RMIT Master of Architecture Design Studio Balloting Posters, Semester 2, 2020

SEMESTER 2 | 2020

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO BALLOTING POSTERS

R M I T m a s ter o f A R C H I TE C TUR E S TUD I O : s em 2 , 2 0 2 0

L o r en A d a m s

Somewhere between the environmental activism of Jack Mundey, the bizarre anti-ergonomic architectures of Arakawa & Gins, and the clumsy joy of an “I Forced A Bot” meme – with a splash of psychogeography – lies the potential for a radical reimagining of safety regulations for the built environment...

REGUL A TO R Y N o nsense :

DANGER

ZONE As architects, our freedom to act upon or within the built environment is governed by codes, standards, and regulations – well-intentioned frameworks designed to guide our decision-making towards “good” built outcomes and protect us from nefarious actors.

Our neighbourhoods are a direct product of the regulatory documents which shape them.

The specific things we choose to regulate – and the method by which we choose to measure compliance – tells a story about what we, as a society, collectively value.

In this studio we will interrogate the relationship between the language of regulatory documents and the quality of our built environment, with an emphasis on “safety”.

We ask: what if safety regulations were written by poets, dancers, philosophers, 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? In particular, how would the tensions between our simultaneous but contradictory desires for freedom (individual agency, bodily autonomy) and protection (public safety) play out in the design of our neighbourhoods?

In this studio, you will use a bespoke deep learning text generator ‘bot to create a radical, site-specific regulatory framework for “safety” in design (i.e. a “nonsense regulation”) for the City of Maribyrnong. Your ‘bot will be trained on carefully curated text inputs from a range of literary, poetic, historical, theoretical, and personal sources.

You will incrementally evidence the effectiveness, limitations, and possibilities of your “nonsense regulation” in the design of a precinct or building at the Maribyrnong Defence Site – a site of longstanding contention, contamination, and community action.

TUESD A Y E VENIN G s

TUESDAY 6-10 PM

TUTORS: ANDRE BONNICE - JEAN-MARIE SPENCER

Large-scale power plants have proved incapable of delivering electricity without significant impact on the environment.

Large-scale power is our energy myth. Energy companies continue to reassure us our energy systems are undergoing a great transformation but the reality is far from this. As the environmental cost of electricity generation has become clear, Architecture is still silent on the matter. The economic and environmental incentives have clearly not been enough.

Led by Andre Bonnice & Jean-Marie Spencer, EFDC Pty Ltd will research and develop speculative visions for alternate power systems that offer critical perspectives on the ‘now’ and remind us of other possibilities for the future. Students will explore independent systems to subvert and disrupt the existing power dynamic and power infrastructure of the city. Through the exploration of energy in exchange; EFDC Pty Ltd will explore actions and reactions, flows and interruptions.

As EFDC Pty Ltd’s members you will expand on previous research - Dirty Coal, Beloved Coal and EFDC. Students will explore power distribution from the LaTrobe Valley to central Melbourne and the cultural, social, economic and environmental impact of electricity generation in Victoria. Final projects will be individual with some group work during semester.

Please visit efdc.info for more information.

KEYWORDS: ENERGY - DISTRIBUTION - PROTEST - ECONOMICS - TECHNO-POLITICS

STAND UP

DESIGN, DISCUSS, AND DEBATE

Original Picture: AAP / Morgan Sette

The studio takes the current political climate as a backdrop both globally and locally as the impetus for architectural exploration and debate and makes the assertion that Architecture can be a participant in defining critical public debate but is usually complicit and rarely disobedient in its manifestation.

The studio will task students to engage critically in a broader spectrum of social issues and visit, through the practice of design, a considered attitude towards them. Whether environmental, preservationist, political, ethical, or simply aesthetic. We submit that there is a need for Architecture to enforce upon itself a clear, delineated agenda and to explore the argument within itself as it informs the ethos of architectural practice. How students speak to and represent their work will also be a large topic of exploration.

Students will explore the idea of ‘doubling’ or ‘embedding’. They will explore an approach to architecture where the response to client brief, context and program are the mere scaffold for architectural investigation. Leading to an architecture that meets the expectation of client driven architecture (function, profit, public good, etc.) but also ‘stands up’ and takes its place in critical debate of issues that affect our cities and places.

