RMIT M ASTERS STUDIO_ SEM 1 2020
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Tu tors: D r A l i sa A nd ra s ek an d Josh ua Lye The studio is part of CITYX 100YC global initiative, seeking to create a sustainable blueprint for the future evolution of urban design and architecture in China. It will showcase new architectural and urban design concepts for the staged development of Xiong’an New Area, which will be featured at the 17th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, alongside leading international architecture schools, visionaries and design researchers. In a world that is rapidly converted into information, future cities and buildings will be characterized by enhanced resilience, plasticity, and malleability of complex interrelated systems; in short, increased designability within complex ecologies, allowing for design proposals of unprecedented nature, complexity and scale. Recognizing that architecture is as fundamentally informational as it is material, studio will explore design systems for complexity, necessitated by the increasingly volatile state of the planet, and afforded by the convergence of exponential technologies. Big data, AI, blockchain, simulation, robotics and automation are new resources, disrupting micro to macro conditions of architecture, cities, engineering, construction and development. The studio will focus on a design of an intensive urban sequence, a tower for a high density, very large future city. We will be looking critically at the current planning, automation and prefabrication examples such as Google Sidewalk mass timber tower and Archistar property intelligence platform, evolving next generation of buildings, co-designed and built with big data and ai, at radically increased resolution and complexity, and rendering previously unseen aesthetics. Building will search for radically enhanced inhabitation patterns, be super-sensitive to local physics of wind, sound, exposure to the sun. It will relate to the new mobility infrastructures and test the ideas of distributed and localised energy production. Studio will be taught mostly online, in an intensive format over 6 and a half weeks. There will be strong collaborative links with Bachelors studio, taught by Andrasek and Hayball architects, and working on an urban scale on the same site. Students will be working in teams throughout the semester and prior knowledge of Rhino, Grasshopper and similar software is highly recommended. https://www.alisaandrasek.com/ https://www.cityxchina.org/ Studio Timeline Studio runs from Weeks 1- 8. Weeks 1-6 Online Week 7-8 face to face intensive workshops
Somewhere between the disciplinary earnestness of “A Pattern Language”, the imagined worlds of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, and the clumsy joy of an “I Forced A Bot” meme lies the potential for an unconventional regulatory framework that just might bring us closer to our aspirational city...
Our built environment is shaped by regulations and standards – well-intentioned frameworks designed to guide our decision-making towards “good” built outcomes and protect us from nefarious actors. Regardless of context or site, the language, tone, and structure of these regulatory documents remains similar – cold, dry, unambiguous, and obsessively quantitative.
Contemporary cities are a direct product of the regulatory documents which shape them. Typical new builds seem to echo the cold, matter-of-fact language and overtly quantitative metrics which regulate their existence, devoid of atmosphere or qualitative difference. Perhaps by adhering to a set of regulatory frameworks which avoid ambiguity at all costs, we lose something – we lose potential for interpretation and imagination; we lose the possibility of a better quality of built environment. Well, what if planning regulations were written by poets? Or an A.I.? If we embrace linguistic ambiguity, would the language of our built environment begin to reflect the novel, poetic language of its regulations? Let’s investigate. Your role in this investigation is twofold: First, you will carefully curate and contribute text-based inputs from a range of literary, poetic, film, historical, theoretical, and personal sources to an automated text-generator program to create a radical, site-specific, alternate regulatory framework for city planning (i.e. a “nonsense regulation”). Second, you will evidence the architectural possibilities created by your “nonsense regulation” in the design of a building, buildings, or precinct within Melbourne – a UNESCO designated City of Literature and site that is at once real and imagined.
