RMIT Architecture & Urban Design - Major Project Catalogue Semester 1 2023

RMIT Architecture Major Project Catalogue Semester 1 2021 2023

Major Project Catalogue, Semester 1, 2023

Prof. Vivian Mitsogianni

Dr. John Doyle

Ian Nazareth

Designed and Produced by

Ian Nazareth

Joel Theophylactou

Trent Davidson

Emily Dodds

Yuen Yan Tsang

Akshayan Parameswaran

Joel Polychronopoulos

Shao Tian Teo

Geema Wijerathne

Copyright © 2023 by RMIT University

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of RMIT University

RMIT Architecture Major Project Catalogue Semester 1

Contents

Introduction, Professor Vivian Mitsogianni...06

What is Major Project?...07

nD co-LIVING , Devika Panicker... 08

Pangaea Proxima: An Immigration Museum For Potential Futures , William Bennie... 10 [NOT] In My Backyard , Pele Rose Morrison... 12

xyxxy , Simone Miriam Chait... 14

Housing | A Public Amenity , Dyuman Jatin Pandya... 16

Ambiguity . AI , Fan Zhang... 18

What Goes Around , Riley Thomas Sherman... 20

Kiss and Ride , Benjamin Robert Bartlett... 22

Insert Colloquailism Here , Trent John Davidson... 24

Brighter Estate , Anne-Marie Refalo... 26

Factory Reset , Nicola Danielle Maugeri... 28

An Architecture that is Unique to any Individual , Lars Hegmann... 30

Journey to the Pearl , Zhaonan Guo... 32

A Street by Grace , Grace Huang... 34

Ozymandias , Elizaveta Zyuzina... 36

The office for preparing-for-the-not-just-yet-but-pretty-much-right-now , Samuel Torre... 38

Provisional Occupation , Varshna Dhamodaran... 40

Void Formation , Hansi Nirasha Hettikanda... 42

Hi, It's me, I'm the problem, It's me , Sarita Christine Karyn Mistry... 44

Location, Location? Location! , Joel Evan Theophylactou... 46

Local Content , Kathryn Larkin... 48

Living by the Derbal Yerrigan: An Unfinished Project , Lucy Elizabeth Gipson-Stratton... 50

Re-industrialisation: Bigness & Network , Rachel Jin Hui Low... 52

Reconnect , Cara Isabella Humphry... 54

Workplace Accidents , Shaoxiong Guo... 56

Some Things that Matter , Laura Isabel Zammit... 58

Reviving the Fossil , Xinyun Zhang... 60

Dam to be Damned , Joel George Polychronopoulos... 62

Trading Post Machine , Djuro Djuranovic... 64

Yallourn^3 = 1000 , David Ricardo Guerrero Torres... 66

Past Forward , Jinal Gandhi... 68

Discrete Assembly: Reimagine Prefabrication , David Hsu... 70

ReDirect , Nidhish Govindarajula... 72

Permission Please , Lameesa Ajmaeen Yousuf... 74

City Backwards , Yi Tang... 76

Architecture of the Floodplain , Emily Rachael Dodds... 78

NGVT , Isabella Bernadette Magliano... 80

Modern' Maridan , Randy Aditya Mucti... 82

One Beacon , Songwei Wang... 84

Patching Land , Yuxuan Hu... 86

Character Tower , Tianyi Luo... 88

Suburb's Suburb , Nikita Sanjaybhai Akruwala... 90

Temple is not for praying , Jingyi Wu... 92

Record .10 , Nikita Gautam Dave... 94

Abandoned Space , Runze Shao... 96

Supervisors Semester 1, 2023... 98

Students Semester 1, 2023...99

Introduction1

Architecture schools should be concerned with experimentation that challenges the apparent self-evident certainties and accepted orthodoxies of the discipline (in its expanded definition), the underlying assumptions about what architecture is and can contain, and what it should do next. Architecture schools need to ensure that their graduates have all the professional competencies that are required for professional practice and registration, but Architecture schools should also lead the struggle to challenge the default conventions of the discipline. The architecture school should strive to point towards possible futures not yet evident within existing understandings of the discipline and wider cultural/political terrains.

Architecture is about ideas. It is part of a wider cultural sphere and a way of thinking about the world in a broader sense. Knowledge and learning in architecture do not finish in the academy but require continued learning and a level of receptive agility from the architect, throughout the architect’s life. The rapidly changing economic and cultural conditions in the extended fields that architects engage with necessitate this, requiring, but also opening up possibilities for, new types of knowledge, fields of engagement and practices.

The architecture student’s graduating Major Project – a capstone for the formal design degree – should not merely demonstrate the competence and skill they acquired in the course. These are base expectations on entry into the graduating semester. The graduating project is an opportunity to speculate through the work and to develop ideas that will serve as catalysts for future, lifelong investigations.

The project should lay bare considered attitudes, brave speculations and leaps of faith, pursuing these with rigour and depth. We would hope that the projects are ambitious, brave and contain propositions relevant to their time. We would hope that students experiment – in whatever form this might take – and engage with difficult questions, contributing not merely to areas that are well explored, but to what is yet to come. Experimentation though, in the graduating project, as well as in the design studio, comes with the risk of failure. But failure can be cathartic – it is an essential possibility tied to innovation.

At RMIT Architecture we understand well the ethos and importance of experimentation and we have long-standing processes to reward it, importantly through our grading and moderation processes. In the RMIT architecture programs, we call this venturous ideas-led design practice. ‘To be venturous is to be brave and take risks. What we hope is happening here is that students are learning to establish their own explorations which they can constantly reconsider and navigate through future conditions that may not resemble present understandings of practice. Competencies and experimentation can happily co-exist.

We aim to educate students to engage with architecture’s specific characteristics unapologetically, and to not be afraid of its complex, uncertain and liquid nature. We aim to prepare our graduates to engage in and contribute to a broader world of ideas and to eventually challenge our ability to judge with new, challenging and meaningful propositions.

This semester we saw some astonishing and brave projects and propositions from a student body deeply concerned with making a positive impact on the world around them and with contributing new ideas to their discipline. We look forward to following our students’ careers as they join our global community of practice and to seeing how the ideas seeded here are pursued and advanced.

Professor Vivian Mitsogianni Dean, School of Architecture & Urban Design RMIT University

1For

The Major Project Medals

The Anne Butler Memorial Medal, endowed in honour of an outstanding emerging practitioner, is awarded to a Major Project that exemplifies the goals of Major Project.

The Peter Corrigan Medal celebrates the project that is most critical, political and culturally engaged. It is awarded to a student with a strong independent vision in honour of Professor Peter Corrigan who taught successive generations of architects at RMIT for over 40 years.

The Antonia Bruns Medal, endowed to recall Antonia’s interest in the relation between film and architecture, is awarded to a Major Project that investigates the relationship between architectural representation, association and perception.

The Leon van Schaik 25th Anniversary Peer Assessed Major Project Award celebrates Prof. Leon van Schaik’s arrival as Head of Architecture at RMIT 28 years ago. It is decided by all Major Project voting for what they view as the most adventurous and future-embracing project of the semester.

an expanded version of this text see Mitsogianni, V. (2015). Failure can be cathartic! The design studio - speculating on three themes In: Studio Futures: Changing trajectories in architectural education, Uro Publications, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 25-31

What is Major Project?

RMIT Architecture values ambitious, adventurous projects; those that demonstrate new and pertinent architectural ideas or show how established ideas can be developed or transformed to offer deeper understandings. The best major projects take risks and attempt to see architecture anew. Major Project should form the beginning of an exploration of architectural ideas that can set the agenda for the first ten years of original and insightful architectural practice.

The nature of the project is not set, and the scope of the brief and site is established by the student in consultation with their supervisor as the most appropriate and potentially fruitful vehicle for testing and developing their particular area of architectural investigation. Typically, major projects proceed in a similar way to design studios – with the difference being that students themselves set their brief and topic of investigation.

