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

“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.