdays 6:30PM - 9:30PM
Studio Outline www.jlstudio.com.au
BoydWatching
This studio, BOYDWATCHING, will operate through ficto-critical methodologies, with a particular interest in modalities of thought, and modalities of expression. The studio will ask students to operate through precedent, to draw in other disciplines, and to consider a collective futurity. How might a foundational architectural typology be stretched, reconfigured, and ultimately redescribed in order to operate critically on the present, consider the operative methodologies of the past, and invest in a construction site for possible worlds. This will be done, not through fantasy, but through a manifestly realised fiction. The obsessive desire to construct a world around the singular object. The architectural object. The architecturally affected subject.
Monday and Thursday 6-9pm Tutors: Hannah Zhu, Jack Murray, Aimee Howard
What is the architecture that holds multiple personal readings? What is the project that chases its own consequences, one week to the next? What is the architectural profession that isn’t considered successful? What is the framework of difference? What is the life that is built before it is lived? What is the architecture that holds a narrative mouvance? What is the architecture that holds a critical position? What is the architecture that translates the alternate, the other, the Actor? What is the architecture of Walsh St without a Boyd?
Image: Sharyn Cairns ‘Robin Boyd House’ - Edited
DIGITAL MEANING tutor | caitlyn parry
MON & THU 1:30-4:30PM
We live as if we have an infinite amount of resources at our disposal. The 20th century saw an 23-fold increase in the use of natural resources in the construction industry alone. We also have no lasting relationship to objects or the place where they came from. This studio will explore digital tools and techniques to provide the potential reuse of construction materials and to enable the communication of a relationship to the primary resources that acknowledges building on Country. These techniques are situated in the speculative future of Australia where we have reached a point in time where we have depleted all natural resources. We must build by reconfiguring, dissambling and reimaging. We must also embed and communicate the Indigenous story of materials from Country to provide a more meaningful and lasting connection with that which we build with.
Important details Group work Grasshopper and some coding will be used. Previous knowledge would be helpful but not a requirement.4 BYO laptop if possible
IMAGE SOURCE: https://www.cdu.edu.au/northern-institute/cons-waste-manage-workshop-2019
OVERWRITTEN RMIT Architecture Bachelor of Architectural Design Design Studio 2022 Semester 2 Vicky Lam & Tidus Shing Mondays 6:00 pm & Thursdays 2:30 pm Begins at Week 2 Monday 25th July 6pm Site Visit Week 2 Thursday 28th July 2:30pm- Hawthorn Train Station Additional Classes at Week 6 Thursday evening and Week 13 Group work with Individual project at Final assessment
How do we live in unstable conditions? How can we adapt to environmental and cultural turbulence to not simply survive (sustaining what we know or imagine) but to evolve and discover something new? Overwritten continues a series of design studios that look to nature as inspiration for adaptation. In fluctuating border conditions such as forest edges, and wetlands and environments of extreme change are where innovation thrive. In this studio we look for contrast, difference and change as sites for architectural opportunity. Hawthorn is not a suburb we associate with extreme change or fluctuating borders. But in the darker and quieter hours along the train station, overwritten systems emerge. You would hear sound of the hidden canals and drains that warp the grid. Hidden pedestrian paths rise and dip along the train lines intersect dozens of cul-de-sacs. Bats fly overhead between colonies across the Birrarung Yarra at sundown. Here we define territory not by municipal boundaries, but through drawing and animating the “long things of life” (Joseph Brodsky) streets, rivers, drains, flight paths, train lines, fences. From this we mark a site for new occupation in the suburb, for housing, for recharging, and for public amenity, and for new opportunities of exchange and encountering the changes to come.
Overclock City Teaching times: Mondays and Thursdays 2.30pm > 5.30pm Tutor: Jan van Schaik
Overclocking is the practice of customising a computer component so that it functions at a higher level than it is designed to. Overclockers push their systems to failure, and then measure the speed their systems reached just before failure occurs. The aim of the studio is to find new approaches to architecture by pushing existing models to the point of collapse. The nature of the collapse will be drawn with standard architectural graphic techniques, and described
Each student will begin by setting up a starter pack. This will involve learning about the history and context of an existing project. And also drawing and modeling it. Then, one element of the existing project will be overcloked to the point that
Jan van Schaik is an architect at MvS Architects, and a researcher and senior lecturer at RMIT Architecture & Urban Design. He is the founder and convener of WRITING &
There is no practical use for an overcloked computer, other than what can be learning more about a computer system. This studio borrows the idea of overclokcing and applies it to the domain of architecture. What can we learn by pushing ideas to failure?
using the language from the starter pack. The work of the studio will be presented in a before-and-after format, where the previous week’s work, and the current week’s work are presented side by side to show evolution and adaption.
it functions at a level higher than it was originally designed to do. As this one element becomes overclocked, the balance of the project will need to be adjusted in order to accommodate the changes in the overcloked component.