The research question and architectural project will often develop in parallel and it is expected that the precise question and focus of the project will be discovered and clarified through the act of designing. This process is iterative and develops through weekly sessions. Projects are also formally reviewed at two public mid semester reviews before the final presentation.

Major Projects have ranged from strategic urban and landscape interventions with metropolitan implications, through to detailed explorations of building form, materiality, structure and inhabitation; to detailed experimentation in the processes and procedures of architectural production. It is expected that Major Projects will develop a particular and specific area of interest that has grown during a student’s studies, rather than merely complete a generic and competent design. Often these specific interests will develop in relation to those of supervisors – we encourage students to work closely with their supervisors to build on mutual areas of expertise and interest.

It is understood that major projects will differ in scope, scale, kinds of representation produced and degree of resolution; with these factors depending on the nature of the architectural question and accompanying brief. Emphasis should be placed on producing a coherent and complete project, where proposition, brief, scale, degree of resolution and representation work together to provide a balanced, convincing and focused expression of architectural thought.

There is no expectation that Major Project be ‘comprehensive’ in scope. Rather, the aim of the subject is to establish, through the completion of a major design work in a rigorous manner, a well-argued architectural experiment that has the potential and richness to engender future explorations and that will sustain the student for the next ten years of their architectural practice.

A high level of skill and a demonstrated knowledge of existing architectural ideas is an important component of a successful major project, however the goal should not be to demonstrate a professional level of accepted best practice. Rather it is an opportunity to demonstrate new kinds of knowledge and ideas through architectural form.

_Excerpt from Major Project Briefing Notes 2020

In Major Project, students are expected to formulate an architectural research question and develop an articulate and wellargued architectural position through the execution of a major architectural design project.

Urbanisation trends have led to housing scarcity, crowded conditions, and isolation. Conventional architectural methods cannot meet these evolving complexities. "nD co - LIVING '' addresses this issue, proposing a progressive co-living concept explored through angled timber prefabrication to maximise building efficiency and spatial diversity.

This approach enhances the external and internal spaces, creating a promising high-density co-living residential typology. Despite utilising standardised prefabrication elements, this design shows various spatial possibilities while maintaining quality and affordability. This model enriches apartments by prioritising shared communal spaces.

The proposition focuses upon environmentally friendly prefabricated Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) materials, merging cost-effectiveness, customisation, and a significant reduction in carbon emissions. The architectural composition is data-driven, optimising design based on many parameters and ensuring unmatched adaptability to changing user needs and occupancy patterns.

Its unique angular façade enhances sunlight accessibility, diversifies views, and reduces wind intensity. Furthering this innovation, the design incorporates principles of aperiodic tiling, producing unique formations and patterns through repetition.

This strategy reveals the potential of timber prefabrication for producing complex outputs with minimal input. "nD co - LIVING" offers to reimagine, reinvent, and revitalise urban living. Showing a glimpse where sustainability meets serenity, affordability meets innovation, and architecture becomes the canvas for human connection

Devika Panicker Supervisor: Prof. Alisa Andrasek & Joshua Lye

Pangaea Proxima: An Immigration Museum For Potential

In 25 million years the north west coast of Australia will collide with the island of Borneo.

In the time intervening, in the lower west corner of the hoddle grid, the immigration museum contends with the task of recording and curating the tracks of a city’s migration – tracing a path that steps ahead continually, keeping pace with the indefinite cycle of addition and arrival.

A new museum, an expanded museum, is folded into the interstices and corners of the T-shaped site. Its form and trajectories evolved through a process of packing, unpacking, and repacking its reconfigured contents, an extra suitcase or two added to the assemblage. The museum becomes an apparatus for the procurement of its remit, with its expanded collecting exhibited in its galleries, its stored repository, within the structure of its walls, the zinc on its roof, and through its inhabitation. The museum is repositioned as a dynamic operable element within the machinations of a city’s migration, peering forward in anticipation of Pangaea's arrival, or whatever comes before.

William Bennie Supervisor: Dr. Michael Spooner

In My Backyard

With Melbourne's population projected to double by 2050, “[NOT] In My Backyard” investigates the potential for our middle-ring suburbs to accommodate urban infill and consolidation. Moving away from the conventional high-rise towers and growth corridors which proliferate our urban sprawl, this project instead seeks to uncover how the densification of existing homes might aid in the affordability of our inner-city.

From the light touch retrofitting of existing building fabric to full-scale demolition and rebuild, this project explores how locally manufactured, prefabricated architecture can be used to redesign the way we live, embracing a collapse of boundaries and encouraging a shift towards sharing.

The Fishermans Bend Estate, conceived in the 1920s by the Housing Commission of Victoria, serves as the testing ground. As a pilot project for housing density in the post-war era, the site no longer meets the demands of modern living, with its unvaried housing stock and looming flood risk indicating the necessity for an overhaul.

Addressing the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) mentality of current residents, an incentivised framework that enables homeowner autonomy is created, using these hesitations to encourage architectural agency and strategically add density to an area previously resistant to change.

Through the incremental introduction of alterations, the revised estate guidelines blend benefits for individual homeowners with community-wide incentives, using its stealth approach to urbanism to envision a future where residents' hesitations become a driving force for gentle densification, ultimately encouraging more homeowners to say “Yes, in my backyard”.

Pele Rose Morrison Supervisor: Lauren Garner

XYZZY1 is an exploration into the absolute line we straddle between physical and virtual worlds.

Through the smartphone – a modern prosthetic – this project examines the invisible infrastructures that ghost the city, and the powerful abstractions technology has on us, each other, and our relationship with urban space.

William J. Mitchell argues that each concrete system has a juxtaposing digital counterpart, and to sustain the physical city, traditional architecture must be decomposed, and recombined. This project seeks a new praxis for architecture, where concrete, a physical object that is made redundant, is augmented by an abstract, a non-physical virtuality, which is then returned to a concrete state.

Taking occupancy at the central convergence of digital and physical infrastructure, movement of people and gateway into the CBD, this project is governed by the invisible digital fields that are superimposed onto the traditional city grid. Inspired by Derive, the site becomes a rabbit warren of pathways, subverting the temporal rhythm of the city to match its asynchronous virtual counterpart. The project is then returned to the user through the digital device, augmented again in a constant state of evolution.

1 Xyzzy is a gaming command that allows a player to magically toggle between two worlds.

For an extended experience of the project, scan the QR code below.

Supervisor Statement

Simone takes on a challenging subject, in exploration of the digital and virtual technologies that augment and impose upon the city’s physical public and social spaces, and our own everyday interactions and behaviours.

Architecture is the medium through which affordances and privileges of the virtual are enhanced or exchanged into the built environment, for mutual benefit. Contending with the evolution of our social programs, spaces and infrastructures, that have been made redundant by these digital virtualities; her project demonstrates an architectural praxis that demands a deeper engagement and broader recognition by the discipline.

The project deliberately occupies a transient space of overlap and intersection, movement and infrastructure, where the architecture both gives form to these unseen conditions, but for the most part remains subterranean, hidden and difficult to define. There is no edge, the project neither starts or stops, it is the city.

Simone Miriam Chait Supervisor: Anna Jankovic & Andre Bonnice

Anne Butler Memorial Medal Semester 1, 2023

_Anna Jankovic & Andre Bonnice

Housing | A Public Amenity

An amenity is an urban armature in service of the public. Public housing estates in the city have for long, laid unfunded and have continually fallen into disrepair, only to then lose their open space and agency to the Big Build.

The project is rooted in the position that the state of the housing estates is a result of their oftenisolated estate-hood.

An attempt is therefore made, to expand public housing, a rightful amenity, into the urban fold. Interdependencies with urban infrastructure and amenity are hard-woven into the architecture. One is not more important than the other and one cannot function without the other.

The scope of the project is consciously limited to an architecture of shared amenities. A restricted kit of parts including service walls, mailboxes, garbage bins and awnings are tactfully used to aid habitation. The agency of habitation ends here, allowing the project to lean more deeply into the agency of public amenity relationships and the architectural tectonics resulting from it. In closing, this is a project steered at mending and building interdependencies. Executed, while being firmly planted on the urban curb, this is a project about building relationships and opportunistically expanding the public offer.

