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.