Nick Bourns with Dominic Tanaka Tuesdays 6pm

even looser G RAHAM CRIST AND TOM MURATORE R M I T M a s t e r of Architecture Design Studio 2020 Tuesday 6pm + online

The point of loosening architectural space is to reduce our footprint. This is perhaps the most important question or contribution architecture can make now.

This is done by sharing and overlapping space, rather than shrinking or compressing it.

Looseness 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, Hyperloose)

Kanagawa Institute of Technology / Junya Ishigami + Associates

POST CAPITAL This studio will explore the future of Jakarta and the future capital of Indonesia.

In 2019 President Joko Widodo announced that the capital of Indonesia would be moved away from its present location to East Kalimantan on Indonesian Borneo. Jakarta is experiencing major infrastructural and environmental problems. During the 20th and 21st Century the city experienced a surge of population growth, with rapid migration of people moving to the city in search of economic opportunity. There is a shortage of adequate and affordable housing, leading to vast sprawl which places extreme pressure on the city’s transit network which is frequently gridlocked. The city is prone to flooding, experiencing frequently catastrophic deluges. At the same time the city is located extremely close to sea level, and as a consequence of its geomorphology and haphazard infrastructure is sinking below sea at an alarming rate (17cm per year). When combined with a projected sea level rise of at least 800mm through the 21st Century, it is possible that the city will become unliveable in its current form.

The solution to move away from an existing capital and start afresh is not a new one. Throughout history there have been numerous examples of sovereigns uprooting the seat of power for political, military and other strategic justifications. During the nation building era of the 20th Century, the creation of a new capital became a mechanism by which (in particular) new or emerging countries could assert themselves as sovereign nations. In the era of modernist and proto-modernist planning, these schemes were invariably conceived as complete insertions into a virgin landscape, as autonomous entities that denied the particularities of the natural environment, indigenous cultures and often the practicalities of distance and access – with a similar stultified approach to the functional programming of the city.

If this brute force approach characterises the creation of new cities in the 20th Century, how might we propose an alternative or more nuanced approach to city building in the 21st Century.

This studio will explore alternate forms of city making and urbanisation for the future capital city of Indonesia. At a time when travel has become almost impossible, and the use of digital communication platforms has become the norm, is a new centrally located capital city even necessary? If people can be sentenced to death via Zoom, is a physical civic domain relevant?

More broadly, how should we design a capital for an archipelago, in which people can’t travel and if they are able to travel in the future – should they? What happens to Jakarta if it is no longer the capital?

Finally, how do we begin to conceive of a city that is fully embedded in its environment? Like many cities in South East, Jakarta is in close relationship with the natural environment that surrounds it. While the present discourse frames this as an existential battle, this studio will explore an alternate model of ecological urbanism in which the challenges of the city are reframed as its greatest strength. Rather than resisting nature, or even entering into a circular system of environmental management, a future urbanism might consist of a state of total liminality between green (biomass), blue (water) and red (hardscape) within a total concept of integrated urbanisation. While it is arguable that all cities are in some form of dialogue with these elements, Jakarta and similar emerging cities in the global south provide a valuable example through the extreme proximity and extreme density of all three of these conditions.

The studio will be a partnered studio working Dynamic City Foundation (Shanghai) and other organisations on a broader comparative research project analysing strategies of rapid urbanisation in delta landscapes.

TUTOR: JOHN DOYLE | WEDNESDAY EVENINGS

Background image an extract from Daniel Boyd’s VIDEO WORKS; Carriage Works; 2012,2013, and 2018 shown at Sydney Film Festival

Working DirtY Aus-Bush

This studio uses dirty algorithms to challenge current ideas of the way we occupy Australia and this semester works with Industry Partner Melbourne Zoo to look at new ways of doing Zoo. studio led by Dr. Emma Jackson Tuesdays from 9-1pm

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the idea

of melbourne

simone koch

with matthew lochert

Our intent is to help you understand how you engage with the world around you and to recognize how that affects the work you do. The way we see the world is inextricable from how or what we create within it. What makes this interesting to us is that this is not an idea that is unique to architecture. In almost every deliberate or even thoughtless action is embedded a philosophy or way of seeing, that is particular to every actor, that fundamentally shapes the decision, the action or the outcome. This understanding of yours will be developed through design and writing throughout the semester. Our intent is that you use the studio to clarify your position and leave with a way of presenting your ideas with the same efficiency as you do your work.