Peter Corrigan Medal Semester 1, 2023

Supervisor Statement

This Major Project asks the question, what if housing was an urban armature in service of the public? Dyuman’s speculation starts with the observed – the claim and consequence of existing housing estates in Collingwood and Clifton Hill are mapped, understood and redeployed as ways of expanding the public offer of public housing rather than contracting or gentrifying it. The project is a polemic against, and a compelling alternative to, the State’s Government’s Big Housing Build. The project grows public housing into the disused buildings and the slack spaces of crown land along the northern axis, opportunistically capitalising on weak points and natural urban thresholds. This is an architecture that is hard-woven into, and indivisible from the city that hosts it. In proposing a way of seeing housing estates outside their often-isolating estate-hood, Dyuman returns public housing, a rightful amenity, into the urban fold.

_Prof. Mark Jacques

Dyuman Jatin Pandya Supervisor: Prof. Mark Jacques

.AI

Reality is the world as we perceive it through our senses, the world we can physically interact with, and every interaction leaves a tangible trace. On the other hand, virtual reality is a realm born of code and algorithms. It's an immersive environment, a fabricated universe where the laws of physics can be rewritten at will. In virtual reality, the line between the plausible and the impossible blurs, offering a canvas for our imagination to paint unfettered by the constraints of reality.

But these definitions are not absolute, as technology and our understanding of consciousness continue to evolve. The line that delineates reality from virtual reality is increasingly blurred. If reality is what we perceive, and our perceptions can be convincingly replicated in a virtual realm, then where does reality end, and virtual reality begin?

As we continue to push the boundaries of technology, we may find that our notions of reality and virtual reality must evolve. Maybe they are not two separate entities, but rather two ends of a spectrum of experience. Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, reality, and virtual reality are merely different ways of experiencing the same universal truth.

Supervisor Statement

Fan’s project, Ambiguity.AI, explores emerging AI image processing technologies and their application in architecture. It asks how AI can enhance the design process and uncover previously unseen architectures and environments. Leveraging AI's strengths of speed, pattern recognition, and complexity handling, Fan constructs an immersive virtual environment that blurs the line between plausibility and impossibility. In this world, buildings amalgamate the tectonics of timber with the fluidity of waterfalls, resulting in highly intricate, scenographic and surreal environments. These architectural scenes invite users to experience a world where conventional boundaries are challenged and reimagined, offering a glimpse into a future where reality and virtual reality intertwine.

_Prof. Alisa Andrasek & Joshua Lye

Fan Zhang Supervisor: Prof. Alisa Andrasek & Joshua Lye

Ambiguity

Antonia Bruns Medal Semester 1, 2023

What Goes Around

Zygmunt Bauman observed “Where there is design, there is waste.” It often seems that for this to be true, so must the inverse: where there is waste, there is design.

This project considers a series of seemingly unrelated events: the clearing of an industrial estate for the building of a freeway, the repair of a cheap hotel and the redevelopment of the former Reserve Bank of Australia. Although unconnected, all are bound by architecture that represents only a momentary stage of their material’s possible lifespan.

In re-evaluating these sites currently undergoing demolition across Melbourne – this project examines their relationship with the Brooklyn Waste Precinct, to develop necessary infrastructures for retracing the stories and value of materials as they flow through the city.

In facing complex environmental problems, architecture must look beyond form and instead rely on the construction methods and material processes it uses to provide solutions. By taking responsibility for the entire life span of their built output, the profession can bring about sustainable changes through the approaches they adopt. Accepting that design and waste are cyclical, the architect must engage with materials from their source to their inevitable re-extraction and reconstruction. As the city builds itself from itself, what goes around comes around.

Riley Thomas Sherman Supervisor: Dr. Peter Brew

Kiss and Ride

Kiss and Ride proposes a celebration of the local through the staging of a major bike race as an opportunity to strategically give back to the regional cities of Albury Wodonga

Like too many other regional areas, Albury Wodonga often feels overlooked. This project endeavours to explore how the two cities can collaborate on a large-scale event that can serve as a catalyst for the development of infrastructure for events, and generate long-lasting benefits that the community can enjoy throughout the year.

By focusing on the unique characteristics and narratives that define the local area, the project seeks to emphasise the value of place through personal anecdotes, shared stories, and communal experiences. Through a comprehensive examination of these anecdotes, a framework of strategies and architectural interventions emerges, not to fix Albury Wodonga, but rather to contribute back to, and enhance its inherent worth.

This project is not a nostalgic return home; but rather an examination of what constitutes a place, how its value can be perceived, and how we, as professionals, can engage with it in novel ways.

Simply put, I put on a bike race to finally get Wodonga a Cinema

Benjamin Robert Bartlett Supervisor: Dr. Michael Spooner

Insert Colloquailism Here

This project critically examines the "she'll be right" attitude that has led planners to rely on a title system that has caused a disconnection from the pre-settlement condition of this country.

As architects, it is imperative for us to acknowledge our profession's role in perpetuating the impacts of colonisation. We must explore alternative design approaches that do not reinforce the existing title system. This proposal focuses on alternative systems that prioritise ecology and the presettlement condition over current titles.

This architectural proposal goes beyond immediate surroundings, drawing inspiration from Victoria’s bioregions to establish an architectural language that aligns its built structure with the land it occupies.

The proposed system involves approaching current landowners with an opportunity to relinquish their property in exchange for an alternative. As land titles are repeatedly exchanged, the city grid is gradually evolved, ultimately eroding the established title system.

The alternative leverages AI as impartial observer, it unveils hidden patterns inspired by the surrounding bioregions, forming a taxonomy that informs the architecture.

This transformative architecture fuses AI-generated information, alternative planning systems, and design methods in an aim to harmonise the architecture with the land, serving as a catalyst for change.

Trent Davidson Supervisor: Dr. Jan Van Schaik

Brighter Estate

Brighter Estate on the fringe suburb of Tarneit, features six distinct house models that promote a culture of sharing and larger households. Metronest Homes' Falcon-27 off-the-shelf plan serves as the foundation for a series of transformative experiments and modifications to the volume house. Each of the 6 homes within Brighter Estate is named to reflect the distortions defining their attributes. The No Name House challenges the preconception of a room’s functions. The Solarium House embraces the suburban greenhouse. The Half-Finished House provides a flexible framework that can be completed with growing financial resources. The four-story house stacks the model for multigenerational living and the Many Faces House fragments the model into separate rooms. Finally, the Very Long House, radically stretches to 110 meters for co-living groups. Varying the typical house model can fosters sharing and a wider range of social arrangements enhancing affordability and granting residents access to a wider range of amenities. The Brighter estate matches Tarneit’s house density with more occupants and aims for these homes to assist in a walkable suburb. Amidst a pressing housing crisis, RBA Governor Phillip Lowe recently stated “We need more people on average to live in each dwelling”. Have we accepted that generations of individual house ownership are over? This moment calls for a comprehensive reassessment of our existing housing models and this project is part of that.

Anne-Marie Refalo Supervisor: A/Prof. Graham Crist

Factory Reset

A factory reset is recommended when a system is no longer operating as required. A factory reset is recommended for Cranbourne.

It is a suburb at a critical point of flux, in which rapid development is occurring, without planning or longterm consideration. An explosion of homogenous housing estates, with a distinct lack of public amenity is compounding the vulnerability of the booming population. The co-occurrence of this hyper focus on housing, at the same time as a loss of industry, is resulting in strange adjacencies. Programs seen as irreconcilable on paper readily exist within Cranbourne. Bedrooms are seen hidden through factory windows, buffer zones between backyards and sheer factory walls are non-existent, and the delineation of home and work has become unclear.

