RMIT Master of Architecture Design Studios, Semester 2, 2023

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO

BALLOTING POSTERS & STUDIO LEADER BIOS

RMIT Master of Architecture Design Studios

Studio Leader Bios

RMIT Master of Architecture Acting Design Studio Coordinator (Sem 2-2023)

Vicky Lam is an Associate Lecturer at RMIT Architecture. She coordinates Selections as well as Bachelor Design Studios. She teaches Design in the Bachelor and Masters Programs.

Design Studio: Tarneit Baby Features

e: vicky.lam@rmit.edu.au

RMIT Master of Architecture Program Manager

Dr Ben Milbourne is an architect and Senior Lecturer at RMIT where he is engaged in research on the creative potential and professional impacts of the adoption of advanced manufacturing in architecture. He is a founding partner of Common.

w: commondesign.com.au ig: @benmilbourne_

Loren Adams is a disciplinary promiscuous spatial practitioner. Trained in architecture and public policy, her current work explores the “socio-spatial exploit” as an instrument for thinking-with planetary urban power structures.

Design Studio: Regulatory Nonsense: Strata Party w: www.lorenadams.me ig: @regnonbot

Dr Peter Brew studied architecture at RMIT in the late 1980s, practiced architecture and returned to RMIT in 2015 as a PhD candidate and faculty member since 2017. He is committed to reimagining the possibility of architecture.

Design Studio: Instrument Architecture Allan Burrows is an architect at Wardle and has led design studios at RMIT University and the University of Melbourne. His research explores how architecture can act as an agent within interdisciplinary systems and institutions.

Design Studio: Lifework Associate Professor Graham Crist is an associate professor in RMIT architecture and the program director of the Master of Urban Design. He is a founding director of Antarctica Architects and an author of the publication Supertight.

Design Studio: Macro Tight ig: @antarctigram

Dr Nic Bao is Director of BDW Architects, ARBV Registered Architect, and Lecturer at RMIT Architecture, where he teaches and explores his research on architecture technology, computational design, structural engineering, behavioural algorithms, and robotic fabrication.

Design Studio: Coral Marine Utopia Ig: @nic_bao Ig: @floating.coral.reefs

N’arweet Carolyn Briggs AM is a descendant of the First Peoples of Melbourne, the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung. She is Elder in Research in RMIT’s College of Design and Social Context.

Design Studio: Yirramboi Gadhaba

Jimi Chakma is an urban designer, academic and overseas architect from Bangladesh. His international expertise ranges from professional practice to academic teaching, with a focus on multiplicities in architecture and urbanism.

Design Studio: Macro Tight Ig: @folio_jimi.chakma

Emma Donovan is an architecture graduate and an Associate at Antarctica Architects.

Design Studio: Focus ig: @antarctigram

Simon Drysdale Driven by enthusiasm, passion & inventiveness. I have typically worked in teams unified & driven by deep ecological & social outcomes. I have a particular lens on the spatial experience of place and how the spectrum of care can be enhanced through built form.

Design Studio: Counter Errorism 2

Briony Ewing is an architect at Lyons Architecture

Design Studio: Lyons Practice Studio: Building Critical Mass

Youjia Huang is a Master of Architecture Graduate from the RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design with an interest in architectural storytelling and its contemporary representation. Currently, Youjia is working as a Graduate Architect in Red Design Group

Design Studio: Lest We Forget the Muses

Gwyllim Jahn is is the co-founder and Creative Director of Fologram, a design research practice and technology startup developing software for designing and making in mixed reality.

Design Studio: Hand Made Automation

ig: @fologm

w: fologram.com

Design Studio: MARCH Practice Studio: Quarantine Studio w: march.studio ig: @march_studio

Andy Ferguson is Senior Architect at Kerstin Thompson Architects

Design Studio: KTA Practice Studio: Precinct Matters

Marc Jacques is an Urban Designer and Landscape Architect with more than thirty years’ experience across a broad scope of public projects in Australia, Asia, North America and Europe. His projects have won significant awards, including the Australia Award for Urban Design, The Melbourne Prize and the Premier’s Design Award.

Design Studio: Extremely Small and Very Loud

Anna Jankovic is an architect, director of Simulaa. An Associate Lecturer at RMIT Architecture, alongside her research on adaptive and resilient architecture that explores cultural, historical, and time-based design.

Design Studio: Parti Line

Rodney Eggleston is Director of MARCH Studio.

Simone Koch is a a registered architect working at Workshop Architecture. She has taught as a sessional tutor for over 10 years in architectural design, technology, and professional practice at RMIT Architecture at a Master’s level.

Design Studio: The Existentialist House (the existential city)

Jarrod Malbon is an architect practicing ata Kerstin Thompson Architects.

Design Studio: KTA Practice Studio: Precinct Matters

Associate Professor Paul Minfie is a practiciing architect, and long standing member of the RMIT Faculty. He is the director of MvS Architects.

Design Studio: Go North!? : Shaping central Melbourne’s expansion.

Caleb Lee is Caleb is a designer practicing at Kerstin Thompson Architecture and a graduate of Master of Architecture at RMIT. He believes that good design is borne from productive discourse, collaboration and a collective will to develop a proposition beyond the functional.

Design Studio: Tarneit Baby Features

Stasinos Mantzis is a practicing architect for 20 years. Stas is an experienced registered architect and educator with an interest in how culture and cultural knowledge can be integrated in all aspects of the built environment.

Design Studio: Yirramboi Gadhaba ig: @stasman

Hesam Mohammed is a registered architect and a director at De-Form, researcher and design studio leader at RMIT University and University of Melbourne. His research aims to develop hybrid additive fabrication methods for printing complex geometries.

