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.

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.