Factory Reset capitalises on these conditions and seeks to explore what degree of closeness can exist between industrial and residential spaces. The project sees the opportunity to redefine the value of the factory directly through its relationship with housing. It explores two different methods, one introducing the house into the factory and the other, the factory into the house. In this sense, the role of the factory is extended beyond traditional industrial uses into providing essential community amenity.

Nicola Danielle Maugeri Supervisor: Anna Jankovic

An Architecture that is Unique to any Individual

This project looks at architecture’s role in creating meaning for the development of one’s self.

It navigates a position between architecture’s standard and regulated elements, to drive a response that is both universal and individualised.

It understands that individual action cannot guarantee the common good, so instead it focuses on combining individual forces to achieve an outcome.

These standard and regulated elements and their typical identities are intermeshed to become unique. This is an evolutionary process, just like growing up. Each element develops new characteristics and attributes, which are intrinsic qualities of individualism.

By allowing this analogy to react with context and program, a framework emerges that supports unique and singular meanings.

Here architectural space and its moments become evolutions of one another, with no one element sharing the same qualities. It becomes a fabric that is made of the same fibre but has no clear pattern. It is a complexity that shares a closer affinity with a beginning rather than a distinctive end. This field of meaning offers unstandardized and subjective readings that resonate with the complexities of individuality. In recentering its functions to cultivate meaning and exchange, the architecture becomes an ode to the unique individual.

Lars Hegman Supervisor: Dr. Jan Van Schaik

Journey to the Pearl

Pearl river is the major water channel for one of most dense yet cultural cities Canton/Guangzhou. And Tanka people are the core of the river culture. They live, laugh, love on the river most of their life.

The rapid growth of the city comes with the expense of sacrificing the home and livelihood of this vital ethnic group due to industrialization and gentrification.

In the darkness of the urban village, between the uproar of the factory. Home of Tanka people scattered through the city.

The cultural resilience of the Tanka people manages to create new conditions, streetscapes, or adaptive structural reorganisation for the community to survive the relocations.

As the architecture assists the return of the Tanka people, so does the cultures, communities, and experiences of the city of water. Rediscover the pearl on the river, to learn what Tanka culture is to us as new generation Cantonese

Zhaonan Guo Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao

A Street by Grace

Perhaps planning is no longer functioning as intended. So, what if we reversed the process and unplanned? We recognise that this is possible because planning is not the only catalyst for function and livability. Buildings can be used as the instrument to create functioning 20-minute neighbourhoods. Which gives architecture the licence to then transgress the boundaries we currently work within due to planning.

This project delivers both health and social services through a single GP super clinic, resulting in a new, unplanned Mixed-Use Zone for an existing neighbourhood. The city is affected by reimagining the existing fabric using both existing and new tools at the scale of a situation. Buildings are redefined as agreements in material to permit land use and access. Architecture is redefined as first relationships, then forms, and finally relationships again.

In this way, there is the ability to deliver more soft infrastructure within proximity by simply reshaping what we see without changing what we see. This project argues for a change in current attitudes towards ownership and property. In order to literally build properties in a neighbourhood governed by the consequences of planning, we must realise where property separates, land unites.

Grace Huang Supervisor: Dr. Peter Brew

Ozymandias

This project delves into the palliation strategy for cities at the end of their lifespans when gentrification is no longer viable. It fantasises about the gloriously ambitious and hopeful future that was supposed to be but never was.

How do fleeting recollections play out before a city's last curtain? What does it recall?

The architectural form draws on the motif of an ottoman, which is frequently used to store garments and sentimental pieces; it is a family's informal cabinet of curiosities. It employs domestic imagery as a means of being pertinent to nostalgia and memory in homage to a long day's labour, compressed in ideology of respite. It serves as a metaphor for the process of palliation.

It is a rebuttal to the Stakhanovite Movement, which stood for overachievement and collective effort in pursuit of a prosperous future for all. The bright future is long gone. Put your weary feet up on the ottoman and take a break. Ozymandias is a journey inspired by reminiscence, hope, and disappointment – exploring poeticism in conjunction with the investigation of practical solutions to tackle socioeconomic and climatic challenges.

Elizaveta Zyuzina Supervisor: Simon Drysdale

Samuel Torre

Supervisor:

Lauren Garner

Throughout most of human history, form has followed fuel which, through modernity has shifted to form following finance 0 this project is interested in how form could follow love and what a model of collective care looks like at an urban scale.

The office-for-preparing-for-the-not-just-yet-but-pretty-much-right-now is an alliance of disciplines committed to collective knowledge-making and sharing. Where typical architectural services are governed by a finished product, the office is focused on designing the conditions and systems that steer the future outcome of a site through a framework of operations, maintenance and logistics.

Rejecting the business-as-usual model which perpetuates a violent cycle of extraction, construction and premature demolition, the office finds itself occupying the currently vacant former headquarters for Exxon Mobil at 12 Riverside Quay Southbank. Through a decades-long site analysis, the office slowly mines, maintains and subverts the office typology into a laboratory for cultural production. What begins as a suite of provisional interventions evolves into a strategic system of soft and hard infrastructure for public amenity - all the while anticipating when the primary structure will reach its material expiration date. As the tower decays, a new structure slowly manifests, eventually metabolising the existing building. Through this, the office hopes to temper the hyper-speed we have become accustomed to, recognising that the unfinished, messy and unbuilt are perhaps a city's greatest asset.

Leon van Schaik 25th Anniversary Peer Assessed Major Project Award Semester 1, 2023

Supervisor Statement

Deeply frustrated by the business-as-usual model which perpetuates a cycle of extraction, construction and premature demolition once a building has lost its usefulness, Sam’s project seeks to temper the hyper-speed we have become accustomed to, acknowledging that the unfinished, unrealized, and slower aspects of a city may hold great value. Through the conception of new architectural services and alliance delivery model, a taskforce is formed: “the office-for-preparing-for-the-not-just-yet-but-pretty-much-right-now”. Unlike traditional architectural services that focus solely on a final form, this taskforce prioritizes the design of systems that guide the future trajectory of the site.

To achieve this, they occupy the vacant former headquarters for Exxon Mobil at 12 Riverside Quay Southbank. Through a long-term site analysis, and public program, they slowly mine, maintain and subvert the office typology into a laboratory for cultural production. What begins as a suite of provisional interventions evolves into a strategic system of soft and hard infrastructure for public amenity - all the while anticipating when the primary structure will reach its material expiration date. As the tower decays, a new structure slowly manifests, eventually metabolising the existing building.

Through this careful balance of subtle and disruptive operation of maintenance, Sam’s project steers the site slowly towards environmental, social, and fiscal repair. At its core, this project is a visionary exploration of what collective care entails when applied to an urban scale.

_Lauren Garner

The office for preparing-for-the-notjust-yet-but-pretty-much-right-now

Provisional Occupation

The project looks at the possibility that architecture can have to be generous by facilitating an occupancy that is other than its first intention. It is a way of seeing the existing built environment through the lens of redundancy and occupation, and provide a different reading of our public, shared and private spaces, to accommodate for the changing diversity in our Suburbs.

It looks to our suburb and its common single use sites; the surface car park, the forgottenheritage building and the generic six pack housing model. The project is a way of interrogating the redundancies in these sites as opportunities to welcome an unseen occupation, to move forward from our inherent single use suburb. It draws from a place ofmemory and care, because architecture can be deeply personal and sentimental, and translates these memories into the project as moments that become provisions for other occupations. Into moments where the handrail is also gate to access the bins, or the bench in a car park that is a place to sit or a place to lay your groceries onto as you load the car.

Varshna Dhamodaran Supervisor: Simone Koch

The project draws from the first encounter with architecture, the memory of the childhood home. It is a memory of domesticity and of safety. Because architecture can be deeply personal, sentimental and have care for others. These moments become possibilities for occupation, it is ambiguous and loose to be occupied as needed and to allow for a different reading of our public and private spaces. Spaces that in their design or specificity in program has allowed for only a single type of occupation, like surface carparks, or carpark underneath apartment buildings.

