RMIT ARCHITECTURE MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO BALLOTING POSTERS SEM 1 2017
RMIT MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE SEMESTER 1 2017
HOLD THE LINE
This studio will form part of Suburban Realism, a series of studios concerned with the current trend for public authorities to hand over the focus and definition of our public spaces in the outer suburbs to commercial developers. The aim of this studio will be to promote an empirical understanding of the metrics that characterise the post WW2 suburban condition and critically deploy these ‘found’ conditions toward a poetic reformulation in a manner similar to the 2016 NGV pavilion “…haven’t you always wanted?” (aka The Car Wash) by M@ Studio. Program: Community buildings set within a new civic park. Site: Sandown Raceway (aka ‘The Home of Horsepower’). Process: Through initial exercises students will be expected to cultivate knowledge of the constituent spatial and programmatic types of various community facilities coupled with civic landscape and urban typologies. This knowledge will be gleaned through building tours, readings and analysis. From this base tactics will be developed through iterative processes toward the production of a project which could be imagined to become the site of collective (suburban) memory. Tutors: Dean Boothroyd, Mark Jacques, Martin Heide, Kerry Kounnapis Time: Tuesday evenings 6:00pm
let’s dense
What’s left for architecture when you strip away the props that we regularly lean on? The techniques, methods, processes that take us to the forms that inhabit the city. What’s left is a clear concept, an idea, an invention born of the imagination. This studio looks at how design can flourish without so much the application of a technical process as a deep understanding of how we live and work now and by imagining how that might be improved through architecture. We’ll take a site in Werribee, 35km from the CBD, already being developed by Places Victoria. The proposed dwelling density is 11.4 dwellings per hectare. We’ll look at how that can only fail by promoting continuing dependence on car use. We’ll look at how we can more take that density to 26 dwellings per hectare and how that might lead to a more successful outcome. We’ll design a range of house types and add local workplaces, shops and industry, cultural places, a primary school and health centre. We’ll look closely at the existing assets of the area: Werribee River, Open Range Zoo, Racecourse, sports grounds, and aircraft museum, and how we can engage them from our site with a local tram network that also connects to the train station. The projects will be weekly. The focus will be on what you bring to design. What ideas you have that you can shape into buildings. The repetition of design exercises should enable you to develop a strong sense of yourself as a future architect. Project area: 197 hectares 5,200 Residences: 2260 homes at completion. Wednesday 5:30pm Simone Koch
Wegocity: Tailor-Made Housing A collaboration between RMIT Architecture & Urban Design and The Why Factory (T?F) - TU Delft this is an RMIT Master of Architecture travelling studio which will commence in Melbourne and then travel to The Why Factory - TU Deflt, Netherlands for a three week workshop which will also include students from Bezalel Academy Jerusalem. The Why Factory (T?F) is a global think-tank and research institute, run by MVRDV and Delft University of Technology and led by professor Winy Maas. It explores possibilities for the development of our cities by focusing on the production of models and visualisations for cities of the future. The project will be part of the “Wegocity: Tailor-Made Housing” project which investigates participatory processes applied to housing design. These processes establish a negotiation between the desires of each of the residents of a housing slab and help determine the design of their apartments. To achieve this, “Wegocity” manifests a particular interest in the development of a gaming process. This game leverages the specificities of each resident and transforms them into spatial needs. This way, unexpected housing typologies emerge within a truly human-driven housing architecture. The project will result in a publication called “Wegocity” to be published by NAi010 Publishers in Rotterdam which will compile the research undertaken by The Why Factory together with students from TU Delft and IIT Chicago, RMIT Melbourne and Bezalel Academy Jerusalem. The research begins with the acknowledgment that even though we have measured and compared almost all that can be quantified (areas, densities, uses, users…), we had avoided getting to the bottom of the matter, to the bottom of the wishing well that housing represents to its residents. We know that the dense city must be built, but while building the city, we cannot forget the desires of every individual and their dream home: the home of the user who will put their name on their letterbox. How do we make then every dwelling become a desirable home? Students will tackle the challenge of converting density into desire by accommodating the users’ needs, yet following a restricted urban envelope that keeps energy consumption and carbon footprint under control. Students will develop an innovative tool (a game) capable of facilitating and visualizing a typological puzzle resulting when different clients, cultures and desires come to live together. The resulting intensity of the proposals is due to the convergence of many interests and the resolution of conflicts. We believe that this intensity, when applied to housing, can optimize land use, help combat inequality and counteract the centrifugal force condemning urban development to urban sprawl.
