SEMESTER 2 | 2022
MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN ARCHITECTURE DESIGN ELECTIVES BALLOTING POSTERS
ARCHITECTURE DESIGN ELECTIVES COMPRISE A SUITE OF VERTICALLY INTEGRATED COURSES OFFERED ACROSS THE BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND THE MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMS. ARCHITECTURE DESIGN ELECTIVES DRAW ON KEY AREAS OF ARCHITECTURE HISTORY AND THEORY, COMMUNICATIONS, TECHNOLOGY, AND DESIGN, AND FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY COMBINATIONS WITH THE MASTER OF URBAN DESIGN AS WELL AS DESIGN PROJECTS OFFERED ACROSS THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN PROGRAMS.
THE EMPHASIS OF THE ELECTIVES ARE THE APPLICATION AND SYNTHESIS OF NEW SKILLS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUR PRACTICE AND KNOWLEDGE OF ARCHITECTURE.
ARCHITECTURE DESIGN ELECTIVES BALLOTING POSTERS
RMIT University Architecture Bachelor/Master Elective History and Theory Stream Semester 2 2022 Mondays 10am-1pm: B100.04.007 Richard Black
How are the concepts of nature, our relationships to nature, being rethought through various exhibitions, texts and creative practices?
Rewilding Architecture Overview
FORMALHAUT Kuhprojekt, Vogelsberg, Hessen, 1986
Writer Robert Macfarlane tells us that the ‘idea of the Anthropocene repeatedly strikes us dumb. In the complexity of its structures and the range of its scales within time and space – from nanometric to the planetary, from picoseconds to aeons – the Anthropocene confronts us with huge challenges. How to interpret, or even refer to it? Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures withdrawn. We find speaking of the Anthropocene, even speaking in the Anthropocene, difficult. It is, perhaps best imagined as an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope’ (Macfarlane, Underland, p364). The reality of climate change has provoked a critical reflection on architecture and demands an urgent rethink of our relationship to nature, in all its forms, and for its status in the architectural profession. This elective explores these issues, and more: specifically, what are the implications for architecture and its design knowledges in an era of environmental collapse? Underlying this is a belief that design has a critical role to play, and that the essence of design knowledges and processes can assist in navigating a new relationship to nature whilst considering dramatic shifts of the traditional frameworks of what constitutes architecture. So then, what can architects do to promote a new, more radical, but still sympathetic, understanding of nature? The syllabus is structured around a critical review of communities of practice within the field - across architecture and urbanism, and other related disciplines tracing lineages of ideas emerging over the past 30 years to the present – to make an assessment of the discourse. These include built and unbuilt works by artists, architects, landscape architects, as well as various forms of writing - a range of material that is broad and yet focussed, crossing disciplinary boundaries from ecology, urbanism, art and architecture, exploring ways in which an engagement with nature in its various forms is being reimagined as a response to the pressing issues of economic and environmental decline. Several years ago, architect and critic Alan Colquhoun summarised the contemporary situation: ‘Today the west is wealthy and promotes mass consumerism. Its aesthetics is based on extravagance and desire’ (Colquhoun AA Files 67, p146) - a thread running through this semester will be a critique of such excess and a questioning of architecture, its role and its design design processes in these uncertain times – as well as a brining into focus a greater awareness of a socially, ethically and politically aware creative practices: a new regime of care. The seemster begins with a review of several recent (and not so recent) exhibitions and their curatorial themes: Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing planet 1969-2009. Curator: Francesco Manacorda, Barbican Art Gallery, London. Broken Nature: design takes on human survival, Milan XX11 Triennale, 2019. Curator: Paola Antonelli, Ala Tannir, Laura Maeram and Erica Petrillo. Critical Care Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, Architekturzentrum Vienna 2019. Curator: Angelika Fitz and Elke Kransny Repair Architecture actively engaging with the repair of the places it is part of. Australian Institute of Architects Australian Pavilion 2018. Curators: Baracco + Wright Architects in collaboration with Linda Tegg Finding Country, curator Kevin Obrien (Venice 2012)
Semester structure/assessment tasks Wks 1 - 6 Archive: beginning with the exhibitions above, and supported by additional key texts, films, documentaries, art works, architectural works, urbanism and reference material
(available on the Rewilding Architecture Elective canvas shell) – this archive forms the base material for a structured review of selected discourses. What are the significant ideas, practices and projects? What are the key ideas and themes that can be drawn out of this pre-existing material? How can we navigate a new relationship between architecture and nature? Across the first six weeks, you will make 3 tutorial presentations (working in teams of 2).