DRIA
Designing
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International Design Competition and Symposium Master of Architecture Design Studio sem 1-2020 Mauro Baracco, with Imogen Fry Tuesday mornings, 9 30 - 1 30pm, 100.04.006 Beginning week 1, Tuesday 3 March
RMIT Architecture has been invited to participate in the Designing Resilience in Asia International Design Competition for urban, architectural and landscape projects for the City of Naga, on the mouth of the Bicol River Basin, Philippines. Students will complete projects in small groups with one of these being selected to represent RMIT in the international competition. 2 selected students will travel to King Mongkut’s University of Technology, Thonburi, Thailand in July 2020 together with RMIT staff to attend a symposium focused on the topic of urban resilience. The RMIT delegation will present their project 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, flooding, sea level rise, typhoons, landslides, liquefaction, urbanisation and land use change, all of which are currently affecting Naga City. The design approach encouraged through the studio will investigate resilient environments through solutions that are dynamic, unstable, flexible, fragile, malleable and, thus, resilient. Image 2019 DRIA competition entry RMIT
The End of the City Our cities continue to grow and their edges keep disappearing, it is unclear where city ends and rural begins. Rural contexts are often thought of as the picturesque and endless expanses of green space however are they really just another version of city? We inhabit a rich urban context. Melbourne in 2020 has nuances, strangeness and accidental greatness in its urban realm. This studio will take the city as a contemporary resource of urban infrastructures, observe and learn from it. It is expected that students will develop catalytic and systemic design propositions that will be tested against the particularities of specific context. Students will be asked to define what is universal verses the particular to their conceptual agendas. Being one of the few building typologies that occupy our coastlines, the lifesaving club will be used to investigate these ideas. The typology of the lifesaving clubhouse originated in Australia. We will be looking beyond the limited historic examples of clubhouse to local urban ecologies to find a new relevance for this building. Lifesaving clubs inhabit a clear threshold between city and nature, they bookend our city. However, they are positioned in the ever-changing environment between sea and land, which by no means is a permanent edge to the city. We will speculate on how architecture can better address this condition. Evie Blackman Tuesdays 6pm
WEDNESDAY 6-10 PM 100.04.07
TUTORS: ANDRE BONNICE - JEAN-MARIE SPENCER
Of all the issues threatening global politics, few are as baleful as our refusal to tackle climate change. In Australia, the devastation of the recent bushfires has laid bare the lack of leadership on the most pressing issue facing our time. For Australia, at the heart of the issue is undoubtedly coal. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chang (IPCC) declared, to stop warming at 1.5C, coal use for electricity must be reduced to almost zero by 2050. In Australia in 2019, 86% of electricity was generated from fossil fuels, 74% of which was from coal. Architecture is deeply complicit in this negligence, the power station symbolic of this failure. While modern power plants are a technological achievement that has transformed many lives for the better, our reliance on coal power must end. For Victoria, its large scale power plants in the La Trobe Valley have proved incapable of delivering electricity without a significant impact on the environment.
As Enter Future Dist. Co’s first members you will expand on previous research - Dirty Coal & Beloved Coal and will move beyond the bounds of the power plant. Exploring power distribution from the LaTrobe Valley to central Melbourne and the cultural, social, economic and environmental impact of electricity generation in Victoria. Beyond solar panels on the roof, what capacity could other novel forms of power generation have on the expanding distribution network of power production? Through the integration of speculative power with existing directional infrastructure, Enter Future Dist. Co. will theorise positive futures for the power industry in Victoria.
KEYWORDS: ENERGY, DISTRIBUTION, PROTEST, ECONOMICS, IDENTITY
We Are The Word
This studio expands on the prize-winning proposition ‘Parker Model’ by Alter Atlas Architecture to investigate, speculate, explore and design the way we craft architectural propositions. The agenda of this studio is to engage with the complex and contradictory nature of architectural design and to instill the ethic of working with structure and rigour during the design process to study and generate multiple, articulated positions for an ideas-led venturous design practice leading to speculative spatial outcomes for urban environments. Through a literary-process-based exploration, students will be introduced to the curation and purpose of critical design where speculative visions and detailed resolutions are interdependent, to produce thoughtfully executed propositions that catalyse new interpretations of the practice of architecture as intellectual and cultural production.
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Students will be introduced to a literary process of designing, guided with a tangible framework aimed at generating openly speculative yet thoughtfully executed architectural propositions. The word will be identified as the generator of architecture. Each student will work on crafting a major proposition for cities using the Central Business District in the City of Melbourne as a departure point, specifically focusing on one city block. d in
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Wednesdays. 6 PM. 100.06.003 RMIT Architecture Masters Studio Steven Chu - Founding Director at Alter Atlas Architecture
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Loaded with creativity and aspirations to address, critique or challenge social, cultural and environmental issues and existing urban design policies and framework, this studio seeks to promote the role of the architect and the skill of architectural thinking beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture.