CONCEPTS, the designer of Lost Tablets, and a creative sector consultant at Future Tense. More at janvanschaik.com
Monday & Thursday 9.30am * Patrick Macasaet & Youjia Huang * Face to Face Delivery
FEAR AWE WONDER: Download of Unreal Engine 5 required.
MATTERMETA is the second edition of the FEAR AWE WONDER series that seek to reimagine our architectural agency to design, speculate and communicate architectural ideas through three founding trajectories: [1] typological and procedural techniques; [2] gaming and the moving image; and [3] narratives and worldbuilding. It is an evolution of the After Series studios (2020-2021) that initiated a deeper inquiry into the potentials of gamification and world-building for architectural speculation in parallel with continuing research on procedural techniques. Fear Awe Wonder critically threads these territories to explore the edges of our emerging contemporary digital and autonomous infrastructures – positioning these new types and machinic landscapes as a cultural idea juxtaposed with alternative climate and environmental imagination. It views infrastructure as a civic project, not only valued as an engineering and technological endeavour, but worthy of design consideration as indispensable systems of our cities. [CONTEMPORARY INFRASTRUCTURES: ENGINES OF THE CLOUD] This studio will focus on the architecture of data centres as an emerging new form of infrastructure of our digital selves, cities and immortal worlds impacting future socio-political and cultural landscapes. As Facebook rebrands to Meta entering the metaverse fray; as we see the rise of cryptocurrencies, nfts, web3 and tokenomics; as we see our cities and devices become ‘smarter’; as we see the gamification of our personal and professional lives transformed to bits and pixels and we grow accustomed to ‘culture instant’ - the engines of the cloud need to work triple-time. There has been much recent energised discourse in the virtual, digital and the metaverse but the back-of-house infrastructures of the data centres are the physical matter that matter. The studio is not only interested in the fabrication of digital worlds but also the physical and material infrastructures that sustain it and the thresholds in-between. We ask, what is the spatial, environmental, social, political and material impact of our digital worlds and what agency does architecture have in these developments and environments (physical/meta/virtual)? What new or alternative forms of institutions, infrastructures and representations can emerge from the constant negotiation between the physical and the virtual? [TYPOLOGICAL BEHAVIOURS, ECOLOGIES AND THE PROCEDURAL] Many of our infrastructures that maintain and support our cities are primarily located in the peripheries - the “infrastructures that condition and construct our world have been rendered invisible to it. They are comfortably hidden away, unsung ‘monuments’ to an ‘environmental irresponsibility’ playing out at a terrifying scale.”1 They are central to the production of our urban environment but are largely ignored and forgotten. Big shed data centres thrive in isolated rural environments where land is more abundant required to materialise power, capital and space-hungry ecosystems. We will go the other way. The studio will investigate the future adaptation of abandoned factories and productive architectures of the past embedded within our suburban landscapes as staging grounds for experimentation. How might the architecture of the data centre simultaneously look to our histories, site and place to inform projective forms, space and program for this emerging type? The studio will engage with the abstraction and augmentation of architectural typological behaviours as formal, spatial, ornamental and compositional strategies to unravel new models of didactic infrastructures. [OPEN WORLD ARCHITECTURE LAB: GAME ENGINES, WORLDING & FILM] Beyond the speculative procedural processes, the studio’s design development work will foreground game engine based openended worlds and film as a possible new pictorial and architectural space of production and design to establish new pipelines for designing to unearth new realities. This approach could not only generate speculative architectural propositions, but also explore and design speculative fictional worlds that engage with contemporary concerns for the architecture to inhabit with the ambition to further design discourse and allow new thoughts of concerns and opportunities to surface. We will utilise game engines and film to situate new possibilities, worlds and narratives for within fictional/non-fictional scenarios intended to enable new architectural and environmental discourse. What type of Imaginary Infrastructures could emerge through a critical interrogation of typological behaviours? What is the potential of gaming intelligence and film as experimental grounds for other infrastructural and institutional worlds and narratives? This series is not about the proposal of solutions but provocations that require deep imagination and courage to step into the rabbit hole. As design theorist Benjamin Bratton stated, “… so-called ‘industrial architecture’ may be where many of the most interesting technological and intellectual disciplinary problems are now situated, it has little prestige. Theoretically rich coffee-table books of best-in-class automated power plants, warehouses, megafarms etc are required.”2
1. Odell, Jenny. 2013-2014. “Satellite Landscapes.” Jenny Odell webpage, November 22, 2020. https:// www.jennyodell.com/satellite-landscapes.html // 2. Bratton Benjamin. 2019. “Further Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene.” Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene 89, no. 1: 14-21. // Background Image: Globata Township Metaverse by Sophie Sung & Tsz Fai Li
Scale: Medium * Sites: West of Melbourne * Group Work Projects * Team Players Only
No prior knowledge of game engines required.
MATTERMETA