Our subject is Melbourne because it is complex and conflicted and a place in a perpetual state of flux. It is difficult to hold as a single idea and difficult to imagine affecting. To us it neatly represents the very difficulty of architecture. We’ll get you to engage directly with both of these through a series of weekly projects, commencing with a landscape project and working through an assortment that could be seen to form the basis of a community. Through each project you will gain a better understanding of the place and through repetition a better understanding of your own architecture. With luck, you’ll also develop a deeper understanding of how this work does happen.

The result of the projects as they compile will be more than just the sum of the objects but the potential effect on the place that they inhabit. So the idea of melbourne will be your unique idea of the place as well as your idea of you. Wednesday eve

Block Party: Victoria Street Vicky Lam RMIT Master of Architecture Tuesdays 12:30 pm - 4:30 pm starting week 2. Intensive week at week 6.

Please see Block Party: Richmond Elective this semester.

In this design studio, you will design a series of architectural projects in Victoria St. that borders Richmond and Abbotsford.

Victoria Street transitioned from a hub of Greek and Turkish immigrants in 50’s and 60’s , to new Vietnamese businesses and restaurants in the 80’s and 90’s . Along with growing diversity of immigrant populations, intensifying pressures of inner city gentrification is evident in the number medium to high density developments in the area.. Another layer of transformation is the drug use and economic decline of much of the retail activity along the street.

This studio will interrogate a site earmarked for medium density residential development to propose a series of designs that include: Relocation of the Memorial for Drug Overdose Decontamination Landscape Plan Vietnamese Women’s Association Residential Development This design studio continues a series of studios that addresses urban development that focus on what Atelier Bow Wow calls “Flux Management” to generate architecture that amplifies difference with generosity.

There will group work till mid semester, and following mid semester, students will work in pairs.

There will be no class in Week 1, but an intensive in Week 6 will be scheduled after discussion during class.

Illustration: Laura Zammit

The legacy and relevance of our public monuments is being openly debated. By extension, our urban spaces and public buildings should also be contested. While we are asked to withdraw from the civic sphere we are also drawn back to participate in challenging and reshaping its meaning.

Indigenous leader Noel has spoken of the three strands that form Australian culture; indigenous, settler and multicultural. It is a powerful idea to consider the complexities, layers, and potential reconciliation of groups within the city.

The city of Melbourne has its own foundation stories, erased histories, and waves of changes. The studio will examine how these three strands of the Australian cultural narrative are present and could be used to redraw our city.

The practice studio will explore our civic institutions of democracy, places of contested histories and hybrid buildings of multiculturalism.

Swanston Street and all the public buildings that form the ‘civic spine’ will be our focus, exploring the city from the Shrine to RMIT. Through drawing and urban research, the studio will design how these strands of identity could be erased, amended, or combined.

Working between competing ideas is critical to how the practice of Lyons makes architecture through ideas and debate. Through negotiation and debate, the studio will give form to contested ideas for the civic spine, and for each public building that could create a new Swanston Street. The studio will include individual design projects, research and mapping, and a final major project in small groups.

Studio will be held online on Wednesdays 5 – 9pm.

Studio Leaders: Professor Carey Lyon, Adam Pustola and Lyons studio guests

DOCKL ANDS-AN RMIT LOCATION STRATEGY STUDIO #

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AFTER TYPE CHAPTER: RMIT DOCKLANDS MEDIA PRECINCT SITE: DOCKLANDS | SCALE: MEDIUM | STUDIO LEADER: PATRICK MACASAET SEMI-INTENSIVE 10-WEEK STUDIO | WKS 1-5 TUESDAY 9.30AM | WKS 6-10 TUESDAY & FRIDAY (A). TYPOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS, SUB-TYPOLOGICAL BEHAVIOURS + RULE BASED EXPLORATIONS

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.

(B) MODELS FOR EDUCATION ALTERNATIVE TYPOLOGIES

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The studio will explore speculative formal and spatial strategies and compositions 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 modalities.

(C) RMIT DIGITAL MEDIA PRECINCT The studio will be a vehicle to seek out architectural possibilities to generate 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.