PROF. WINY MASS (MVRDV) JAVIER ARPA FERNANDEZ FELIX MADRAZO ADRIEN RAVON
TRAVEL DATES Delft, Netherlands: MAY 08 - MAY 31 3 students will be awarded the the Fender Katsalidis Architecture travel grant which is to the value of $3,300 per grant.
As this studio is a part of an ongoing research project students will be asked to sign an RMIT participation agreement prior to commencing the studio.
PROF. VIVIAN MITSOGIANNI BEN MILBOURNE PROF. MARK JACQUES
Background Image Copyright: The Why Factory 2015
DISTRICT 2 Vietnam travelling studio 2017 ho chi minh city This studio will examine the urban patterns of a city in super-fast change; particularly areas at the edge of the hyper-dense explosion. The tube house as a unit of the city structure, and the strange moments of a half built city will be our starting point. Looking very closely at what is already there will be another starting point.
another periphery another strange another observation
DRIA Designing Resilience in Asia International Design Competition and Symposium
Architecture UP Design Studio sem 1-2017 Tutor: Mauro Baracco Wednesday evenings, 5.30-9.30 pm Studio will start from wk 3, Wednesday 15 March Time lost at the beginning of the semester will be recovered through additional classes and/or some longer hour classes
RMIT Architecture has been invited to participate into an International Design Competition for urban, architectural, landscape projects for the coastal town of Semarang, Indonesia. Some of the students projects completed through this studio will be entered into the competition. 2 selected students will travel (travelling + accommodation costs are covered) to the National University of Singapore in August 2017 together with RMIT staff to attend a symposium focused on the topic of urban resilience. The RMIT delegation will present their project/s as part of a forum where presentations will be given also by other international speakers and institutions involved with the same competition. This studio/competition will be focused on urban solutions for droughts, subsidence and flooding affecting the town of Semarang. The design approach encouraged through the studio will investigate resilient environments through solutions that are dynamic, unstable, flexible, fragile, malleable, thus resilient.
R E S I L I E N T E N V I R O N M E N T S M E T R O C B D N O R T H This studio will place architectural design in a central position to develop design-based solutions to urban resilience by considering the traditional concerns of land use and urbanisation anew. It will investigate the role and effects of ‘infrastructural development’ applied to urban environments that are currently undergoing intensive urban transformation. The Melbourne Metro project, will be explored as a relevant case-study context that will be tested at many different scales. A range of urban, landscape, and housing projects will be tested within the vicinity of the CBD North Station, seeking to transform current urban and environmental conditions into a set of innovative integrated resilient urban/architectural/landscape and infrastructural environments.
MASTERS OF ARCHITECTURE STUDIO SEMESTER 1 2017 TUTOR: JONATHAN WARE - WEDNESDAYS 6 - 10 PM
Cities
This studio will utilise the Melbourne Metro project as a catalyst for new resilient infrastructures in the city by creating vibrant and liveable urban habitats. Our interventions will work toward incorporating ecologically performative systems which help to reduce the environmental impacts of cities on their local and territorial contexts, while simultaneously generating opportunistic and generous architectural outcomes that directly engage with natural phenomena. A key architectural concern will seek to address housing as a fundamental aspect of resilient urban environments. What alternatives can supply a demand in housing to a disenfranchised generation in urban environments? By treating architecture as an infrastructure for living we will suggest occupiable frameworks as an alternative to the generic apartment tower typology which continues to drive the speculative housing market. We will look at the values gained and the lessons learnt from the radical and brutalist architecture of the sixties + seventies and attempt to relate these to the current situations, extending the social and political agendas of these works into the contemporary situation with a focus on urban/environmental rehabilitation + landscape/infrastructural resilience.
no-stop city - archizoom
robin hood gardens - the smithsons
bosco verticale - stefano boeri
utec, lima, peru - grafton architects
And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!" "Have you used it much?" I enquired. "It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. - Lewis Carol, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
Ex Nihilo
ɛks ˈnʌɪhɪləʊ/ adverb formal out of nothing.