It proposes a way of looking at the existing through the lens of redundancy and occupations and the negotiations we make with our built environment in the scale of the everyday.

Void Formation

Void Formation explores the creation and preservation of public space through the lens of the void. Developers, planners, and architects tend to build what is not there, making form a solution to spatial problems, and therefore contributing to the rapid growth of the built environment. What if instead of building, we subtract from the city? What if negative space can be designed to generate positive, uplifting offerings to the public?

The void is given an opportunity as a design tool in the realm of urban planning – curated public space is derived, moulding itself to create its own envelope and programmed for purpose. These spaces allow for considered use, passage, and habitation – unlocking the void’s potential to become the public space of urban fabric, rather than remaining as obsolete pockets in our city.

The project investigates void as a founding design strategy for public space creation within urban planning. Through a taxonomy of voids, rigorous formulae, a balance of consistency and variation, and the associated ‘Void Policy Report’, the void could become the catalyst for future developments.

To view the Void Policy Report, scan the QR code below:

Hansi Nirasha Hettikanda Supervisor: Anna Jankovic

This major project queries public-private housings claim to break down negative impacts, the concentration of disadvantage, and to improve connections with community.

This major project recognises that the big build purports a generalised benefit and displaces public residents forcing them to assimilate materially and immaterially into a model palatable to the private purchaser.

This major project, residing on Fitzroy’s Fleet Street estate explores strategies to retain familiarity and historical value within architecture. Consulting with the residents, distinctive existing conditions can be perceived as antithetical to the fictional lifestyle pedaled by the developer.

This major project engages confrontation to give expression to the problems and challenge our perception of spatial displacement and immaterial boundaries.

This major project empathises with the retention of deviancy as a monument that allows the architecture to have a relationship to its past, yielding an honesty in history, and inverting the boundaries of inherent ownership.

The project seeks to reposition a trajectory of public-private architectural practice from a commoditybased incentive to an instrument that anticipates the ongoing issues in relation to its history. And asks, can we hack our subjectivity around the anti-social and match the pace of reality?

Sarita Christine Karyn Mistry Supervisor: Dr. Peter Brew

Hi, It’s me, I’m the problem, It’s me

Location, Location?

Location!

The project explores the in-betweens of regional Victoria that have been neglected and forgotten through the investigation of the hamlet and the idea of decentralisation.

The original Mechanics Institutes were known as places for adult education, community engagement, sharing and knowledge. Through reigniting this idea, the project will explore strategies where small towns can unite along the roads that connect their communities. In order to achieve this, the process of decentralisation is necessary to achieve a linear hamlet. A community that is spread across multiple nodes rather than central to one. Access to goods and services will be available and showcased throughout the landscape and distributed for access anywhere, rather than packed into one location.

The Taungurong Institute, named after the Aboriginal land on which it stands, will be a destination that celebrates the land and its community. Placed evenly between Kyneton and Heathcote this structure will accompany and reignite the Barfold Mechanics Institute to its former purpose. Functioning for the local community as a place for gathering, education, memories, events, study and careers.

Joel Evan Theophylactou Supervisor: Simon Drysdale

Local Content

Situated at the intersection of labour and material, this project explores how architecture is employed as a public economic vehicle. Economic stimulus through construction is an established policy response, with job creation a key metric in any project announcement. However, we also understand that there are significant environmental impacts associated with our current construction and demolition practices, with nearly forty per cent of energy-related carbon emissions attributed to the building and construction industry. ‘Local Content’ suggests that we can reconcile these priorities by rebalancing the material and labour equation.

Extending upon existing content requirements that favour local manufacturing, the project proposes a material reuse network that supplies new buildings with components from their demolished predecessors. Material extraction is no longer an abstract and distant concept but is instead dependent on locality and time. How can design accommodate the decisions of the past while preserving potentials for the future?

The project aims to be a demonstration and facilitator of the methodology with inquiry centred on a pilot site located in the western industrial suburb of Brooklyn, where a large proportion of Melbourne’s construction waste is currently processed.

Kathryn Larkin Supervisor: Ian Nazareth

Living by the Derbal Yerrigan: An Unfinished Project

It is from an unfinished documentary archive that my major project begins. My project aims to build on what the documentary started – a passing of the project. It doesn’t seek to solve what film and architecture cannot, but rather provide a platform for discussion and preserving memory. It includes the design of a Community Performance Space (Pool), an Art Gallery and Artist Residence (The Shed) and a Rangers Base (The House). These sites exist within a series of complex adjacencies. Adjacency is a shifting condition, with a mathematical angle that incorporates a shared side. Throughout this project, I explore adjacencies and the dialogue that emerges from them. It is important to recognise the way we see and the way we draw as the first tools used in architectural design. In 'Staying with the Trouble', Donna Harroway references Marilyn Stratford, saying: “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with.” In this way, my project is a temporary moment in a long investigation, a project shared with everything that came before and is to come. Here, we can see the enmeshed world of sacred sites, underground water networks, current built form and past built form, swimming pools, and remnants of Jarrah, Marri and Eucalyptus forests. Things only come to matter (in both senses) in relation to one another. My project is therefore focused on the way that we draw as a mechanism and how it interacts with what we chose to give value to.

Lucy Elizabeth Gipson-Stratton Supervisor: Dr. Michael Spooner

Re-industrialisation: Bigness & Network

The project aims to reintroduce industrialization by inventing a new typology for urban modern manufacturing precincts. This is achieved by combining "Bigness" and "Network" effect, which have been observed in the evolution of manufacturing typologies such as the Innovation District and the Neo-cottage.

The project utilises bottom-up behavioural systems and draws inspiration from Jane Jacob's concept of "Generators of Diversity" to stimulate the "Bigness" and "Network" effect.

The behavioural systems approach demonstrates a way to induce innovative solutions across architecture of different types, by focusing on cultivating new possibilities of architectural conditions, through fostering typological variation and diversity.

This approach enables the creation of a new manufacturing typology that is adaptable to different modes of working, manufacturing and uses, ultimately establishing a future-oriented urban environment that operates dynamically in response to changes, which cannot be achieved through conventional top-down approaches.

By incorporating “Bigness” and “Network” effects, the project envisions an industrial ecosystem that serves as an industry incubator, in which big industries support each other and further cultivate smaller varied types of industries that eventually form the “Network”, and in turn contributes to the sustainability of the overarching "Bigness" and “Network".

Rachel Jin Hui Low Supervisor: Dr. Ben Milbourne

Reconnect

The Commonwealth Games are being held in regional Victoria in 2026. In response to the commonwealth games. The proposition considers how event tourism can be of benefit and detriment to a community. The project focuses on the game’s events taking place in Bendigo.

The site is situated at the pinch point of the creek and train line where the territory is most disconnected. The interventions reconnect territory via the introduction of an urban spine. Bridging both an event space and the existing local activities through the event. The project discovers a disconnection between our care for event spaces for tourists and our public spaces for locals. To engage with these values of care through remediating the existing gasworks, weaving native flora through the spine, and recognising the needs of the existing sports pavilions.

The series of interventions are introduced as sets, which change over time. The existing, the event as a catalyst for change, followed by the revelation of public gifts and legacy post-event. The project placing emphasis on how to maximise the community benefits of post-games. So the legacy is not a static artefact. Could we design a baseline recreational infrastructure that can live longer than the 10-day spectacle event?

Cara Isabella Humphry Supervisor: Adam Pustola

Workplace Accidents

This project, titled "Workplace Accidents," aims to develop a novel design approach by utilising collisions to hybridise various workplace typologies. The goal is to create an architectural cluster that offers a flexible working environment for different present and future work types.

Given the current Melbourne government's policies, anticipated population growth, and future job requirements, there is a need for a versatile workplace environment to support these changes. As architects, the project seeks to address this impending issue and explore how architecture can contribute to generating potential working environments in the future.

The research primarily consists of a series of studies on both physical and conceptual collisions, as well as plans of diverse work types from various industries. These studies inform the creation of a range of workplaces and provide spaces where new work types can emerge.