(D) SPECULATIVE MEDIA FRONTIERS: GAME ENGINES, FILM AND ANIMATION The studio will engage with speculative media and critical communicative formats for architecture to include game engines, film and animation via Unreal Engine and Adobe Premiere Pro. The studio embraces the notion that the medium of film and videos games are extraordinary shared languages and that they are engaging platforms on how our culture shares and disseminates our ideas. We will take the ideas and propositions generated from the design studio and encode them into the mediums of popular culture. As a speculative overlay, students will tackle future-centric speculations on the future of tertiary institutions particularly in the current pandemic climate. No previous experience on Unreal Engine and Adobe Premiere Pro required.

Background Image: ‘City of Gold’ Virtual World MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) by AT Chapter 1 students.

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VOLUME 2 Melbourne is Australia’s fastest growing city, projected to overtake Sydney as Australia’s largest city in 2030 and reach a population of 8 000 000 by 2050 . This growing population must be accommodated somewhere. If further expansion at the periphery of the city is arguably unsustainable in economic social and environmental terms, increasing density within the existing territory of the city is the principal solution to accommodating this city’s expanding population. However density is often a dirty word in public discourse concerning planning and future of Australian cities. But, what if density itself is not the key metric for successful urban environments, but rather how density is implemented?. The Volume studio ask’s how much density is too much? Or more importantly what is the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ density in our cities?

STUDIO LEADER: BEN MILBOURNE

This studio argues that the principal medium of Urban Design is volume and its distribution in space, rather than form/material arrangements (the medium of architecture) or the terrain/material (the principal medium of Landscape Architecture).

Melbourne City Council planner Leanne Hodyl has noted that Southbank’s density far exceeds that of Hong Kong and Manhattan.

This studio takes this observation as a point of departure and through detailed examination and analysis of these existing built environments that approach the distribution of built volume, or density, very differently, students will learn to both understand and manipulate the medium of volume to present critical urban design positions. The studio will then test these speculations via urban design propositions for a new precinct within the Fisherman’s Bend, nominated within the Victorian panning scheme as a strategic site for the future of Melbourne.

TUESDAYS 6-10PM

HAB

DESIGNING THE LIFE SUPPORT PROTOTYPE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE EPOCH Practice-led studio: Paul Morgan (Paul Morgan Architects)

HAB focuses on the design of the free-standing ‘life support’ prototype in the Anthropocene epoch.

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate, geology and ecosystems.

In HAB studio students will attempt to answer the research question: In the early Anthropocene, how do we design the HAB (or house) by responding and adapting to the challenges posed by this age?

Students will undertake process experiments; design research; design propositions and complete two HABs — coast and forest. Techniques explored include: ground effects; patterns in nature; structural optimization; intensity mappings and technical elements. Where possible, 3D printed HAB

Image: Blowhouse: life support unit, Paul Morgan Architects

prototypes and building sections will be produced.

Paul Morgan’s informal lectures will include: the architecture of the late machine age (Jan Kaplicky [Future Systems], Neil Denari and Lebbeus Woods); architectural drawing and communication; Kinetics of the Environment in PMA projects; Architecture in the Anthropocene epoch.

Studio mode Studio sessions will be held remotely. If possible, a site visit to the Cape Schanck house will occur. This is a practice orientated Studio with practical advice and industry insights. Group projects and peer review sessions will occur.

Day and time: Wednesday evenings 6.00pm. www.paulmorganarchitects.com

Cities are in a constant state of flux. These anomalous characteristics and behaviours are a product of its interaction with a matrix of legal and spatial codes and relationships, market forces, as well as fluctuations on the global dais. These uncertainties make any attempt to intervene within their complex organisation, rather precarious. Unsuccessful or flailing modernist enterprise, the rise of nation states and unbound exuberance of the free market economy, has coincided with the retreat of creative disciplines from the civic realm and public imagination.

The increasing decentralised forces – from transformation of workforces, ecological and environmental change to migration, compel a new manner of engagement. However, cities continue to operate within disputed forms of urban renewal and antiquated models of real estate speculation. Collectively, the models and tools of engagement with the city have arguably have not adapted to the plurality of the urban environment, its variables, and utter hybridity. Urban planning too, seems hopelessly retrospective in its inability to meet current demands and expectations. Meanwhile, the peer-to-peer economy can be seen to promote the occupation of our cities according to transient, temporary and dynamic demands - a disruptive technology operating as a non-physical infrastructure that results in its nimbleness, manoeuvrability and has an extended a temporal dimension in its influence on the city and its change over time

