MACRO TIGHT

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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