The project explores work types within the context of local conditions, recognizing architecture as a medium to connect different industries. It serves as an information hub to understand local features and acts as a platform to showcase the city's vitality and future prospects.

Shaoxiong Guo Supervisor: Dr. John Doyle

Some Things that Matter.

A place might be judged on its capacity to absorb mistakes, failures, or blemishes.

The project is a response to a series of failures, of policy and ambition, and a series of complicit stories, retold back to us. It is an enquiry into the way we see things, writing up and righting a series of wrongs in the regions and in the city.

It looks at places and architectures of perceived low value using sentimental and careful observation to affect the existing. It offers up a vocabulary of forms, not prescriptive but descriptive, to expediate the experience of architecture and creating clarity in the process. The closer we get to the sensory world, the better we might understand our place in it.

This major project is an exploration into sufficiency, a critique on material excess and a relational tool by which architecture is determined.

The architecture is a prompt for how we might use architecture and how it might use us. Acknowledging our responsibility to the distribution of labour, knowledge, and architecture. It is about the place, the commute, and the person. It is about how two things can be true. And as always, it is for my mother.

Laura Isabel Zammit Supervisor: Simone Koch

Reviving the Fossil

Hehuatang is a historic residential area renowned for its intact traditional style and extensive collection of Qing Dynasty relics. During the Qing Dynasty, it thrived as a hub for silk weaving craftsmanship, with an authentic city layout aligned with the ancient city wall. Unfortunately, in recent years, Hehuatang has faced neglect and marginalisation within the district, earning the name "Greyback" due to its isolation amidst a thriving commercial and cultural district. Challenges such as haphazard housing, limited public amenities, and overcrowding have endangered its cultural and historical significance.

To revitalise the area, a series of innovative design interventions have been implemented. Community buildings in Hehuatang have been thoughtfully designed to reflect the traditional silk weaving workshops, seamlessly blending with the surroundings using Siheyuan-style housing. These buildings serve as versatile spaces for local activities and act as carriers of silk culture, guiding visitors to explore the area's rich heritage. This approach reactivates Hehuatang's potential and preserves its cultural and historical value. By embracing traditional aesthetics and fostering community engagement, the area can overcome neglect, ensuring its legacy endures for generations to come.

Xinyun Zhang Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao

Dam to be Damned

With the complacency that we share regarding drought, especially given the recent wet conditions, Bendigo is a city that is destined to sew its current mistakes into the future. Insert Ibis Island. The spotlight that illuminates Bendigo’s poor treatment of water, history and country. You would be surprised to discover that where this project is situated is the former Municipal Baths. Discarded and fenced off for your own ease of mind. There is a current proposal to simply improve the provision of amenity through a boardwalk, however this fails to analyse the condition that exists. In the temporal nature of climatic shifts and the drastic variances that regional contexts endure, I insert a new design for the dam as a critique to the persistent muddy pit in the ground. A speculation, that when water levels fall throughout a 10 year drought, it reveals potential for new program and occupancy within the unveiling public offering. An affordance otherwise not possible to a context that continues to seek the easiest possible outcome. The introduction of a sustainable ecology that expands through time opening outward in connection to its adjacencies that equally expand into it. This reveals opportunities otherwise unseen where the value of public architecture is reinstated through new and radically shifted insertions of the Public Bathroom, Public Dining, Public Kitchen, and the Public Backyard.

Joel George Polychronopoulos Supervisor: Adam Pustola

Trading Post Machine

We find ourselves in the post-industrial epoch, grappling with an environment marked by scarcity and waste, where the nature of the home as a crucible of creation has been forgotten and its role reduced to a passive site for consuming. Challenging this paradigm, the Trading Post Machine emerges as an alternative. Anchored in Melbourne's Bourke Street Mall, this living, adaptive entity reorchestrates urban flows in order to reevaluate the domestic realm. By reuniting production and dwelling, it becomes a bastion for creativity, where material creation and symbolic connections develop side by side. Objects are metabolised in a dynamic cycle of appropriation and transformation, imbuing the discarded with renewed significance. In this model, accumulation gives way to informed manipulation of materials, promoting choice and sharing as the new luxury of living. The Trading Post Machine evolves into a shared resource, catalysing a community centred on creativity and expression. It stands as an emblem of resilient living, underlining the potential futures of our domestic landscapes. Through this lens, we can honour our homes as sites of alchemical potential, with materials serving as mediums of expression and identity. The transformative potential of the home presents a unique opportunity to redefine our domesticity, our individuality, and our relationship with the world.

Djuro Djuranovic Supervisor: Anna Jankovic

Yallourn^3 = 1000

This project is about the physical materialisation of the digital world. Its architectural proposition states that the future of the digital era will respond to the appearance of hyper-scale technology parks that will establish a new framework of digital sovereignty. The greatest interest of this project is to understand and speculate on the future dynamics of a digital-based society such as The Metaverse. The project’s theoretical foundation is the digital culture in architecture. Such a framework has led to speculation about the architectural effect, crises of scale and tectonics and contemporary landscapes. The site is The Yallourn W power plant. This place has the perfect combination of existing infrastructure, skilled workers, and available land for the development of this mega project.

Yallourn³ = 100 uses the field conditions to dissect the existing objects of the site with the intention to establish a new contract between place and networks that will bring digital Sovereignty to the future of our meta-civilization. The process of dissection is implemented through a programmatic field. Such quality will allow the introduction of integrated communication between centre nodes, Implement a civic agenda to the typology and prompt transparency within data control and ownership. The outcomes of the experiment evidence the capacity of the process to create architectural volumes with interdependent loops of interaction between field nodes. They convey specific hyper scale compositions of digital contemporary landscapes.

David Ricardo Guerrero Torres Supervisor: Patrick Macasaet

Past Forward

Past Forward explores idea of the familiar and unfamiliar of site - of context more broadly - for the retrieval and reuse of histories and objects of site for the redevelopment of a community school in small village on the outskirts of Mumbai, India. Working with objects – some architectural and some nonarchitectural - I explore how past memories and traditions of a place can be retrieved and renewed and transformed in places to make a new community school. The project also addresses local issues where schools like this one are neglected and can be refitted, reworked to have a broader community role in both their design and programming while effectively addressing the overall challenges associated with renovation, retrofitting, and rebuilding by employing various levels of understanding for each environment.

The project takes inspiration from our lifelong interactions with people and our engagement with material possessions. These elements are interwoven into the broader narrative of our daily existence and the various experiences we encounter within the spaces we inhabit. The overall composition of the project explores a deep understanding of how these components shape our lives and contribute to the atmosphere and functionality of the places we dwell in. The memories are retained in an abstract form, sometimes quite literal and in other instances unrecognisable, but the essence remains intact.

Jinal Gandhi Supervisor: Dr. Anna Johnson

Discrete Assembly: Reimagine Prefabrication

From traditional building methods to prefabrication, the widely implemented construction method within the contemporary architectural scene was greatly motivated by the measurement of cost and efficiency over its design capabilities and performance.

The project ‘Discrete Assembly: Reimagine Prefabrication’ originates from the contradicting ideal of purpose within a singular component and a greater aggregated collective, inciting a series of explorations in form, connection logic, and aggregated architectural resolution that best articulates a response to the design issue we face in the prefabrication architecture scene.

The architectural program sets as a medium-density residential complex that hosts a spectrum of spatial requirements on the macro scale, guarantees the ability to accommodate a range of programs from public to private; and frames the formal demands for higher architectural resolution within the microscale, creating a testing ground for the discrete component and its aggregation rule sets.