hyperloose G RAHA M CRIST AND TOM MURATORE R M I T M a s t e r o f A r c h i t e c t u r e D e s i g n s t u d i o 2 0 1 9 We d n e s d ay 6 p m
Kanagawa Institute of Technology / Junya Ishigami + Associates
Hyperloose is the ipside of the Supertight: space less precise but more efficient Hyperloose is the flipside of the Supertight.* It asks the same question, from the opposite point of view. How can we use space more intensely and ultimately, less of it? As we try to tightly compress space, it becomes useful, paradoxically to loosen how it is used. To jam as many things into a space as possible, the space needs to be loose, accommodating and super robust. Often these spaces are big, with big spans and great structure. Often they are so beautiful we simply want to find ways to fit into them. Hyperloose is flexible without being generic. We will design projects that accommodate everything the future needs, without sprawling. Our experiment will be whether pulling function out of architecture, loosening its space, can help tighten its footprint. We will test all sorts of functions, and reserve space and energy for HOUSING in its radical forms. (* see Supertight AU; Supertighter, Supertightest)
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H a y b a l l Of f i ce - Fl i n d e rs La n e We d n e s d a y s 1 7 : 30 - 2 2: 3 0 Source: https://davidspriggs.art/portfolio/paradox-of-power/
The Hayball R.M.I.T. practice studio is embedded as part of ‘HayLab’. The studio utilises design as a research method to probe a series of questions to develop analysis as a creative tool to generate new and synthetic propositions. The process will be iterative and immersive.
The Hayball studio will use the combined boundaries of Preston Market and Preston Station in the City of Darebin as a test site to create a design and urban led approach for a dense mixed-use precinct, a new speculative model of master planning where the market and exchange system drives this city quarter. The studio begins as an investigative foray into the history of the marketplace as a synthesis of multiple spatial typologies – such as commerce, social, transition, education, and tourism. We will expand on the traditional understanding of the word, “market” as one of many types of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations, and infrastructures where exchange occurs. Markets facilitate trade and enable the distribution and allocation of resources in a society, so how can this model engage with the current and future economic climate? The studio will develop the marketplace of the future, with the opportunity to capitalise on an existing symbiosis between train station and market; two spaces in continuous flux.
Outpost is a series of teaching studios run by John Wardle Architects. A place to test new ideas, we chose its name to evoke the feeling of occupying a frontier - of leaving an established base and surveying new territory. This resonates with our ongoing engagement with issues, people and places beyond our studios. We understand Outposts as speculative by nature and represent a desire to evolve cultural values and experiment with emerging forms of knowledge. They can be defined by a geographical location, a philosophical position, or a new medium of creative expression. By operating at a distance, an Outpost is a site to experiment with new ideas, identities, and modes of representation. PLATFORM Outpost 03 considers the Platform as a site for architectural inquiry. Platform is a term that is loaded with mixed associations - it can be regarded as a neutral plane, or something that purposefully elevates, privileges and gives prominence. Architectural projects themselves are often a Platform for promoting specific values, agendas and ideas. The Platform being considered for this studio is the design of a new bridge - from Birrarung Marr to the Alexandra Gardens. As a type of Platform, the perception of bridges is as mixed as the sheer diversity of built and speculative precedent on offer. Bridges can be Indifferent or embedded, imagistic or anonymous, symbols of progress or destruction (often at the same time) and resource heavy or renewable. While bridges are often presented as the solution to a clear problem – alleviating congestion, enhancing connectivity or upgrading obsolete modes of transportation, these chequered perceptions complicate this assumption. The construction of a new bridge often precipitates the reconstruction of its environment – for better or worse. Indeed, this studio pursues the idea that the construction of architectural type should be paralleled with a speculative reconstruction of its context. This complex reading of the relationship between site and object is evident in the ability of a bridge to transform the maximum amount of city with the minimum amount of footprint. Far from a neutral piece of infrastructure, this studio promotes bridges as a Platform for addressing the key issues and anxieties facing contemporary civic and infrastructural projects.