Wks 7-12 Urban Nature Drawing + Text: having developed a working knowledge of the material explored in the Archive (weeks 1-6), make a speculative/propositional drawings and
1000-word text (mini-essay) expanding upon your understanding of the key issues explored in your tutorial presentations and research. As a mode of exploration, through mark making, lines, image and so forth, this drawing builds upon a tajectory of ideas around nature, culture, being.and the anthropocene. Your role changes from that of ‘critic’ (wks 1-6) to that of designer/artist – where you are required to make a series of drawings speculating upon ways of reading nature within the urban environment. Rather than understanding the city as built fabric your role will be to find and discover the hidden and unseen aspects of the city, the land underfoot, watersheds, from micro to macro scales, below and above ground, the weather, a habitat for living things, biodiversity, processes and ecologies within the city: a drawn study of urban nature. On Nature, both human and non-human what are the ways of representing this through drawing, image making? What are the new strategies for engaging the non-human? In particular, Jakob von Uexkull’s, ‘Umwelt – the environment that is perceptively available to each species, which he famously described as from the viewpoint of a sightless tick’. (Broken Nature p20) and ….’It’s about empathy and about the realization that we are all part of nature, not nature’s masters’ (broken nature p28).‘Nature has been aptly called the most complex word in our language’ (On the brink, surveying the contemporary sublime, Suzanne Ramljak, p11, Natural Wonders, The Sublime in Contemporary Art) (working in teams of 2 or individually)
Dr Richard Black is a registered architect, educator, author and Associate Professor with RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design. His teaching, design practice and research activities explore overlaps and adjacencies between architecture, landscape and urbanism. With Anna Johnson he has co-authored several publications, most notably Living in the Landscape, Urban Sanctuary, Neeson Murcutt Neille: Setting Architecture, all by Thames and Hudson; and in 2017 they established an architectural practice based in Castlemaine. Richard’s mapping of the Murray River floods, fieldwork and associated design projects, have been acquired by the Centre for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, USA. Richard’s design projects have been nationally and internationally recognised through exhibition and publication. He obtained his B.Arch (first class honours) from Curtin University (WA) 1987 and has completed post-graduate study (1991) under Sir Peter Cook at the Städelschule Art Academy, Frankfurt, Germany. He completed an M.Arch (Research) in 1998 and a PhD (2009) both at RMIT University.
SEQUENTIAL ARCHITECTURE Sequential Architecture posits that through the fundamental skills of composition, contouring, gesturing, and forming, the architectural comic is able to unpack the speculative or propositional object in a manner that steps down from the teleological impositon of the hero render, and speaks to those inside and outside of the discipline in a with radically relational way. Sequential Art, the academic study of comic making, differs from more established academic art forms like cinema and painting in how it allows the reader to sit within the space and time drawn into the work.
laura
This elective will provide students with three analogue drawing methods: contour, gesture, and forming. They will learn the fundamentals of observation and composition, and then push into more experimental modes of analogue image making.
szyman
Students who wish to extend themseles will also have the opportunity to practice with the Blender Grease Pencil tool.
phd student
Students will develop technical skills drawn from contemporary and historical illustration, comic making, film, and 2D-3D compositing, alongside a set of conceptual and theoretical skills focusing on re-understanding the architectural visualisation as something beyond the hero image. There will be a firm emphasis on workflow development so that these techniques can transfer to other visualisation methods. Students will be expected to provide their own drawing materials, a range of options will be provided.