David Hsu Supervisor: Prof. Alisa Andrasek & Joshua Lye

ReDirect

The carbon impact of modern post-production and its distribution system motivated my major project’s inquiry. My initial study focused on the customs and market selling practices of India, from which I concluded that the world food issue caused by food waste will be the main challenge in the near future.This is a result of a lack of facilities and a pattern of selling strategies where products are more frequently thrown in the trash than they are consumed. Consequently, food waste is a serious problem in Australia as well. In the Melbourne CBD, renowned for its food lanes, I found that the current food waste recycling facilities are inadequate to manage the food waste produced. Therefore, a common connection between food lanes and nearby landmarks is the 7-11 store. Which motivated me to try locations that could act as hubs for promoting expired food and recycling food trash. Since the majority of the stores in the CBD are located in historically significant but underutilised areas, it makes sense to transform these structures into examples of adaptive reuse by constructing a facility on the current 7-Eleven store that will meet the CBD's needs for food waste recycling and marketing.

Nidhish Govindarajula Supervisor: Prof. Mark Jacques

Permission Please

This project seeks to explore and expose the lack of agency and autonomy of displaced persons seeking asylum in Australia in critique of offshore detention centres. The project’s agenda is to bring awareness to the evasive and inhumane policies of offshore detention centres and to humanise asylum seekers through a critique of the role of architectural mechanisms of control, isolation and violence. The Centre of Permission plays on themes of transparency and permanence to highlight the disparate narratives of displaced persons against the unassuming citizens of the bustling city of Sydney. By comparing the parallel journeys of these two demographics, this project intends to highlight the innate disparities and similarities between the two groups. At the core of my project I am interested in critiquing the bureaucracy of the law that determines a person's quality of life and their right to occupy space on this planet we call home. The Centre of Permission has been designed as a heterotopia in the bustling metropolis of Sydney and is intended to serve as a conduit in which surveillance and political visibility form a symbiosis to shed light on the policies surrounding offshore detention. Ultimately this project seeks to critique, expose and speculate upon the role of architecture within political protest.

Lameesa Ajmaeen Yousuf Supervisor: Dr. Ben Milbourne

City Backwards

This architectural design project focuses on the mountainous communities of Chongqing and aims to rebuild a close-knit community and recreate the essence of grassroots life in Chongqing. Chongqing, a city known for its hilly terrain, has gradually lost its local identity in the process of urban modernisation.

In this city, staircases have taken on a role beyond their traditional function, becoming vibrant shopping streets, activity centres, restaurants and living spaces. Previously, Chongqing was divided into a hilltop urban area and a docklands area at the bottom, interconnected by a network of staircases. As the population grew and the economy prospered, these staircases began to form a pattern of neighbourhoods unique to Chongqing.

These typical neighbourhoods played a key role, not only as a physical link between the upper and lower urban areas but also in providing additional housing and employment opportunities for the city's grassroots population. In addition, they have fostered a thriving small commodity economy within the staircase communities.

The organic growth of these communities, shaped by the unsystematic planning and construction undertaken by the residents themselves, led to the prevalence of scaffolding. Paradoxically, scaffolding creates a distinctive urban atmosphere by framing limited views, reminiscent of a photographic exhibition of the city. This unique experience of viewing the city through a frame on rugged terrain is what the project aims to preserve. The main objective is to contribute to the former by providing residential and commercial opportunities while cherishing and preserving the valuable qualities of Chongqing's mountain communities.

Yi Tang Supervisor: Patrick Macasaet

Architecture of the Floodplain

The city controls The Birrarung. The Birrarung by nature is borderless. How do we co-exist to both support and celebrate its fluctuating system?

The Birrarung is my site, as well as the client. Its extents fluctuate as it flows, flooding, retreating, adapting, revealing.

Mapping movement of water and people beyond the constraints of title boundary; a new bike and pedestrian path carves its way to the river from Burnley station, exposing hidden water systems in the creation of an integrated precinct of conservation, education, and recreation – amplifying the existing nature reserve and connecting the Yarra Trail and an expanded Parks Victoria program with the historic Herring Island Environmental Sculpture Park; a constructed choreography of built and natural systems benefiting, adapting to, and guided by, the site.

Through curating site-specific typologies and applying them as part of an interdisciplinary response, I show how we can strengthen our relationship with the river. Using the knowledges and tools we have, to better adapt to the systems we have always depended on. This project illustrates how architecture can be used as a guide to actively participate in the betterment of our waterways, whilst engaging with the ephemeral connections building with water brings.

Emily Rachael Doods Supervisor: Lauren Garner

the city controls The Birrarung. The Birrarung by nature is borderless. how do we co-exist to both support and celebrate it’s fluctuating system?

NGVT, the National Gallery of Victoria Tarneit, is a gallery that offers cultural space for both residents of Tarneit, and visitors alike. Located in Melbourne’s outer western suburb of Tarneit, the NGVT fills a gap that the development hasn’t considered – making the outer west a place to stay and relish rather than to live and leave by providing a cultural centre. Taking inspiration from the bulk stock houses that make up a majority of Tarneit’s built landscape, the NVGT is a seven times scaled up version cut and placed in-between Tarneit station and the existing Bunnings warehouse. A duplicity is demonstrated within the design, both at the larger original scale, and a smaller more domestic scale. Allowing a meshing of private and public designed spaces at a scale not often explored allows for opportunities not seen within the construction of building off a stock builders plan. Playfulness and scale are the driving factors to this project, attempting a whimsical balance of understanding both the existing built landscape, the opportunities that come with vast land as well as the potential in domesticity on a civil scale.

Isabella Bernadette Magliano Supervisor: A/Prof. Graham Crist

N G V T N G V T N G V T

"Modern" Maridan

This project responds to the Indonesian government’s plans to relocate the capital city to East Kalimantan, in the hopes of distributing resources and investment and to mitigate flooding and overcrowding.

An influx of Javanese migrants to Balikpapan will fuel tensions between ethnic groups, the existing jungle and mangrove ecosystem with be imposed on and wealth disparity between the local and migrants with form.

The architecture here facilitates change whilst retaining the connection of people with their environment whilst maintaining culture and customs. One that allows villagers to increase mangrove production, sustain the ecosystem, increase their fiscal capacity and reverse their imposition on the threatened proboscis monkey habitat.

A vocational, primary and secondary education facility operates alongside mangrove nurseries entwining play and plantation, a wildlife crossing woven from the surrounding rattan trees float over the structures for the monkey’s safe passage. The existing seafood market is refurbished, the local mosque and town hall are connected to a town square. The local Malay peoples who will be displaced by the capital city will have their building repurposed as cladding for these new structures. A network of netting, agricultural structures connect the buildings with a series of elevated walkways. Water filtration systems, a fishing pier and an elevated lookout point, peel away from the network forming armatures to observe the surrounding mangrove habitat.

Randy Aditya Mucti Supervisor: Helen Duong

One Beacon

One Beacon is a transformative architectural remnant located in Gaodang Village, Guizhou Province, China, with a vision to ignite rural revitalization and preserve the vanishing cultural heritage of the Tunpu people. At its core lies the remarkable restoration and reimagination of the long-forgotten Xiaotun, an abandoned watchtower and defensive stronghold, into a captivating Cultural Exhibition Center. One Beacon aims to create an inclusive space that welcomes both villagers and visitors through breathing new life into this historical landmark.

The transformation of One Beacon seamlessly incorporates the traditional architectural elements that are characteristic of Gaodang Village, thereby metamorphosing the once-military bastion into a living testament to the vibrant Tunbao culture. It not only offers a captivating glimpse into the rich history of the region but also serves as a platform to showcase the distinctive local techniques “Stone-Wood Mortise” that define the area.

Through cultural tourism and economic opportunities, the project strives to cultivate pride and financial stability among the villagers, encouraging the younger generation to stay, contribute to the community, and preserve their heritage. One Beacon's narrative intertwines preservation and progress, standing as a guardian of Tunbao's cultural legacy and inspiring a sustainable future.

Songwei Wang Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao

Patching Land

Patching Land is an ambitious project that seeks to reconnect Shanhuba, a historically and culturally significant site in Chongqing. Located in a vibrant city, known for its hilly terrain and intersecting rivers, Shanhuba holds immense value as a green wetland area along the Yangtze River. However, due to limited accessibility caused by annual flooding, its potential has remained untapped.