(∆T) The Temporal City Masters Architecture Studio Semester 2 2020 | Ian Nazareth The Temporal City is a kinetic organism that is simultaneously and synchronously enabled by the flow of data, people and logistics. It proposes a spatial operating system, a stream of inputs and outputs – I/O. Its intensity and form unravel and wane as an organic mechanism that underpins a chronologically-based urbanism. Traditional principles of the city are upturned. The Temporal City is not about absolutes or repeatable spatial products - but a framework that embraces and amplifies the indeterminate, messy, contradictory, combinatory, uncertain and improbable conditions. It is opportunistic. Agility instead of stability, multipliers rather than repetition. Change, difference and time are accelerated. The complexity of its systems benefits from variability, unpredictability, imbalance and volatility.

Projects will utilise static and real-time data, techniques of data scrapping, hybridising urban datasets, to generate real and counterfactual propositions and scenarios for the city. Focusing on Melbourne’s CBD, the work will offer a critical insight into the behaviours of cities and networks, all captured through decentralised systems. Through gamification and designing the protocols and relationships projects will record and reveal patterns and offer new ways of engaging with the city and its architecture.

How can we move beyond a conceptual framework of spatial programming and outlines, binaries and modernist scripts to embrace and engage our formal habits with the virtual and behavioral logics of the post-urban, post-rational megacity?

The studio and projects will form part of the City X / Supercity design studios running at leading design schools internationally. The work from this studio will be exhibited and presented at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Tuesday mornings 9.30 - 13.30

INCLUSIVE CITY - POBLENOU, BARCELONA -

Master of Urban Design | Master of Architecture Design Studio 2020 Eva Prats | Ricardo Flores | Ian Nazareth The old neighbourhood of Poblenou in Barcelona grew under the industrial revolution during the mid 19th Century. When production started disappearing from European cities around the last decades of the 20th Century, this neighbourhood, a former major industrial area, became the scenario for the testing of different possible urban futures.

The start of this process was the moment it hosted a brand new Athletes’ Village for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics that erased all the industrial pre-existences. The second step was a plan to convert former polluting industry into clean-tech businesses in the early 21st Century.

The global crisis of 2007 stopped the sequence of transformations and froze a scene that survives until today. It is the image of a fragmented reality. This Studio will focus on the social and urban rehabilitation of a neglected area of Poblenou, nowadays occupied with illegal settlements, introducing a program of social housing with communal facilities as a catalyst to change this fragmented part of the city into an inclusive neighbourhood.

Professor Eva Prats is architect for the School of Architecture of Barcelona in 1992. After a long collaboration at Enric Miralles' office, Eva establishes Flores & Prats Architects together with Ricardo Flores in Barcelona in 1998. The office has worked on reoccupations of old structures, as well as on neighbours' participation in the design process of urban public spaces, and on social housing and its capacity to create community. Flores & Prats obtained the Grand Award for the Best Work in Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts in London 2009, the City of Barcelona Prize 2016, and has been exhibited at the Biennale di Architettura di Venezia 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018.

Eva Prats is Professor at the School of Architecture of Barcelona, RMIT Melbourne and ETH Zurich.

Professor Ricardo Flores is architect for the School of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires, Master in Urban Design and PhD for the School of Architecture of Barcelona. After a long collaboration at Enric Miralles' office, establishes Flores & Prats Architects together with Eva Prats in Barcelona in 1998. The work of this office has been selected for the Prize for Contemporary Architecture-Mies van der Rohe Award in 2005 and 2015. In 2009 obtain the Grand Award for the Best Work in Architecture at the Summer Show of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in 2011 the International Award Dedalo-Minosse in Vicenza. Besides his professional practice, Ricardo is Professor at the School of Architecture of Barcelona.

Note: Due to restrictions on overseas travel, there will be no workshop / site-visit in Barcelona. The studio will be taught entirely online as per the schedule below. Students will work in groups. The primary mode of production / representation will be hand drawings and physical models.

Please review the schedule to confirm your availability.

In case of any queries please contact Ian Nazareth (ian.nazareth@rmit.edu.au) Schedule: Information Session: Friday 9th October 6.00pm Weekly Classes commence: Friday 23rd October 6.00-10.00pm Intensive Weeks: Friday 20th November to Friday 4th December Final Presentation: Friday 18th of December 6.00-10.00pm

TECTONIC BEHAVIOR MASTERS STUDIO ROLAND SNOOKS + CHARLIE BOMAN This studio will explore the design of intricate forms and their strange qualities through innovative tectonic logics. Advances in robotic fabrication and building-scale 3D printing is about to radically change the relationship between cost and form, with highly intricate geometries becoming cheaper than conventional fabrication of rectilinear geometry.