Open to bachelors and masters students.
wed 10-1
UNITY & C#
games engine + coding Tutor
|
Caitlyn Parry
Day | Wednesday
Time | 0900 - 1200
Location | 100.05.007
Equipment | MUST BYO Laptop
This elective will introduce you to Unity games engine and c# coding language. It is a beginners course which does not require previous Unity or coding knowledge. The subject will begin by stepping through Unity software and with each week will building on understanding the general principles of programming using C# language. The later parts of the subjetc focusing on more creative 2D & 3D applications that are relevant to architecture. Student must provide their own laptop with adequate capability to run Unity3D. A folio documentating all creative outcomes will be required as part of the final submission.
OVERWRITTEN RMIT Architecture Elective 2022 Semester 2 Vicky Lam Overwritten elective is a critical exploration of how our cities are observed, measured and visualized at different scale of physical space and time. At certain times in Hawthorn, particularly in the darker quieter hours, overwritten infrastructures, pathways, and systems emerge...the sound of the hidden canals and drains, flight paths of the birds and bats, the rituals of exercise and commute along pedestrain paths along the train lines and the Birrarung Yarra River. Here we define territory not by municipal boundaries, but through drawing and animating the “long things of life” (Joseph Brodsky) streets, rivers, drains, flight paths, train lines, fences.
PART 1: Research “Long things of Life” Drawing , Animation, Writing Work individually to produce a body of research of through a series of drawings and short animations PART 2: Observation Mapping System Seeking in Hawhorn, following River/ Waterways, paths of flora and fauna, trains/ fencelines, Cul-De-Sacs, overwriting structures, overwritten structures PART 3: Panaorama Group work Combined drawing , Animation for Exhibition PREREQUISITE: Architecture students in Bachelor or Master Program, skills in Drawing, Modelling in CAD program, Adobe Suite. Wednesday Mornings at 9:30 am Week 2- Class begins Week 3 - Site visit at Hawthorn Train Station Animation/ Aftereffects Workshop at Week 5 - Friday 19th August 5:30 pm
Your 15 Minutes
Public relations for architects Dr Jan van Schaik
Wednesdays 2.30pm > 5.30pm Room 100.04.07 Weeks 1 to 12
“In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes”
But new evidence shows that Andy Warhol didn’t even say it.
So said Andy Warhol 40 years ago. This quote perfectly captures the power that today’s social media tools have to transport an act as innocuous as making a wooden bowl to global fame overnight.
Yet, once attribut3ed to him, he was astute enough to recognise its power, and embraced the association.
In this elective you will learn how to brand an architecture business, define a target audience, define your public presence, run a marketing campaign, make social media, conduct viral and guerrilla marketing,
deal with the press, and the speaking and presentations skills to promote yourself in person.
Jan van Schaik is an architect at MvS Architects, and a researcher and senior lecturer at RMIT Architecture & Urban Design. He is the founder and convener of WRITING &
CONCEPTS, the designer of Lost Tablets, and a creative sector consultant at Future Tense.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Classes will be held in face-to-face presentation discussion format.
More at janvanschaik.com
This elective is part of a group of studios and electives run this semester that are aligned with RMIT Architecture | Tectonic Formation Lab, which will collaborate through combined reviews and symposia. Students will be researching the robotic and advanced fabrication of: a)
Suspension 3d printing within gel matrix
b)
Glass Fibre and carbon fibre vacuum infusion
c)
Post tensioning structure in sacrificial formwork
The students will be divided into groups to explore a selected fabrication technique. Classes will be conducted on campus within RMIT workshops. Students are required to access the RMIT workshops independently to develop each process. No experience with algorithmic tools and robotic tools is required. However, engagement in both workshop environment and iterative algorithmic tools is vital. Students are required to purchase materials on certain projects.