Tuesdays 9:30-1:30 Gwyllim Jahn Ex Nihilo is a masters studio investigating the relationship between mixed reality representation, craftsmanship and the production of architecture. Students will work with Hololens headsets to represent and build their ideas through shared collaborative holograms at 1:1 and in situ, shattering existing barriers of interdisciplinary communication, expertise, drawing convention and even conventional understandings of how we occupy and produce space. Ex Nihilo will explore “creation from nothing” without drawn documentation - by using holographic models as guides for collaborative fabrication and gamified making. This polemical position attempts to refigure the tropes of digital design not as a means of working to high degrees of tolerance and precision but instead as a return to craftsmanship whereby the capacity of the builder to make intuitive design decisions and adjustments in-the-making will take on renewed significance in architectural production.
The studio is a deliberate attempt to assimilate design and fabrication. What new architectural forms might be found in this superposition of the digital and the craftsman? Are we on the brink of a second wave of CAD/CAM, formed instead as a collaboration between digital model and man (CAD/MAN)? Ex Nihilo will investigate how emerging augmented reality technologies influence design thinking, and how we may peer through the augmented lens to rework older notions of architecture and architectural production that have been abandoned by the digital epoch. The first half of the semester will be spent reworking architectural precedent, reading (Carol & Borges among others) and working individually to develop techniques and capabilities for augmented reality fabrication. The second half of the semester will be spent resolving large scale prototypes and architectural propositions. Final projects will be completed in pairs. Key superpositions: architecture without parts / architecture of all-parts architecture without drawings / re-drawing architecture architecture without tolerance / master craftsmanship contortionist builders / building from the body building games / gaming building continuous design /
ASCENSION CENSION
MASTERS STUDIO UPPER POOL STUDIO ROLAND & MARC GIBSON ROLANDSNOOKS SNOOKS & MARC GIBSON With building-scale 3D printing becoming a reality, this studio will explore the This studio implications will exploreofhighly intricate ornamental and architectural this technology through the design of tectonic high-rise architectural towers. The studio willthrough explore highly intricate structural, and tectonic geometry created emerging robotic andornamental digital fabrication tools. RMIT have architectural geometry created through generative design processes. These become leaders in large scale 3D printing that enable the fabrication of geometries geometries are becoming increasingly realisable through innovative construction not previously feasible. processes. This is not a fabrication studio and it won’t directly engage in prototypes, however it will seek to understand the limitations and possibilities of large-scale Theprinting studioand willexamine offer an introduction bothspace digital and fabrication 3D how this opens upto a new of architectural designtools capable possibility. The first half of the semester will focus on algorithmic techniques and of generating a high level of intricacy. The iterative nature of these tools enables methodology through a series of short studies, while the second half of the studio highly intricate patterns and forms to be generated. will apply this approach to the design of a tower.
The half of the semester on scripting methodology It willfirst be beneficial for students to will havefocus prior experience withtechnique grasshopperand or other through adigital seriestools. of short esquisses, while the second half of the course will focus on procedural the application of these methodologies to problems of design.
The studio will run in parallel to the R2-Detail elective course, and we encourage students interested in this studio to also enrol in the elective. R2-Detail will operate through the design and prototyping of 3D printed high-rise building details using full-scale robotic prints.
WEDNESDAY 5:30PM - 9:30PM ***Please note that it will be beneficial for students to have prior experience with grasshopper and complex topological modeling software (Rhino/Maya/Max).***
CONSCIOUS CREATING THE PLACE | Medini Iskandar Malaysia | THE YEAR THE PLATFORM | Malaysia Biennial 100YC
|
2117
We will consider the probable shifts in human consciousness in 100 years and consider how that manifests in HOW we live. The SDGG (Super Democratic Global Government) has dissolved borders, influencing trade and intellectual property toward a phase of “radical sharing”. We will imagine new technologies from multifarious fields to create buildings congruent with the fundamental life force. We will transcend old ideas of “separateness’’ in humanity and look to architectural models of support, inclusion and fusion. (We will keep a keen eye on what is proposed for the current inhabitants of the site and how/where they will be relocated). We will engage in absolute leading edge thinking to unveil the next evolutionary strain of mind-matter. There are NO “Green” buildings or “Sustainable Design” as the cerebral cortex has evolved to assume these definitions in all instances as inherent. We will antagonise the current Master Plan and proffer alternatives. We will sketch, paint, model and compute the Global functional aesthetic for 2117 Medini Iskandar will be the model for future global projects.