The studio will focus on tectonic experiments and investigate the architecture that this generates. This studio will have a particular focus on developing and refining tectonic architectural elements and their details.

The studio will explore forms that are becoming possible with emerging building-scale 3D printing, in an attempt to articulate what the forms of 3D printed architecture might be and how these could be a radical departure from current architectural form-making. Within this context the studio will develop a synthetic design process that combines emergent algorithmic approaches and the logic of 3D printing to create a strange hybrid.

No experience with algorithmic tools is required, however a willingness to engage in these tools and highly iterative processes is essential

WEDNESDAY 6PM - 10PM

We Are The Prison This studio expands on the inaugural studio of the ‘We Are’ series of design studios - We Are The Word - to continue to investigate, speculate, explore and design the way we craft architectural narratives through both observational and propositional perspectives.

The agenda of this studio is to engage with the prison system in Victoria, Australia albeit not ignoring different systems in other states or countries. Through architectural mediums, students will be encouraged to interrogate the existing prison system(s) and generate articulated positions for an ideas-led venturous proposition for a new or altered prison facility in Victoria.

Through literary methodologies, students will be introduced to relevant writings particularly that of Michel Foucault in order to examine current conditions and speculate on future conditions, catalysing new interpretations of the practice of architecture as intellectual and cultural production.

Specific focus will be given to Foucault’s take on prisons this semester. In particular but not limited to: “Our prisons resemble our factories, schools, military bases and hospitals - all of which in turn resemble prisons. You ask where prisons come from. My answer is ‘from practically everywhere.’ Something was ‘invented,’ to be sure, but it was an entire technique of surveillance: the control and identification of individuals, the regulation of their movements, activity, and effectiveness. It seems to me that whether the prisoners get an extra chocolate bar on Christmas or are let out to make their Easter Duty is not the real political issue. What we have to denounce is not so much the “human” side of life in prison but rather their real social function-that is, to serve as the instrument that creates a criminal milieu that the ruling classes can control. It would be pure illusion to believe that laws are made to be respected, or that the police and courts are intended to make them respected. Only in disembodied theory could we pretend that we have once and for all subscribed to the laws of the society to which we belong. It is common knowledge that laws are made by certain people for other people to keep.”

Wednesdays. 6 PM. RMIT Architecture Master of Architecture Design Studio Steven Chu - Founding Director at Alter Atlas Architecture

RMIT MASTER OF URBAN DESIGN SEMESTER 2 2020 RMIT MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE SEMESTER 2 2020

EXTREMELY SMALL AND VERY LOUD (A STUDIO ON RMIT, THE CITY AND THE BRUNSWICK DESIGN DISTRICT)

The urbanist that has been trained to think that urban design is only about the big scale will go hungry after graduation - it might be some time before they are designing instant cities again. The urbanist who thinks that a masterplan can carry an authorial idea into the future is deluded. Time heals all, especially grand plans. This is a studio that will tackle two clichés of urban thinking directly – the big scale and the masterplan. In the place of super scale, we’ll test how small-scale moves can conquer large territories. In the place of the staged masterplan, we’ll explore the agency, time and catalysts.

RMIT University, Moreland City Council, and the Victorian Government (Creative Victoria and DEDJTR) have undertaken to develop and grow a vibrant ‘Design District’ in the heart of Brunswick. This studio is agnostic about the Brunswick Design District (BDD) - it might be a great idea, it might also be spin. What is interesting about the proposal is that at its basis, the BDD is counterfactual – it turns the orthodox order of planning cities – big scale infrastructure and then density and then zoning and only then use - upside down. BDD will start with use – design, making, manufacturing, social enterprise and see if new infrastructure might -supercharge its density and viability.

The key focus of this studio will be an attempt to redeem Melbourne’s middling recent history of design at the scale of the precinct through an understanding of the spatial consequences of use. We will speculate on the disaggregated campus as an urban typology (including RMIT’s own) and propose arguments for designing and growing the city based on enabling infrastructure, catalytic agents and accelerated evolution. We will put our assumptions to the test by providing a spatial design that might act as a catalyst for the BDD and which will provide a kind of framework of irritation to counter the rapidly changing character of Brunswick.