ADVANCED FABRICATION RESEARCH ELECTIVE CHARLIE BOMAN + ALAN KIM
Bao, Nic. 2019. Cast Agency. Melbourne
Snooks, Roland. 2013. Composite Swarm. Melbourne
Soliquid. 2019. Combined with Generative Design and Topology Optimization processes. Twitter. https://twitter.com/soliquid_io/status/1080808081729163264/photo/1
EVERY THURSDAY 11AM 100.05.003
Insights from an analogue world
Tutor: John Cherrey When: Thursdays 2:00 - 5:00pm Duaration: Weeks 1 - 12 Where: B100 Workshop, Level 1 Our world is one where the digital is an escapable, but have you ever paused to wonder what may have been lost in the headlong race to embrace the digital. Is there still valuable analogue based knowledge which you might usefully draw upon? In your unquestioning use and exploration of digital techniques and technologies have ever wondered if the outcome might not be much improved if you understood something about materiality. In 3D clay printing for example, does the type of clay being extruded have any bearing on what can be achieved? In using physical modelling, can the richness of architectural expression and ideation expand dramatically if you thought beyond just laser cutting? This elective offers you the opportunity to explore these questions and proposes that greater richness in design can evolve from combining digital and analogues knowledge, skills, and experience. This workshop is a based elective. You will design and make a series of works, at varying scales using a broad range of hand and digital tools. You will also be asked to expand your usual material palette and delve into our rich material world. The projects will include smaller class-based exercises as well as larger works which will be completed both in class and during your own time. You should expect to spend up to $150.00 on materials. This class is taught Face to Face so you must attend in person from Week 1.
AI
ACCELERATED
ARCHITECT
Tutor: Prof Alisa Andrasek https://www.alisaandrasek.com/ https://www.aiarch.ai/ https://linktr.ee/nDarchitecture KEYWORDS: MACHINE LEARNING/AI /AESTHETICS /COMPLEXITY / HIGH RESOLUTION / PATTERN RECOGNITION / WONDER / AI IMAGE TO IMAGE / AI TEXT TO IMAGE
Architecture is increasingly trans-disciplinary and enriched with information, introducing big data into design processes. Through the cross section of the latest AI tools, we will investigate AI-assisted design search, accelerating development of student’s design thinking and sensibility emerging from new forms of partnerships with AI. We will start with a visualization of cliches, and the bias that such big-data platforms encourage since they are being trained on the lowest common denominators. We will also uncover and discuss student’s biases in this process. We will then nudge AI into more unknown territories of design discovery, emancipating designers from familiar and predetermined, we will embrace re-origination of architectural expressions, asking what architecture could be with this newfound hybrid form of human/nonhuman creativity. Along the way, we will invite in great architectural masters, intricate and complex patterns from nature, and beyond. The class will culminate in a rich visual journey, deep dreaming through novel fabric of architecture, in a video format. Computational workflow will consist of training and deployment of artificial neural networks in their different forms, such as, Image to Image Neural Translation, Convolution Neural Networks, Text to image generation models such as VQGAN+CLIP, Open AI’s DALL E and Mid Journey. Through this cross-section through the current AI tools, students will develop virtuosity with AI design, visual and conceptual synthesis, and ability to work at accelerated pace on inception of designs. Students will be working in teams. Schedule All classes are face to face DESIGN HUB / L10 / PAVILION 1 Week 1 // 21st July / 2PM-5PM Week 2 // 25th July and 28th July / 2PM-5PM Week 3 // 1st August and 4th August / 2PM-5PM Week 4 // 8th August and 11th August / 2PM-5PM Week 5 // 15th August - 18th August / 2PM-5PM Week 6 // 22nd August and 25th August / 2PM-5PM Week 7 // 29th August / 2PM-5PM
Bachelors and Masters Elective- Wednesday 9.30-12.30, 100.04.007 PETER BREW
degrees of DIFFICULTY Who has not put down a book in annoyance or tossed one in disgust, to then read it