RMIT DESIGN HUB WEDNESDAYS 5.30PM CASSANDRA FAHEY
CATALYST 100 Year City Medini Malaysia Design Studio Leader: BRENT ALLPRESS Industry partners: MIMSB, Malaysia Tuesdays 9.30am-1.30pm This studio investigates the contribution that strategic architectural design interventions can make to the staged development of the new city Medini that is being founded in southern Malaysia, directly across the straights from Singapore. This city is being constructed on a green field site. Transportation and roading infrastructure has been implemented and some initial buildings have been constructed. The city is at a nascent stage of development. This presents a unique opportunity to make architectural proposals that could inform the future evolution of this major new urban centre. The studio will involve critical design responses through architectural interventions that work with, against and across existing urban masterplan assumptions. Metropolitan scale urban scenarios for the staged development of the city will be investigated from the immediately implementable through to longest term projections and speculations on the viable, vibrant and sustainable future of this city and region. Architectural built fabric scaled design proposals and projects will be developed in response to and as a driver for that staged framework. Alternatives to mono-functional zoning defaults will be emphasised. Hybrid building typologies will be considered. Emerging urban economies and technologies will be investigated. Counter-compositional design strategies will be explored. The role of anchor architectural projects with high design values as a catalyst for urban precinct scale development will be a key focus, looking at a productive contestation between the special and the generic. The opportunistic co-option and curation of metropolitan scale infrastructure offers a potential means to gain a critical mass, intensity and quality of urban life. This studio is being offered as part of a funded architectural design research project 100 Year City Medini Malaysia with industry partners MIMSB who are developing the new city. Outcomes of this studio will be presented in a series of international workshops and at the inaugural Malaysia Biennale in November 2017 alongside contributions from leading invited international architecture schools and design proposals are expected to be of the highest exhibitable standard.
FARM HD
This studio will examine the vertical farming typology and its potential architectural consequences. The world is urbanising at an incredible rate. While the population expands rapidly, more and more people are living in cities. As of recently more than half of the world’s population live in cities, and the megacity is the fastest growing urban type. At the same time man made climate change is drastically reducing the world’s arable land, jeopardising the world’s food supply. The future of food production lies in intensive industrialised processes that make maximum use of land and other resources. While not yet practical, or economically feasible, this future might include high density vertical farming. Since the turn of the century, more towers have been built in the world than the entire human history that preceded it. While the farming tower has not come to be, it is worth imagining a future in which it might exist and considering the broader implications of folding productive space into the tower type. The studio will not attempt to solve the scientific, engineering or economic challenges of vertical farming, but rather to think through the architectural and urban implications of this new building typology. The studio forms part of the FarmHD design research project that will culminate in sypmposia in Hong Kong and Melbourne, and is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade & the Australia China Council. The studio will focus on three high density sites in Hong Kong, for which students will develop design responses incorporating one or a number of high intensity farming programs. Students will be expected to develop and understanding of the particular of these sites through remote & digital site analysis techniques, and a familiarity with the taxonomy of tower typologies. The final projects will be a suite of three high density, hybrid and mixed use towers that seek to advance the evolution of the tower type and urban models through the integration of food production. The studio will operate in a propositional mode, where students will be expected to start designing the projects from the first session and continue to develop and propose while gathering information relevant to the problem of high density cities & food production. Students will be working in small groups on multiple projects simultaneously. No experience with Hong Kong or vertical farming is required, however we expect students undertaking this studio to be prepared to speculate on the brief from the start. We expect high levels of production, ambition and risk. Students may be invited to have their work exhibited as a part of the FarmHD symposia and publication.
With: John Doyle Times: Wednesday evenings 6pm-10pm Location: TBC
SKUNK WORKS
ARM PRACTICE STUDIO | MARK RAGGATT & TIM PYKE | WEDNESDAYS 18:30 | 11/522 FLINDERS LANE
! S I H T E T A I NEGOT
LYONS PRACTICE STUDIO Semester 1 – 2017 The studio explores the idea of design as a kind of negotiation, one that is charged with multiple histories, contradictory interests and unexpected alliances.
The final studio project (revealed after a ‘pre-season’ of weekly design exercises) will focus one of Melbourne’s most popular and contentious inner urban sites.
The negotiations will create an idea of a public realm of public architecture that unexpectedly holds together ‘competing’ interests. The city is a treaty in built form.