Design Studio: Esoterra

Tom Muratore is an architect and Associate Lecturer in the School of Architecture & Urban Design.

Design Studio: Focus

Ian Nazareth is an architect, researcher and educator. Ian is an academic at the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT and the director of TRAFFIC - a design and research practice working across architecture, urbanism and computation.

Design Studio: Post-Internet Cities : The Temporal City (AT)6 w: trafficcollective.com ig: @trafficcollective

Olivia O’Donnell is a registered Landscape Architect and Co-chair of AILA Cultivate, a committee opening dialogues around alternative and expanded modes of landscape architectural practice through conversations and collaborations with other disciplines, including art, architecture, industrial design and publishing.

Design Studio: In Circles Caitlyn Parry is an Associate Lecturer and Industry Fellow at RMIT Architecture.

Design Studio: Mongrel Assemblies

Adrian Stanic, a lead Design Director of Lyons, works as a creative and analytical thinker renowned for his lateral ‘idea rich’ approach to the design and development of urban design, health, education, cultural, commercial and major research projects.

Design Studio: Lyons Practice Studio: Building Critical Mass w: www.lyonsarch.com.au ig: @lyonsarchitecture

Adjunct Professor Kerstin Thompson is Director of Kerstin Thompson Architects and an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University

Liam Oxlade is Liam Oxlade is an Associate at NH Architecture and is interested in the application of a public ideas to a diverse set of built & propositional outcomes

Design Studio: In Circles ig: @lxlade

David Schwarzman is an Architect at UNStudio in Amsterdam and Academic at RMIT University in Melbourne. David is interested in the relationships between the built environment, human behaviour and data.

Design Studio: The Temporal City

Matt Stanley is an Associate at MARCH Studio.

Design Studio: MARCH Practice Studio: Quarantine Studio w: march.studio ig: @march_studio

Grant Trewella is an Associate Architect at Lyons Architecture.

Design Studio: KTA Practice Studio: Precinct Matters

Design Studio: Lyons Practice Studio: Building Critical Mass ig: @antarctigram

Darcie Vella is a Graduate of Master of Architecture at RMIT University practicing at Kerstin Thompson Architects.

Design Studio: KTA Practice Studio: Precinct Matters

Andre Wee is a Master of Architecture Graduate from the RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design who is passionate about alternative mediums of architecture representation that speaks to the mainstream. He is a Graduate Architect in Foursight Architects.

Design Studio: Lest We Forget the Muses

Brett Wittingslow Director of small architecture firm (www. bw-a.com.au) and sessional tutor at RMIT Architecture.

www zzz

Design Studio: Network Error

Master of Architecture | Design Studio

PARTI LINE

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?

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 gestures and actions, 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, allowing for different modes of occupation.

The studio is organised through two principal means; design research and analysis; and design exploration and iteration. The studio will explore housing at the scale of a medium-rise, muti-residential building), but will also consider the impact of its larger agglomerated urban form (a continuour, repeatable, linear model) and adjacent site conditions, alongside investigations into discrete and small-scale architectural components, that are charged with domestic scaled 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.

The primary task will be to design a multi-residential housing ‘block’ (model) that is repeatable, and also variable to the site, context, programs and occupation of your proposal. Students’ projects will together form a linear ‘precinct’ of collective housing – the Parti Line.

Students will work both individually and in groups for weekly tasks, before embarking on a final project and presentation, that will comprise of both group and individual deliverables .

Throughout the semester the communication and representation of this work will focus on rigorous drawings, and images, with a series of diagrams, that explore the ‘Parti’ and inter-relational qualities of your proposal.

There will also be tasks dedicated to the production of carefully composed physical models made of card and paper.

Semester

Robin Hood Gardens, by Alison and Peter Smithson, completed 1972, demolished 2017-2018.

Anna Jankovic

1:00pm-5:00pm, WEDNESDAY

Connecting Call, Four operators connect calls while working at a switchboard. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Hand Made Automation

Intensive Design-Build Masters Studio

Tutor: Gwyllim Jahn

Time: Tues 6-10pm & Fri 5-9pm

Location: 100.10.001

Intensive Weeks 7-14

Hand Made Automation is a design-build intensive studio

Interested in the intersection of low tech construction methods, hand-craft in mixed reality and generative AI. Over 6 weeks students will study and curate an architectural language for mixed reality fabrication from first principles, and test and explore this language through 1:1 prototyping and the construction of a pavilion scale structure. These projects will be undertaken individually and in groups.

The studio is situated at an unusual point in time where generative AI platforms such as Midjourney and StableDiffusion have made it possible to envisage completed architectural concepts as photos or renders almost instantly, but the task of developing and realising these concepts as 3D objects (whether in digital design software or physical reality) remains as laborious as ever. The hypothesis of the studio is that human meaningful design contributions can be manifest in how generated images are translated to physical spaces, forms and acts through skilled craft in mixed reality. Hand craft in mixed reality is uniquely suited to the surreal, fractal and materially diffuse images readily produced by current generation AI. Diffusion models have no particular bias for the euclidian elements and projective geometry that has been pervasive to architectural geometry since the renaissance. Instead we see a new language of clouds, fuzz, fields, blobs, adjacencies, estrangement and fog. This in turn encourages a re-evaluation of a set of architectural assumptions around the necessity of standardised materials, grid systems and orthographic projection, structural efficiency, 5mm tolerance, the rejection of ornamentation, the need for consistency between drawings, the rejection of improvisation in fabrication and so on.