STUDIO LEADERS Nick Roberts + Tom Proctor
the idea of melbourne
simone koch with matthew lochert
or proposition. We will use weekly projects as investigations and speculations as to the nature of the place as a system in perpetual flux. Commencing with a landscape project, the students will each
each contributing to this vision, perhaps shifting it sideways, as it develops from a critique of the City of the present towards a proposition for the City of the future. The focus of the
the world of ideas. Success will be judged on each student’s ability to articulate their own agenda, refine it and prosecute it across the course of the semester. To develop a keen awareness of their
We will again take on The City of Melbourne, not just the CBD buts its municipal extents, to the ends of its boulevards. A project that is in parts comprehension, critique and operation
imagine The City of Melbourne as an idea. This may include realities of geology, climate, history, culture, economics and politics. The idea will be used as the backdrop of their weekly interventions,
studio is to provide the forum for each student to develop a personal architecture, of culture, of urban design, and to place themselves within not only the context, their own idea, but that of
individual potential to command and shift the conversations of the future, their willingness and desire to see architecture as a way of engaging with the world beyond the discipline. wed eve
jan senbergs .. geelong capriccio (if geelong were settled instead of melbourne
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The studio will be a workshop for typological & procedural explorations investigating how contaminations and transformations of diverse typologies and sub-typological behaviours can assist in re-imagining formal, spatial and organizational architectural elements (form, circulation, spatial arrangement, ornament, etc.) Procedural experiments will be deployed to assist in manipulating, distorting, amplifying, shattering, dispersing, and {insert action here} the behaviours and qualities of existing sub-typological behaviours to affect the architectural elements of learning typologies.
The studio will explore speculative strategies for learning environments on specific site and architectural conditions. At an urban scale - we will question civic presence and contribution to specific urban conditions; formal and ornamental strategies – exploring formal organisations, scenarios and identity; and learning spatial and programmatic arrangements – examining spatial relationships and interaction between different learning/civic modalities.
The studio will be a vehicle to seek out architectural possibilities - generating experimental propositions and prototypical spatial and formal models for learning environments and to stimulate design conversations for the development of RMIT’s Digital Media Precinct in Docklands. Speculative explorations will merge with the practicalities of real-world conditions.
N E T H E R L A N D S This Master of Architecture Studio is a collaboration between The Why Factory @ TU Delft and RMIT Architecture. RMIT Architecture students will travel to Delft during the last weeks of the studio and will work at the Why Factory @ TU Delft The Why Factory is dedicated to creating future cities; the Super Loop studio will investigate the relationship between mobility and urban form. Starting from a precise “What if…?” question students will develop scenarios that explore the future form of cities over the next 100 years. These changes will be explored on all scales; from global to territorial, to architectural typology, down to innovation on a building technology scale: what are the details that change the world? This studio will challenge students to interrogate the fundamental shapers of their scenario on a 1:50, 1:20, 1:10, 1:1… scale. Double Loop will guide students through this process of formulating and visualizing their future fantasies: learning to dream big, to prepare them with the skills and tools to imagine – then effect – change. How does our life change? How do we commute and how do we consume? What is the urgency and how can we communicate this to global leaders? Refer to the Ballot session for more detail on the studio curriculum.
An information session will be held for traveling studios at 3:30pm Tuesday 25th of February, in 100.05.04
Architecture
SUPER LOOP TUTORS: Winy Maas (MVRDV/ The Why Factory @ TU Delft), Javier Arpa (The Why Factory @ TU Delft) & Felix Madrazzo (IND/ The Why Factory @ TU Delft) Ben Milbourne (RMIT Architecture & Urban Design)
PROPOSED TIMELINE: Semester 1 2019, weeks 2-7 in Melbourne, followed by intensive workshop at TU Delft during Weeks 8-10 (28/04-19/05/20)
TRAVELLING TO: Delft, Netherlands [Delft is 20 mins by train away from Rotterdam and 50mins from Amsterdam]. Financial Support: Students in this studio will be eligible for one of 3 Fender Katsalidis Architecture Travelling Scholarships [$3,300]. Travelling students may also be eligible for other forms of funding including OS-HELP loans. Further advice will be provided at the briefing session. Maximum number of students: 14. Contact: Ben Milbourne (ben.milbourne@rmit.edu.au)
Cemeteries inherently are governed by metrics and the utilitarian infrastructure that has been implemented in order to service, access and maintain the necropolis. Fawkner Train Station opened in 1886. In 1906 Fawkner Cemetery opened absorbing into its site the train line and station. A train that provided for the transportation of coffins and mourners. A train station that serviced the city of the dead. As cemeteries have evolved over time there is an acknowledgment that there is still a requirement to provide for a variety of forms of burial and remembrance. The predominance of the field verses garden. Spaces of inclusion. Spaces defined by religious boundaries. Spaces defined by acknowledgment type. Each cemetery is accompanied by various additional built programs such as the flower shop, crematorium, chapel. With the introduction of assisted death legislation in Victoria in 2019, Greater Melbourne Cemetery Trust are now in the process of understanding how this might be accommodated within their remit. What is the infrastructure that would define this program? The design studio will explore the role of the cemetery through the lens of ‘now’ and the growing requirements associated with death and remembrance. This will be balanced with understanding the historical significance of the infrastructure that defines the mechanics of the necropolis and how this might this be exploited in order to define a new appendage to the cemetery. Students will be engaged with model making, rigorous site, program and precedent analysis, reviewing the role of the cemetery and the infrastructure required to support it as a civic entity. Drawing, drawing, drawing. MA ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO S1 2020 WEDNESDAY 6-10PM AMY MUIR
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EXPERIMENTAL CITIES:
An Interdisciplinary Design Research Studio | Landscape Architecture | Architecture RMIT 2020 The Experimental Cities: CityX international studio project, in conjunction with the Venice Architecture Biennale 2020 Biennale Sessions, will address the sustainability and urban challenges facing the city of the future.