The studio will be based in the Lyons office and led by Professor Carey Lyon, Adam Pustola and Nick Bourns.
Current projects by Lyons such as Yagan Square in Perth and RMIT’s own New Academic Street are ‘negotiated architecture’, where the complexities of the their cities, cultures and stories are embraced. Multiple ideas are curated into each project to design a civic realm that can walk and talk different narratives. Students will work within a ‘design discourse’ with layers of built context and ideas and thinkers that connect our discipline with abutting cultures.
TUESDAYS 6 – 9PM AT LYONS OFFICE Level 3 246 Bourke St Melbourne NOTE: First Studio session will be held on Wednesday 1 March
The General Practitioner has its roots in the Australian suburban landscape. Nestled into existing houses, the waiting room occupying the living room. Florence Nightingale pioneered to push for the hospital to no longer be regarded as the place for the sick to die but rather to understand this construct as a nurturing and preventative environment. The family GP and the health clinic form the in-between condition between aliments, sickness and the hospital, providing a buffer to the much larger machine. Based on a need for providing a utilitarian environment the act of waiting helps to establish an understanding of what the civic responsibility may be when considering the role of community within such an environment. WAITING investigates this in-between condition and questions its role within society as a community ‘convenience’ and support centre. How do we begin to understand the role that this plays within the inner city construct? How might reconsidering the architecture for the clinic impact the city realm? The role of the precedent is always regarded highly within the design studios. The precedents will be utilised as a mechanism for testing the program on the site and will then be used to inform the final outcome. Students will be engaged with model making, rigorous site, program and precedent analysis reviewing the role of the civic gesture verses that of the utilitarian condition of place making. Sections, sections, sections. MA DESIGN STUDIO S1 2017
URBAN ENVIRONMENT – MEDIUM SCALE
WAITING
WEDNESDAY 6.00-10.00PM
AMY MUIR
This studio will explore issues of privacy, amenity and the new(s). These will be explored through the programmatic lens of a Multi Aged Precinct (M.A.P). We will seek out solutions to the variant condition known as adjacency. FAKE HUES held 2017.1 Wednesday’s 6pm+ Simon Drysdale
FAKE HUES
NEW SHEPPARTON NEW SHEPPARTON will examine the
The studio will propose models for a total
STUDIO LEADERS
impilications for architectcure, urban
redesign of Shepparton and will present
Dr Jan van Schaik is a researcher and
design and infrastructure, as well as
these models to the CSIRO, CLARA and
lecturer at RMIT University, co-director
cultural and social ecologies and
representatives of the communities of the
of MvS Architects and curator of the
economies, arising from the proposed
City of Greater Shepparton.
WRITING & CONCEPTS Lecture Series.
high-speed train from Southern Cross Esther Anatolitis is a writer, critic and
Station to central Shepparton and beyond.
In order to fund the line, Shepparton will
CLIENTS
curator, and Director of Projects at
Commonwealth Scientific and
Regional Arts Victoria.
need to be redesigned to deliver significant Industrial Research Organisation property development revenue to the
Consolidated Land and Rail Australia
private consortium that will fund,
Australian Federal Government
DATE
construct and operate the service.
State Government of Victoria
Wednesday nights 6:30pm
City of Greater Shepparton
CROSS POLLINATION involves the transfer of pollen from the anther of one ower to the stigma of a genetically different ower. An external agent is essential to carry the pollen grains to another stigma. Cross pollination is unable to preserve all the highly useful characters since they tend to get diluted. Cross pollination is a mechanism for producing new races, varieties and even new species.
STAGE 1 How can we combine ‘unlike’ concepts to create an architectural proposition? What happens when you cross an irrational and external non-architectural process (or set of instructions) with an architectural design process? The aim of the studio will be to challenge conventional design thinking by creating unconventional design processes to cross-pollinate architectural propositions. Stage 1 will provide glimpses and ideas on how you will structure your own design process. It will be the springboard for students to generate and design their own set of instructions on “how to.....” STAGE 2 An extraction of the discoveries found in the design processes undertaken in Stage 1 will take place to direct us in nding other possible architectural possibilities. We will attempt to explore alternative organisations for a school typology within a restricted site. The goal is to challenge what is familiar and common in architectural relationships and propose new spatial resolutions in the way we experience architecture. KARLA MARTINEZ
TUESDAYS 6:30pm - 10:30pm