Image: Slowbuild Bachelors Summer Studio 2023

“Esoterra”

MASTER DESIGN STUDIO HESAM MOHAMED

This studio will focus on the relationship of urban fabric, and new digital fabrication tectonics through the art of architectural storytelling. Like any form of cultural expression, architectural ideas can take shape in diverse formats such as writing, visual art, or physical structures. Within the field of architecture, narratives play a crucial role in communicating design concepts, addressing social and historical contexts, and shaping the language and aesthetics of architectural practice within the urban fabric.

In this studio, narratives serve as a catalyst for the design process, influencing the program, and architectural style, and informed by the urban context and edge condition. Students will immerse themselves in various sources of inspiration such as short stories, novels, and fairy tales, and will be assigned the task of creating their own short stories to drive their architectural concepts. The studio’s ultimate goal is to re-think an existing carpark building in Melbourne CBD to respond to and accommodate both public and private programs. The site is where the events of the stories take place. Students will utilize their narratives, characters, and environments as guiding elements throughout the architectural design process. They will express these narratives through a collection of geometric forms, employing digital workflows and robotic fabrication techniques to transform abstract ideas into tangible architectural spaces.

Wednsdays 6PM - 10PM

MONGREL ASSEMBLIES

tutor | caitlyn parry

TUESDAY 9:30-13:30

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 its finitude.

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.

Important details

Group, collaborative work

Overnight visit (camping) to Beech Forrest Quarry. Will involve about $100 per students (transportation, camping, food)

Grasshopper and some coding will be used.

BYO laptop

Pay per click, pay per view, subscription, subscription, subscription. DRM. Newsjacking, hashtags, feeds, threads, doom scrolling, DMs, SDKs, click through, chatbots, avatars, APIs, analytics, clickbait! Attention is the only finite quantity. The city for all practical purposes is accessible. But wedged behind a Paywall. Pay to Play.

Post-Internet Cities i.e., The Temporal City (∆T)6 will investigate the paradigm of post internet time and the emergent spatio-temporal urban and architectural experience catalysed thereby. This corresponds to a period of the extreme present where the internet in its every manifestation - its perception, influence, fragmentation, polarisation, disruption, accelerationism, and speculation - is the milieu. It is where and when the microgenres and subcultures of the internet influence the aesthetic, form, and relational hierarchies of the architecture of the city. The semantic web, blockchain, digital ownership etc., in their universality and omniscience, cannot be separated from political, cultural, and economic reality. It presents the multiplicative, ratcheting effect of combinatorial innovation. It is the emancipation and burdening of the infrastructures of the city. It is when the virtual is inapparent yet imperious. Outcomes in the city now depend on whether they are ranked search terms or catalogued by search engines. The benign act of searching and observing from a distance changes reality. Outcomes are contingent on whether they have been observed. The Post Internet City is when and where technical interfaces are no longer discrete, but technology itself emerges as a social and cultural interface. It is a reality that escapes the technology of its extraction and mediation.

The studio will focus on the overlaps, entanglement and frictions between the physical city, digital counterpart, and technological overlays and augmentations. Projects will explore complex and compelling narratives, distinctive formal, spatial and material qualities that stem from ambiguous, unsettling situations and interactions with an increasingly interconnected world. Exploring themes of social media, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, surveillance etc. the studio will provoke intense reflection and contemplation about the role, impact of and dependence on technology on the form and behaviour of the city. How does architecture and the city – reflect, facilitate, and counterbalance the manipulative effects of technology?

Post-Internet Cities (The Temporal City)

Masters Architecture Studio Semester 2 2023 | Ian Nazareth & David Schwarzman

The studio speculates about a possible, domain of urban and architectural invention – i.e., a city’s imminent escape from cadastral space, embracing virtual realms and digital ubiquity, and the hyper-reality of the virtual space as mooring of invisible cultural, economic, and societal forces. It aims to make specific trajectories visible - where technological shifts might get inscribed in the urban process and therefore crystallised in architectural practice. The studio operates at limits of material and spatial practice, (between the physical, the virtual and holographic) engaging with real-time, urban data analytics, simulation / gamification, techno-cultural discourse / narrative, AI and generative techniques.

The Temporal City (∆T)6 is part of an anthology of The Temporal City, that is a hypothesis and model that presents the urban condition as kinetic processes that are simultaneously and synchronously enabled by the flow of data, energy, people and logistics. It proposes a spatial operating system, a stream of inputs and outputs and an organic mechanism that forestalls a chronologically-based urbanism. Traditional and static principles of the city are upturned. The Temporal City is not about absolutes or repeatable spatial products - but a context and framework that embraces and amplifies indeterminate, contradictory, combinatory, uncertain and improbable conditions. It is opportunistic. Agility instead of stability, multipliers rather than repetition. Change, difference, and time are accelerated. The complexity of its systems benefits from variability, unpredictability, and imbalance.

Wednesday evenings 17.00 - 21.00, 100.10.001

STRATA Regulatory Nonsense:

property & geology a celebratory romp through worlds / words of dirt, data & dwelling

tuesdaymornings 9:30am-1:30pm rmit design hub

Since Regulatory Nonsense began, NLP technologies have become more plausibly human but also more problematically opaque, in both content and intent. As criticality is obfuscated by hype, we must work harder — and work together — to unpick the logics and politics of AI/ML/DL technologies in design practice. Regulatory Nonsense therefore offers a collaborative curriculum: through structured esquisses, you will enact democratic processes, co-write ownership rules, and co-make worlds, while remaining individually accountable for you own (ethical and architectural) responses.

In Strata Party, you will perform two broad design investigations:

1) Together, we will negotiate and co-write a new regulation for ownership of dirt, data, and dwelling, with help from a suite of glitchy linguistic bots trained on our own critically curated datasets.

2) Collaboratively, you will conduct a series of architectural design quasi-experiments to evidence the effectiveness, limitations, and possibilities of this new regulation –eventually culminating in your own resolved and cohesive architectural project at the former Cave Hill Quarry in Lilydale

Before architecture, there is property. Before computation, there is geology.

