MONGREL ASSEMBLIES

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.

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

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

click, 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?