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.