If property relations are constituted and controlled through written language, can a linguistic shift in our regulations make our property relations otherwise? And what might this mean for architecture?

In Regulatory Nonsense, the written rules governing property relations are co-written by an AI-amalgamation of poets, storytellers, artists, and philosophers. Using this glitchy, linguistically thick language, we blur, nudge, and renegotiate title boundaries and thresholds of bare-minimum compliance in novel and generative ways. Perhaps, through these new and nonsensical property relations we may also find new possibilities for architecture.

This semester, we return to issues of property relations and regulations with a renewed focus on how acts of planetary ownership are locally and materially constituted. We will explore the ways that AI and architecture are both intrinsically material practices, reliant on extractivism. And, we will use the former Cave Hill quarry site in Lilydale as a speculative sandbox to explore the ways that regulatory language delineates or dilutes ownership conditions for dwelling, data, and dirt.

Along the way, we must be nimble in our disciplinary positioning, toggling back-and-forth between the reciprocal roles of policymaker and architect; juggling the demands of rule-making (for all, for others) and (our own) design intent; grappling with the ghosts of inherited colonial bureaucracy.

Site Visit: Saturday 29 July

Student Led Pre-Mid-Sem Peer Review: Week 6

Mid-Sem Review: Friday, Week 7

International Guest Lecture: Week 8

QUARANTINE V

Situated at the end of the Mornington Peninsula in the Point Nepean National Park, Melbourne’s former Quarantine Station is a fitting location to host the fifth and final (final) QUARANTINE STUDIO. Whilst we are not proposing to relocate modern-day quarantining back to the Peninsula, we are questioning and proposing future uses for the largely abandoned buildings littered throughout this beautiful site.

Given Melbourne’s extended lockdown periods and Melbournians’ inability to travel in recent times, QUARANTINE STUDIO speculates on the rebirth of regionalism by proposing new local tourism activations. QUARANTINE STUDIO will investigate the land, buildings, and structures in and around Melbourne’s original sanatorium, and proposes new uses for the currently underutilized public land, landscape, and infrastructure.

The Point Nepean National Park has been closed off for years and only quite recently been opened to the general public. Its many years of isolation have resulted in the preservation and regeneration of this dramatic landscape.

Students will be asked to research the site from Bunurong times, the sanatorium years where ships plagued by illness were quarantined, the construction of defense systems during the Gold Rush, and the first shot of the First World War. Stories of diseased early settlers, a litany of shipwrecks, and the drowning of Australia’s 17th Prime Minister Harold Holt will be unpacked, researched, mapped, and recorded to uncover programmatic opportunities and inform proposals for new usages of the land and its existing structures.

Students will be asked to review the 2017 Master Plan commissioned by the State Government and currently being implemented by Parks Victoria, question its content, and identify opportunities for new program and subsequent architectural intervention.

The studio will focus heavily on tectonics, materiality, and buildability along with the site. Active heritage conservation, rather than conservation for conservation’s sake will be the driver, eco-tourism is the intended outcome.

In collaboration with Parks Victoria and RMIT, the most relevant projects of all five QUARANTINE studios will be exhibited on site at the end of 2023.

STUDIO CONDUCTED BY RODNEY EGGLESTON AND MATT STANLEY ON WEDNESDAY EVENINGS FROM 5PM-9PM AT MARCH STUDIO - NORTH MELBOURNE

A field trip on-site at The Quarantine Station will be organised at the start of the studio,

I’ve taken the title of this studio from a chapter of Iñaki Ábalos’ intriguing book “The good life: A guided visit to the houses of modernity”.

We’ll use his essays Picasso on vacation and Heidegger in his refuge as the launch point of a studio that is directly concerned with philosophy as a tool for understanding our current temporal and spatial circumstances and for fostering an idea of architecture in our time and place. Philosophies of existenitalism and phenomenology as they relate to the architecture of the house, public buildings and our place the city.

Last semester we took the length of Punt Road as our site for an idea of Melbourne. This time we’ll look at particular points along this transect from the outskirts of town to the bay.

We’ll take weekly readings from Ábalos, Heidegger and Arendt, among others and design each week a building for a particular site that explores and corresponds with this reading. Your weekly response will be both written and drawn.

The house is a term that we’ll stretch to form a village of components: house of Parliament, doss house, school house, out house, art house, bakehouse public house, chapter house

The idea of this studio is to use these existing philosophies as agents for your idea of architecture, acknowledging that we each exist in time and space, as does the site and the architecture, and each has a cultural, social and political framework. The interweaving of these is what interests me.

the existentialist house (the existentialist city)

tues morning 9:30

with simone koch

Tuesday Morning 9.30

“Instruments are nothing but theories materialized” (Bachelard)

The novelty of Raymound Queneau’s “book” 100 Million poems is in the way it reimagines the idea of a book, In a conventional book pages contain lines of text and are bound, Queneau book at first appearance accepts this format and is materially identical to a conventional book in all respects other than each line is a page and it is possible to encounter each line in a different order, in a new context within the book.

It is possible to recognise in the unconventional format of 100 million poems as an invention, it facilities or allows us to encounter the world differently, there is also a discovery which takes the form of a critique with respect to the nature of the book. it is possible to think of a book content as being regulated by its architecture. That the architecture is in this sense the possibility of the book, and what the architecture of Queneau’s book demonstrates is that this is not the only possibility.