Studio Leaders Associate Professor Charles Anderson + Professor Tom Kovac with Professor Michael Trudgeon (VEIL) + Michele Pasca, (Director Zaha Hadid Architects)
Two site locations are proposed for this investigation: the Xiong’an New Area City and the special district of Ma Wan island in the City of Hong Kong. The two locations have been selected as key test sites for experimental projects to develop new resilient urban strategies in the face of climate change and the need to dramatically and urgently reduce the carbon footprint of our cities. Experimental Cities: CityX explores the future of cities in relation to the changing nature of the environment and our changing understanding of the environment and of our place within it. Engaging directly with climate change and its impacts at a local and regional scale, and working across a range of design disciplines and related practices, it seeks to envision scenarios for sustainable and resilient futures. Experimental Cities: CityX aims to more clearly understand new relationships and formations for human habitation, generating future scenarios for Chinese cities which respond to the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing world. Recognising that such design challenges are never discipline specific, this studio also adopts a necessarily interdisciplinary approach of thinking across, between and outside disciplines. By definition, the studio champions a necessary mixed-mode of design/creative research and experimentation. This includes embracing collaborative, interdisciplinary processes and open-ended, iterative, non-linear generative procedures, and questioning ‘normative’ design work flows of conceptualization, development and production.
Experimental Cities: CityX is an interdiciplinary studioi run between Landscape Architcture and Architecture and will be an exhibiting participant in the next Venice Architecture Biennale, Biennale Sessions from May 21st 2020. The studio will be run in the intensive mode from Week 5 through to Week 11 of the semester. With weeks 12 to 14 reserved for the production of individual folios. Select projects and presentation of projects will be held at the Venice Biennale Sessions in Venice.
Studio Intensive Week 5 - Week 11 Tuesdays | Time: 5.30 - 9.30pm Rm: 100.05.05 Wednesdays | Time: 1.00 – 5.00pm Rm: 100.06.007 Thursdays | Time: 5.30 – 9.30pm Rm: 100.04.04
The studio will have joint presentation sessions with the architecture students on Thursday evenings and will be working with them in joint working sessions. Tuesday’s and Fridays will be reserved for individual group discussions. Evolving through this intensive period of the semester we hope that the Experimental Cities: CityX studio will provide a place for discussion, debate, speculation and lively interaction between the two cohorts of students as well as a range of academics, practitioners, professionals and stakeholders. In doing so Experimental Cities: CityX aims to foster a dynamic, participatory knowledge exchange and generate a range of propositional provocations regarding the design of our cities. Experimental Cities: CityX studio presents a unique opportunity to participate in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2020 and in the evolving discussion about what the future of human habitation might be. It is also the opportunity to work in collaboration with a range of practitioners and researchers from RMIT University, Zaha Hadid Architects and the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab (VEIL). Working across scales it is expected that the studio will produce large scale architectural, urban and landscape design propositions for Xiong’an special district and Man Wan Island Hong Kong. This aims to contribute to the broader discussion of the future of the Chinese City, which is at the heart of the CityX international project