Patching Land proposes a strategically designed recreation centre that bridges Shanhuba and the riverbank. It harmonises with the local context, incorporating curved forms inspired by Chongqing's rivers and mountains. The design maximises natural light, transparency, and biophilic elements, creating an inviting atmosphere. The space offers informative exhibitions, open-air performances, mahjong areas, tea houses, hotpot restaurants, picnic spots, and camping areas. It includes a rubber track for exercise, relaxation areas, and a floating fishing platform for riverside activities. Patching Land fosters a vibrant community space that celebrates Shanhuba's history, connecting people with nature and cultural experiences.

By providing accessibility to Shanhuba throughout the year and creating an inclusive community space, Patching Land creates a cultural landmark that fosters harmony between the built environment and nature, reigniting collective memory and inclusivity in Chongqing.

Yuxuan Hu Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao

Character Tower

This project begins with a re-examination of existing apartment tower typologies and proposing a new typology that challenges the current standardised tower designs that we are currently surrounded by. To do this I begin with an engagement Chinese culture, creating a design that both addresses newness in a new suburb, whilst learning from formal and informal typology of the Chinese culture and lifestyle. Extracting from the existing Chinese behavioural typologies as a precedence, this new proposed typology will address the needs of the growing Chinese community whilst also solving the current issues of the existing apartment tower, namely the lack of interaction space, absence of flexible accommodations as well as the low living standards that plague the tenants forced to live in these buildings. Therefore, in order to understand how space can reflect human behaviours and lifestyle as the example in Shanghai shows where people share laneways and continuously expand their homes to meet their needs, this tower embraces individual choices and personalities into the development, as well as encourages people to have the opportunity to alter their own space and adapt on their own after moving into the tower.

To take it one step further, this tower creates a point of interest by taking Chinese characters and letters which echo the meaning according to behaviours for form finding, abstracting its original form and finding close and generic geometries to further push the concept through the physical architecture of the tower.

Tianyi Luo Supervisor: Dr. Anna Johnson

Suburb’s Suburb

Suburb’s suburb is an experimental project which emerges as an investigation through the increasing gap between the rich two-faced character of city and suburb, questioning the formulaic growth pattern in the suburb. The challenge is to thrive for a unified framework that can be plugged into the existing context as a new living typology. It imagines the new suburb to be perceived as a vertical dynamic experience, a micro-object of the suburb in suburb rising as a new micro typology where having cars is not a necessity. This object emerges as a silhouette of the half suburb and half city where all daily needs are accessible in a 10 min walk exploring sustainability and self-sufficiency. It explores an elevated typology on the railway lines to be experienced through the transit. Its location on the existing station gives it direct access to the surrounding context when needed. Here by increasing its potential to be plugged in as micro urban pockets throughout the transit lines in the future. In order to achieve the newness, the key characteristics of the city’s skin are imagined to be shredded as a remanent on this new suburban object binding all the activities within. The key agenda is that the spatial qualities of the transitions within are to be experienced through the texture of the skin.

Nikita Sanjaybhai Akruwala Supervisor: Dr. Anna Johnson

Temple is not for praying

Jingyi Wu Supervisor: Patrick Macasaet

The project tried to reinvent the traditional religious and cultural venue in modern and secular context, and inject new purposes and meanings to the old facility which carries hundreds of years of heritage, and empower the local migrant community facing challenges of the new century. Through various filters and lenses, and referencing other contemporary religious sites and variations of other Mazu templates all around the world, the modern significance of temples was explored and evaluated in the project in a modern and multicultural and immigrant community context. The design tried to transcend the traditional single purpose praying site by providing the community with aged care and nursing functions while keeping the sense of religious and cultural belonging for immigrants and descents old and new. The Mazu cultural and religious factors are kept in the form and decoration design for retaining the cultural affiliation and the harmonious relationship between man and nature in Taoism is explored and integrated in the site and building design and presented as an immersive native nature experience for the local community, exposes the residents and visitors to the beautiful landscape and local ecosphere while traversing the building for its day to day functions

Record .10

My effort, which I started with terrorism, has made a big difference in many countries throughout the world, especially India. The tragedy of the 2008 terrorist assault in Mumbai, India, has had an impact on people's way of life and the historical significance of the city's architecture. Mapping the human activity near one of the major affected sites, known as Mumbai T aj, as the site context gave me an opportunity to record the past, how the site works, and the time when the attack happened and how it has changed the activity of the place. Mumbai, known for its metropolitan life and serving huge crowds 24 hours a day , has been ghosted to survive for 4 days due to the attack. That's where the overlay of activity mapping has been resolved throughout my major project. This gave us the opportunity to capture the past in the same place, as a record of memory for the future. by joining the civic character of the city and recollections of the 10 attacks, which made a place where the history can reach individuals as a memory through a journey that is able to support the ongoing site activities as a whole. The journey of the project gives an architectural way of finding how to record the past and connect it with the present.

Nikita Gautam Dave Supervisor: Vicky Lam

Abandoned Space

Supervisor:

The bridge is an important component of Chongqing. The bridge facilitates the travel of Chongqing people, connects the three sides of Chongqing, and is an important part of Chongqing's transportation network.

But the bridge divides the river and the land into two parts, making the river and the land lose their connection. People's interaction with water is also made difficult by the presence of bridges. A small number of Chongqing people will skillfully use the various spaces under the bridge. They use the dam as a runway; use the platform under the bridge to eat hot pot and play mahjong; use the stairs as a hydrophilic platform. These elements provide the inspiration for the project.

The spatial quality of public spaces will vary according to different needs. The project uses elements familiar to Chongqing people in different forms to create various spatial qualities. The project attempts to explore the possibility of reusing abandoned spaces.

Runze Shao

Patrick Macasaet

Supervisors Semester 1, 2023

Major Project Coordinator

Amy Muir

Major Project Moderation Panel

Prof. Vivian Mitsogianni

Julian Kosloff, Kosloff Architecture

A/Prof. Paul Minifie

Dr. John Doyle

Amy Muir

Major Project Supervisors

Adam Pustola

Prof. Alisa Andrasek & Joshua Lye

Andre Bonnice

Anna Jankovic

Dr. Anna Johnson

Dr. Ben Milbourne

A/Prof. Graham Crist

Helen Duong

Ian Nazareth

Dr. Jan van Schaik

Dr. John Doyle

Lauren Garner

Prof. Mark Jacques

Dr. Michael Spooner

Dr. Nic Bao

Patrick Macasaet

Dr. Peter Brew

Simon Drysdale

Simone Koch

Vicky Lam

Students Semester 1, 2023

Anne-Marie Refalo

Benjamin Robert Bartlett

Cara Isabella Humphry

Chloe Ingrid Bain

David Hsu

David Ricardo Guerrero Torres

Devika Panicker

Diana Kimari

Djuro Djuranovic

Dyuman Jatin Pandya

Elizaveta Zyuzina

Emily Rachael Dodds

Fan Zhang

Grace Huang

Hansi Nirasha Hettikanda

Isabella Bernadette Magliano

Jinal Gandhi

Jingyi Wu

Joel Evan Theophylactou

Joel George Polychronopoulos

Kathryn Larkin

Lameesa Ajmaeen Yousuf

Lars Hegmann

Laura Isabel Zammit

Lucy Elizabeth Gipson-Stratton

Nicola Danielle Maugeri

Nidhish Govindarajula

Nikita Gautam Dave

Nikita Sanjaybhai Akruwala

Pele Rose Morrison

Rachel Jin Hui Low

Randy Aditya Mucti

Riley Thomas Sherman

Runze Shao

Samuel Torre

Sarita Christine Karyn Mistry

Shaoxiong Guo

Simone Miriam Chait

Songwei Wang

Tianyi Luo

Trent John Davidson

Varshna Dhamodaran

William Bennie

Xinyun Zhang

Yi Tang

Yuxuan Hu

Zhaonan Guo