The studio aims to look at the construction of ideas and the design of architecture. The ostensible content for our study’s high density residential projects though it is not predetermined as to what object the form adopts

TARNEIT: Baby Features

Rapid urban growth can present teething problems when the timing and sequencing of development is off. There are traffic jams when public transport delivered too slowly; houses half built languish when builders go bankrupt or council permits stall; commuters need to arrive over an hour early to find parking in busy train stations. This is all playing out in Tarneit, a western fringe suburb currently set to almost double its population by 2040 and has the second busiest train station in Victoria, second to Southern Cross Station in the CBD.

With these growing pains, are there any desirable “baby features” of value? What can newness bring and what gets lost in a city’s development and maturity? And if there are desirable baby features, can we keep them?

In evolutionary development biology (evo devo), this process is called heterochrony. When an organism truncates development of certain parts (paedomorphosis) and extend development of other parts (peramorphosis), new morphologies can arise. A giraffe’s long neck, and an axolotl’s regenerative tadpole-like baby features are the result of heterochrony.

We will exploit ways architects and urban designers can manipulate the difference in the timing, rate or duration of the developmental

process of a city so certain parts remain nascent, while other parts mature. We hope for some strange results.

“Tarneit Baby Features” is a continuation of previous design studios that see the environment (built, natural or denatured) as inherently unstable and in a constant state of flux. We will seek opportunities for developmental innovations and wondrous urban effects with cultural value for its inhabitants and users. We will study the activities, needs and aspirations of Tarneit’s various ethnic communities and its predominantly migrant population, while considering the ecologies of grasslands and creeks of this area.

We will design generative processes that will tweak the consolidation. erasure, dispersal and the sequencing of urban forms and actions across the proposed plan for “Tarneit Major Town Centre” that extend north of the current boundary held by Tarneit Station, and look for design opportunities both in the masterplan precinct scale and in architectural scale of buildings. Students will undertake weekly tasks to explore master planning strategies working in groups for the first half of the semester and produce a final architectural proposal to be designed individually.

We will also use animation and mapping techniques to visualise ideas of systems and sequencing of change. Students will use After Effects and Premier Pro to produce animations, they should download this software and ensure they have adequate computing capabilities.

In our vision Tarneit’s future growth, what can benefit from a city keeping it’s baby features, and how do we do this?

Wednesdays 5pm - 9pm at 100.06.006

Week 1 – First class Wed 19th July Introduction

Presentation by Vicky Lam and Caleb Lee followed by an Aftereffects Workshop run by Quan Tran.

Week 6- Tues 22th Aug 9:30 am – 12:30 pm

Combined Super Crit with Loren Adams’

“Regulatory Nonsense: Strata Party” studio and Caitlyn Parry’s “Mongrel Assemblies” studio.

Vicky Lam

Associate Lecturer at RMIT Architecture

Caleb Lee

Graduate Designer at KTA

Graduate of Master of Architecture at RMIT

Site photo collaged with “Truck Babies” by Patricia Piccinini (1999)

In Circle s

Neighbourhood scale communications infrastructures form a terminus point for global networks of complex information. In 2021 Tesltra outlined a roadmap to repurpose 650 of its 10 000 defunct telephone exchange sites into ‘edge computing’ centres. These sites were mostly designed by the federal government’s Public Works Department for the Postmaster General’s Department prior to the advent of the internet and Telstra’s privatisation. Our brief will speculate on how these sites can be densified to include working & living spaces anchored by a public realm that engages this working program.

The studio will employ nontraditional methods of site analysis through found ephemera, layered and intertwined history, aesthetics, material culture, research and critique. The active archive will be a place to collect objects, surfaces, case studies allowing unexpected relationships to occur and influence our approach to practice. In Circles will seek new spatial opportunities through novel procedures of documenting, cutting, recording and reassembling.

These procedures will form the basis of a vocabulary of representational tools, geared towards the twinned presentation techniques of architecture school - the Panel (Active Archive) & Presentation (Short Film)

Weeks 1-6 will be focussed on introducing and establishing these two modes of communication. Weeks 7-10 will involve high level discussion around key themes. We will visit site multiple times throughout the semester.

We will search for a medium specific role for the moving image in architecture, and will teach you how to use a suite of tools including full motion Enscape outcomes, stop motion V-Ray diagrams & assemblages of found media constructed in Premiere Pro. Soundscapes & music will form a key part of these presentations - as we attempt to understand the spatial conveyances of a medium unrestricted by the frame.

Fundamentally we are interested in the opportunity presented by public infrastructure to broaden the scope of a shared narrative around repair & ethical development. If it can be made to work harder to generate meaningful public placesthen this status can be leveraged to contribute to a sense of collective urgency.

Data Centre / Mixed Use

W1-W14 Tuesday 6pm

W1-4 Rotating Pairs W5-14 Independent

HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA - JLG 1988

GROSSE FATIGUE - CAMILLE HENROT 2012

HALVORSON

BILDBAUTEN 2008 PHILIP SCHAERER

EPICS IN THE EVERYDAY JESUS VASSALLO 2020

NEST 2021 HLYNUR PALMARSON

BRUNSWICK EAST EXCHANGE

BAYSWATER EXCHANGE

ASCOT TELEPHONE EXCHANGE

CURTAINS 2022 MIKEY YOUNG

2022 LIMITS TO GROWTH 2020 NICHOLAS MANGAN

TIMELINE: FAULT OPEN SPATIAL WORKSHOP 2015

FRESCO SHED 2020 SLEEPER AND SNAKE

FRIENDS & STRANGERS JAMES VAUGHAN 2020

MONACO DAVID EASTEAL 2015

STEAMER LAMP WITH TALL POT AND OBJECTS EBONY TRUSCOTT 2022

LUCKIE HOUSE COCO & MAXIMILIAN 2015

NBN FIBRE DISTRIBUTION HUB

NBN

NODE

NEWPORT TELEPHONE EXCHANGE

GUNTHER VOGT - WUNDERKAMMER

WORLD RECEIVER ISA GENZKEN 1992

Graham Crist Jimi Chakma

MACRO TIGHT

RMIT Master of Architecture & Master of Urban Design Studio 2023 Tuesday 6pm

We want to think about the whole city and use the abstraction of map-making to design at a macro scale. Can we think of a metropolis like a building or like a room? How can we have big impacts be working at metropolitan scale?