WHERE: At Your Kitchen Table. WHEN: Tuesday Nights 6:00-10:00. STUDIO LEADER: Prof. Mark Jacques.

ARCHITECTURE FOR COMPLEXITY Seeding planetary designs RMIT University School of Architecture and Urban Design Masters of Architecture Semester 2 2020

Studio Leaders Professor Alisa Andrasek Joshua Lye In a world rapidly converted into information, and with accelerated convergence of exponential technologies, future architectures will be characterized by enhanced resilience, plasticity, and malleability of complex interrelated systems; increased designability within complex ecologies will allow for designs of unprecedented nature, complexity and scale.

Australia has over 60 000 abandoned mining sites. These obsolete locales carry monumental machinic imprints in the vast expanses of the landscape. This studio will be addressing those sites of obsolescence through deployment of architectures based on principles of complexity. The client here is the planet itself, in its perilous state. Depleted sites of the carbon positive outdated economy can now get a new life. Following the half earth hypothesis, the necessity to preserve 50% of the planet for wilderness in order to save 85% of species,we will be investigating new architectural typologies for a very high density of human and nonhuman programming. Co-designed with big data and ai, constructed through automation, at increased resolution and complexity, and rendering previously unseen aesthetics, novel typologies for high density are scientifically altered, in search of inhabitation patterns for enhanced wellbeing. They are super-sensitive to local physics, relating to the distributed and localised networks of renewable energy,, carbon capture, and high density food production.

Since contemporary Ai systems are more akin to large landscapes, with distributed sensing and vast expanses of data, the quality of architectural agency introduced to those sites could also be understood as distributed robotic and cognitive fields, at high resolution and intricacy. They are not yet fully formed, crystallizing into life-supporting architectures for the Anthropocene.

By engaging in architectural terraforming of industrially terraformed sites, we will be seeding prototypes for future design projects at planetary scale.

Studio Times: micrsoft teams Tuesday 10am - 1pm

www.alisaandrasek.com

DISCRETE ELEMENTS, A GOOD LIFE AND OTHER CONCERNS Gilles Retsin This intensive studio will investigate strategies to radically overhaul housing, through automation and prefabrication. In contemporary architectural practice and education, housing is often a dull and dreary task, stuck forever in repetitive planning and harsh austerity, at play of market forces. We seem to have settled for the idea that we can not live better, that dwelling in the 21th century means 2m30 ceilings, white plasterboard walls, an Ikea shelf and some inspirational posters to cheer it up (You got this ! Follow your dreams, they know the way!). As Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek mentioned, it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. As housing is so intrinsically tight to capitalism, the same quote applies. Re-imaging housing today is utopian. As architecture students it’s easier to design daring museums with unlimited budgets in extreme locations, speculative floating parliaments, hydroponic farms or spires for the Notre-Dame. However, once the bathroom is slightly too large, the corridor too wide or a window too generous, your housing project is immediately reduced to naive utopia: this is not possible and the world doesn’t work like this. Have you considered land value?

Based on radical economies derived from increased automation and prefabrication and speculative new modes of ownership and legislation, this studio will establish new visions and dreams for how we could inhabit our world and live a good life today. The studio will collectively develop a simple set of “building blocks”: functionless, automated and prefabricated discrete timber elements.

Not unlike Friedrich Froebel’s timber blocks - the first educational toy we will design through creative iteration and play. Liberated from rigid planning concerns, we will explore imaginative new living conditions and modes of inhabitation, alongside reading, critical debate and reflection on automation, housing and architecture.The studio is perfect for generalists: we will both develop algorithmic workflows, structural ideas, historic reflections, architectural discourses and critical positions alongside sculptural assemblies and humoristic memes and provocations.

In a first intensive one-week session, students will develop assemblies with our timber building blocks, evaluating these as domestic patterns or conditions for inhabitation. At this stage, we will also familiarise ourselves with structural ideas for discrete assemblies and algorithmic workflows. During a second one-week intensive session, we will begin to aggregate and multiply these patterns into housing blocks, sited in Melbourne. In subsequent sessions we will work on representation and presentation towards the final review. The final output will consist of a series of renderings ( abstract and photo-realistic) of your housing proposals, as well as simple plan drawings.

web: www.retsin.org IG: @gillesretsin