PARTI LINE

Parti Line will intervene in the current conditions of collective housing in Victoria and seeks to disrupt existing types that the city and its communities have grown out of. We are concerned particularly with the “missing middle”, between low and high density, and low and high rise. Melbourne has exhausted the former in pursuit of “the Australian Dream” resulting in mass housing on Melbourne’s fringe; the later has emerged as the prevailing multi-residential model, a product of capitalist commerce and developer profits. The studio will operate as a laboratory in which to explore and interrogate housing between these conditions, for new collective living in Melbourne.

A ‘Party line’ was the name for ‘local loop’ telephone circuits, that were shared by service subscribers of the early ‘landline’ telephone networks. This also meant that ‘Party lines’ provided no privacy in communication; frequently used as a source of entertainment and gossip, as well as a means of quickly alerting entire neighbourhoods of emergencies. The ‘Party line’ become a social and cultural fixture (particularly for remote rural areas in Australia) for many decades, and ultimately promoted a sense of connectedness and community life.

In architecture, a ‘parti’ is defines as an organising thought, or decision, behind an architect’s design. The ‘line’ is one form of this ‘parti’ that the studio will study, as many architects have done in the past – including Le Corbusier, Alison and Peter Smithson, Neave Brown, and Robin Boyd – to name a few.

Given this play on words and meaning, the studio asks a series of questions; What does it mean to live collectively today? What does a ‘medium-density’ organisational model for housing look like for our city? What do we need for our comfort, health, and happiness in this collective? How do we consider the thresholds between the private home, shared space, and the city beyond?

The studio is organised through two principal means—design research and analysis - and an architectural proposal. The studio scale is Medium overall (at the scale of a muti-residential building), but will also consider larger agglomerated urban forms and conditions, alongside investigations into discrete and small-scale architectural components, charged with utility, and ornament. As part of this students will study closely, the parts and elements and scenes that constitute domestic life and interrogate the embedded histories in the fabric of the everyday, formed on an accumulation of architectural elements (ie. window, door, balcony, etc).

As collective living requires a variety of spaces, of varying sizes and functions, each design task will work through a series of formal and spatial moves, including - multiplication, division, hybridity, overlap, compression, and expansion. Students will also need to consider the suitability of their outcomes against the scale of the site, the program, its use, and habitation; and ways for how we can live collectively, with equity and diversity in mind.

The primary task will be to design a multi-residential housing ‘unit’ (model) that is repeatable; initially working in abstract space – to later adapt on a given site, situated alongside the other studio groups/projects, to form a ‘precinct’ of collective housing – the Parti Line.

Throughout the semester the communication and representation of this work will focus on rigorous drawings as well images, with a series of (parti) diagrams, plan, section, elevation. There will also be tasks dedicated to the production of carefully curated physical models made of card and paper. Students will work in different groups (pairs) for weekly tasks over the first half of semester, to inquire, critically interrogate, and amass a collection of research work and design esquisses - before embarking on a final project in a group (as you might do in an architecture practice), following the midsemester presentations.