We will also drill down from extra big scale to understand the effects of a design at neighbourhood level. Travelling from 1:100 000 through to 1:100 and connecting the effects which are possible at each scale. We will focus on metropolitan Melbourne but will each bring a companion city for comparison and parallel study.

The aim of this design work is to tighten the city and to reduce its footprint – to identify possibilities within city boundaries for intensification and to inject mixed use housing into it at large volume. We hope therefore to have something useful to contribute to questions of affordable housing and of urban density.

BUILDING Critical MASS II

Building Critical Mass will explore radical design strategies for deploying a massive capital investment on CBD ground – as a positive CIVIC contribution to the evolving city.

Superannuation Investment Trusts are now funding, building and operating university buildings - universities are providing commercial space for industry partners – and the general public is encouraged and discouraged to ‘occupy’ the new vertical campus.

We will explore how to embody cultural energy into our public/private city architecture - through the deep research and subsequent manifestation of the complexity of relational politics - the dominant power at play (logos), the mediating institution (ethos) and the many contested voices (pathos) that then shape our city. We are interested in the creative heat generated when disruptive messy subcultural activism rubs up hard against sovereign wealth funds.

Our studio will explore Mass Timber Construction (MTC) at a super scale – how its predilection to systemic design is fertile ground for critical re-assembly - to suit the programmatic complexity arising from a multitude of competing ‘stake-holders’. Facades design research will be Active + PassivHaus.

Students will start the semester working individually then in pairs (of their own choosing) for the remainder of the semester exploring design solutions through a ‘design competition’, where an aspirational and functional brief will provide the constraints to be cleverly bent and, where argued well, deliriously broken.

We contest that our city is not yet done - that architects also need to design big new buildings of significant value as an antidote to the fear-led trends of temporary placemaking, bleached renovations and the plague of arches.

PRACTICE STUDIO

Wednesdays 5pm Lyons Studio Level 3, 246 Bourke Street

Studio Leaders

Adrian Stanic, Briony Ewing, Grant Trewella and Lyons studio guests

EXTREMELY SMALL AND VERY LOUD

(A STUDIO ABOUT RMIT, THE CITY AND THE BRUNSWICK DESIGN DISTRICT)

The urbanist who thinks the design of the city is only about big scales will go hungry after graduation. It might be some time before we are designing instant cities again.

The urbanist who thinks that a master plan can carry an authorial idea into the future is deluded. Time heals all, especially grand plans.

This is a studio that will tackle two clichés of urban thinking directly – that urbanism is only about the big scale and the master plan is a prerequisite for urban action. In the place of bigness, we’ll test how small-scale moves can conquer large territories. In the place of a staged master plan, we’ll explore how agency, time and catalysts can be deployed to help form urban situations.

The key focus of this studio will be an attempt to redeem Melbourne’s middling recent history of design at the scale of the precinct through an understanding of the spatial consequences of opportunistic thinking. We will speculate on the disaggregated campus as an urban typology (by studying the best one that there is - RMIT’s own) and we will propose ways of designing and growing the city based on small moves with large consequences. We will put our assumptions to the test by providing a spatial design that will act as a catalyst for RMIT’s proposed Brunswick Design District and that might provide a framework of irritation to counter the rapidly gentrifying character of Brunswick.

The studio will be open to both the Master of Urban Design and Master of Architecture students. Group work (2 student groups) will be expected in the first 5 weeks of the semester. After that time, it will be your choice about whether to continue in groups or to work alone.

WHERE: Room TBC. WHEN: Wednesday Nights 6:00-10:00.

STUDIO

LEADER: Prof. Mark Jacques.

PRECINCT MATTERS

Location KTA Studio, 6 Lothian Street, North Melbourne

Time Wednesday 4pm-8pm

Site Fishermans Bend Renewal Precinct

Conceptual Agenda

Fishermans Bend is Australia’s largest urban renewal project covering approximately 480 hectares in the heart of Melbourne. This studio looks at the Fishermans Bend precinct as a microcosm testing ground from which different typologies can respond to certain conditions. As a practice studio it will focus on real-world situations, referencing the proposed urban renewal plans for Fishermans Bend, alongside real site-conditions, and context. The current working structure plan for the Fishermans bend is composed of distinct precincts that include Mixed use, residential, office/ commercial and employment and innovation.

By using the Victorian State Government’s Fishermans Bend Framework document published in 2018, the studio will explore alternate models for renewal within the site. Students will engage with the complexities of redeveloping existing industrial sites, the infrastructure that is required to facilitate large urban redevelopment, and challenges surrounding the ecological and environmental found conditions.

Whilst design outcomes will be founded on research around effective precinct planning, projects will ultimately respond to the contextual challenges of the site. The variety of typological opportunities will enable students to respond to unique conditions set as the focus for the studio.

The studio will explore the pros and cons of the adaptation and re-use of existing buildings within the precinct, compared to their replacement with new buildings. We will do so through consideration of some of the following conundrums:

_ Heritage response; pre-colonial history and industrial Heritage (careful reinvention vs blanket preservation)

_Resilience (climate, biodiversity, community)

_An awareness of Country (connection, revealing of, and repair)

_Amplification and complimentary adjacencies

_Productive landscapes, hard & soft strategies – permanent & temporary, free space

_Growing in time, sedimentary site layers

_Systems and logic

Students will work together to assess multiple sites, which will inform their own selection and the development of their own brief. To respond effectively to the problems proposed, all sites will include an existing (heritage or otherwise) structure, will need to include a development proposal, a public realm offer, and positively contribute to, and enhance biodiversity. Students will collaborate with their peers to establish how each individual proposal works together as a wider precinct, and how small parts working together can create a larger whole.

Image: Existing Industrial Heritage Shed within Fishermans Bend. Image by Lauren Garner.

Studio Leaders KTA Core Team: Kerstin Thompson, Andy Ferguson, Jarrod Malbon, Darcie Vella

How to get a wheelchair over sand, Park McArthur, (2013)

FOCUS

The aim of this design studio is to develop proposals speculating on the future of housing – specifically examining how future housing can be adapted to the specific needs of residents with increased needs, including disabilities, part-time and full-time care requirements.

The studio will examine building typologies and challenges associated with accessible and care housing, including regulatory, economic, political, and social factors. It will explore the future of accessible housing design in light of cultural, technological, policy, economic, and climate change trajectories, and investigate the potential for sustainable, net zero, or carbon-positive design.

This studio will run in collaboration with Focus Life as part of a design-led research project with RMIT University School of Architecture and Urban Design led by researchers John Doyle and Roger Kemp. The project aims to develop new models for the design and delivery of accessible and care housing units.

Focus Life offer comprehensive disability accommodation services to individuals residing in the Mornington Peninsula and its surrounding areas.

Wednesday 6 - 10pm 100.06.007

Tom Muratore & Emma Donovan

WHO: Simon Drysdale with occasional guests. WHEN: 6pm + Wednesday evenings. WHAT: Healing Centre located in the Mildura surrounds

Weekly THEMES:

1. Flora and Fauna

2. Song

3. Sound

4. Ai - Art. Cleverman

5. Ai - Word. Cleverman

6. The celestial

7. Time

8. Hierachy and ‘the deadly’

9. Wattle and daub

10. National

11. Horizon and curiosity

12. Narrative memory

NOTE: There will be travel which will be over multiple nights at YOUR cost that will be clarified at ballot.

This studio will attempt to immerse you. We will be exploring Indigenous knowledge and the external forces that impact our built environment. The site is located North West of Mildura on Barkindji land and the studio experience will focus on regenerative thinking. The brief will explore the intergenerational opportunities for a men’s healing centre that will host programs that foster engagement with place, and the narrative of occupation.

The studio will provide an opportunity to explore themes of adjacency, articial intelligence (mythologically), decline and medicinal constructs and the potential of respite tourism.

Photo: Benedict O’Flaherty

‘COUNTER ERRORISM.2’

yir ramboi yirramboi gadhaba

(2023)

An Arts, Cultural & Treaty Centre

You will be asked to design an arts, cultural & treaty building in the heart of Melbourne. The design of Australian cities post colonization have failed to include First Nations voices, cultures and traditions within them. The studio examines a future Melbourne where the cultures and traditions of our First Nations people are made visible within our colonized city. The studio fits into a lineage of Australian architecture that is ideas based, figurative and pluralist.

Tuesdays 5-9pm

The studio will draw on a range of design techniques to tackle the following design research questions:

• How architects can respectfully engage with Indigenous knowledge and knowledge holders within our built environment?

• Tackle the notion of a colonised country and how we might design a shared future architecture charged by multiple histories and different cultures.

• To consider Aboriginal notions of Country within an urban context?

• How to design a cultural building over existing infrastructure.

• How can the history and culture of the site and its surrounds inform the design of the building?

• How can we add to the current civic narrative of this area?

• How might a better understanding of the importance of the site to the people of the Eastern Kulin Nation make us consider how this new civic building should be sited within the context of Melbourne as a colonial city?

AM

Led by Stasinos Mantzis and Boon Wurrung Elder N’arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs

A. MUSEOLOGY

With an eye towards reimagining the role of museums, aims to break free from the confinements of standardized square rooms and overhead lighting that have long defined museum spaces. While recognizing the custodial responsibility of cultural heritage, it grapples with the complex decisions surrounding object preservation and curation, delving deeper into the essence of museum-making in light of emerging technologies and virtual realms. The agenda raises the question of how museums can adapt and evolve to meet the deep yearning for tangible, immersive encounters. It also reflects on the fundamental question of what objects should be stored and preserved, navigating the delicate balance between real and virtual experiences. Furthermore, it acknowledges the planetary-scale context of architecture and emphasizes the importance of museums being more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable.

B. TYPOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS

Students will engage in the typological studies of the museum type and the underlying systems that have shaped it since its initial patronage of the muses. With these findings, The studio will engage with the augmentation of cultural and didactic agendas to superimpose architectural and urban typological behaviors through procedural experiments to rewrite the underlying code for the ‘new’ museum. The procedural workflow will incorporate Unreal engine version 5.2.1 alongside conventional architecture workflows. Students will work in teams.

C. CINEMATIC NARRATIVE

World building lies at the heart of our studio’s approach. It is our mission to conceive buildings not as isolated physical objects, but consider the extensive networks and entanglements on a planetary scale within which the building exists. We are integral parts of a vast, interconnected city that operates on a global level. Such a site must navigate the intricate flows and ecosystems in which we are entwined.

D. WORLD BUILDING

As individuals, we become seers and creators of worlds. We strive to imagine alternative futures by researching and exploring independent systems and uncovering hidden truths within our urban fabric. For example, we contemplate how the city of Melbourne would evolve as sea levels rise: What will it look like? What new infrastructure will emerge, and how can buildings adapt to this transformation? or how would we observe the transformation of our energy infrastructure, aiming to deliver electricity while minimizing our impact on the environment. We seek to ensure that our actions leave minimal scars on our fragile ecosystem.

We approach the process like film and game makers. We develop narrative arcs that guide our design decisions, considering the project’s context and user experience. Borrowing from composers, we create emotional depth through lighting, materials, and spatial arrangements. Additionally, we incorporate techniques from game makers to introduce interactivity and engagement, inviting users to actively participate and explore our designs. By integrating these approaches, our goal is to create architectural experiences that are immersive, emotionally resonant, and meaningful. Through the careful development of narratives, the orchestration of emotional elements, and the inclusion of interactive features, our ultimate goal is to create spaces that captivate and deeply connect with their users while establishing connections with diverse audiences.

LEST WE FORGET THE MUSES

“Those involved in large-scale housebuilding—including architects—act as if they have little agency in its authorship and as though they are instead obliged to ritualistically recite its logics. They behave as if “architecture” is simply the physical container for a fixed idea of family, rather than recognizing that the real design project is the family itself.”

- Sam Jacob

At present there is little discourse about contemporary life within a BADS (Better Apartment Design Standards) compliant apartment outside of cost, constraint or supply. This studio will provide a space to study, discuss, and elevate contemporary life as an agent to shape the city as vividly and precisely as the regulations or economics. We will exercise our imagination of the contemporary and the near future, through the design of the subject within architecture, and the situation for that architecture to occur.

1. You will design a speculative person/s, with an imagined life. This will form your critical framework.

2. You will design a highly resolved multi-residential building under the Baugruppe development model, coalescing the developer and the client into the same entity. Thus, the design of the consumer will be as important as the design of the commodity.

The studio will contend with multi-residential buildings as a layered situation; an active form

of architecture that is suspended between its economic, regulatory, market and tectonic requirements. Its processes, scenarios and assemblages will be the fields for your action, and your ideas will be implemented amidst these conditions.

This studio pursues intimacy between the personal and the cultural. The idiosyncratic and the systemic. The ultra-specific and the generic. You will speculate upon life as a designable phenomenon and seek an architecture that holds this closely.

Photo by Yoshiyuki Okuyama

NETWORK ERROR

This studio will propose a contemporary outcome for the Parks Victoria Burnley Depot.

The Burnley Depot finds itself located in the peculiar position of the blasted-out remnants of the former Burnley quarry. With direct interface onto an artificial stretch of the Yarra River the site is hemmed into its location by the Monash Freeway overhead, carrying 180,000 vehicles per day, the Richmond electrical substation, and finally, the sole pedestrian interface to the Main Yarra bike trail. This rich social, cultural and environmental history of the site will be unpacked and examined and ultimately balanced against new programmatic requirements. The site will be understood through both the micro and macro, given its connection to the Yarra and Melbourne’s arterial road network.

BRETT WITTINGSLOW - WEDNESDAY EVENINGS

The outcomes will endeavour to move beyond the current static nature of the Depot and provide a new future. The studio will seek supplementary programme that repositions the role Parks Victoria can play in engaging with and drawing attention to the public regarding the increasingly dire climate catastrophes and environmental degradation Melbourne and more broadly, Australia, are facing. The role of how Architecture can facilitate this agenda with the public will be investigated.

Go North !? shaping central Melbourne’s expansion

Victoria Street marks the boundary between central Melbourne's foundational street grids. This initial geometrical imprint has led to a number of consequences in Melbourne's urban development. One has been an accumulation of traffic flows, producing a somewhat abject pedestrian chasm, reinforcing the axial shift in street alignments. This discontinuity has enabled different developmental, temporal and programmatic morphologies to develop. With very few development sites remaining south of Victoria Street, a continuing impetus to leverage the CBD's sophisticated services and opportunities, and new infrastructures such as the Metro Tunnel coming online, pressure is mounting for the CBD to hurdle this barrier. Masterplans are afoot!

But what form could, and should, this coming transformation take? Will this new build be business-as-usual or an opportunity for a new and responsive city fabric? This studio will proceed through an analysis of the urban forces at work, analyse the emerging proposals, propositions and plans for the area, and then distil principles and propose moves to foster a vital, productive and just new precinct. Then, in a focused study, we will examine in detail a specific site on the northwest corner of the Victoria and Lygon Street intersection. This intersection is characterised by the 'trapped triangle' of the 8-hour day monument and the imposing facades of Trades Hall and Emily Macpherson College, together speaking of Melbourne's labour movement legacy

This studio will work closely with two industry partners, RMIT University and Launch Housing. RMIT University is a major landholder North of Lygon Street and is actively developing proposals for its future campus. Launch Housing is a community housing developer and founder of Education First Youth Foyers, which accommodates and educates disadvantaged 18-24 year-olds in conjunction with TAFE colleges. We will propose a mixed-use facility on this site incorporating youth housing, graduate family housing and a range of RMIT-related services, including a clinic, multi-faith centre and a childcare centre. Industry partners will be closely involved in briefing the studio and operating as a client group, with the final presentation addressed to that group. While our urban-level analysis will establish principles, the site exploration will begin with an 'atomic' analysis of user activities and events. The building proposal becomes, in effect, the intersection of these two modes of consideration.

The studio will be run as an intensive workshop in weeks 14 and 15 of the semester The presentation to the client group will be in week 16. Following the workshop, students will further build on and consolidate the workshop outputs for a portfolio and a final studio report.

This studio will be conducted as an intensive workshop. semester 2, 2023

studio: M.Arch and MUD

intensive workshop: 24OCT - 10NOV (weeks 15 and 16)

workshop presentation: 9NOV (week 16)

further work, folio and book submission: 22 Dec

tutor: Paul Minifie