without putting it down. Reading is not nearly as straightforward as its made out to be, we skip words, repeat sentences, miss pages and search for words in a box full of them, We are compromised by reading, we are just as likely to be emboldened as insulted or diminished. we encounter difficulty; we experience doubt, and on occasion we give up. To look at books as repositories of knowledge says nothing of the experience of reading, after all it is not our knowledge of doubt but the feeling of doubt that causes books to shut and be returned to the shelf. And it is not what we know about anger but anger that causes a book to be thrown aside. Is it ironic then that the feeling of doubt is a prerequisite to understanding the modern text ? . “I am a thinking (conscious) thing, that is, a being who doubts, affirms, denies, knows a few objects, and is ignorant of many- (“cogito” dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum—res cogitans) Rene Descartes’ 1641 That the very sensation that causes the book to be returned to the shelf is all that we needed to realise its purpose. It followed from Descartes that modern philosophy is the phenomenology of reading, The” I “who doubts; the reader, who mouths the words, is the instrument of knowing that recognises truth. From Descartes truth is not known but experienced; the experience of the reader reading. This project will carefully read a number of primary texts from Philosophy, Aesthetics and Architecture. A reflection on each weeks reading will be the basis of a journal, This will be collated and submitted for assessment at the conclusion of the semester. Text to be exerts from; 1 M Tafuri; Humanism Technical Knowledge and Rhetoric; The debate in renascence Venice. 2 Rousseau; The Social Contract (Foucault commentary) 3Gombrich from Perfernce for the primitive 4 J von Goethe – On German Architecture (commentary by J Pevsner, E H Gombrich and VonMuke and Purdy et el) 5 Alois Riegl; The Modern Cult of Monuments . 6 Wilhelm Worringer; Abstraction and Empathy. 7 Walter Benjamin; On translation. The storyteller. 8 Hegel Notes on aesthetics 9 Roland Bathe; Mythologies . 10 Foucault; What is an Author- (Giorgio Agambon The Author as Geasture) 11 Kuhn; The structure of Scientific Revolutions .Agambon What is a paradigm 12 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – What is Philosophy 13 Elizebeth Groz The thing 14 Agambon from The signiture of all things
“What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking” Samuel Beckett – texts for nothing
Empathy (Einfuhlung): ... How the body in responding to certain stimuli in dream objectifies itself in spatial forms - and with this also the soul - into the form of the object. Robert Vischer On the optical sense of Form a Contribution to Aesthetics Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. . . . We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong -
karl Popper
The plant contemplates water, earth, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates, and it contracts them in order to acquire its own concept and fill itself with it (enjoyment). The concept is a habit acquired by contemplating the elements from which we come……p 106 Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari What is philosophy Paul Valéry wrote in a very remote context. “Artistic observation”, he says in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, “can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self.”
Aristotle briefly defended them in his fragmentary Poetics. In particular, Aristotle defended the arts from Plato’s charge that they are cognitively useless, trading in mere images of particulars rather than universal truths, by arguing that it is precisely the arts, or at least poetry, that deliver universal truths in a readily graspable form, unlike, for example, history, which deals merely with particular facts (Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, 1451a37–1451b10).
Biennale Sessions biennale architettura 2023
venezia
20.05.2023
visualising the virtual concourse
visualising the virtual concourse tom kovac michele pasca di magliano marjan coletti alessandro melis patrik schumacher javier ruiz peter russell research assistants joanne qiu sammy kudret tony lee week 06 - 12 intensive thursdays 6-9pm
microsoft teams master of architecture research partners ZHA tsinghua SIGS bartlett UCL NYIT
VVC teams will be developing the next stage of the Venice Virtual Pavilion, researching new spatial environment for the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023 which will be rich in sensory and spatial information. This will enable engagement with generative tools and technologies evolving an emergent metaverse digital platform exhibition within an NFT blockchain environment for engagement with creative works.
The VVC ( Visualizing the Virtual Concourse ) Venice Virtual Pavilion project is ongoing research within the framework of the Venice Architecture Biennale researching spatial intelligence, enabling future directions in scalable environments for sharing and connecting a virtual world. The current platform hosted the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilions created for navigating exhibitors' projects and their links to social media platforms as a stage one metaverse experiences for exhibitors, visitors and friends. With an aim to add new utilities as an iterative process the virtual environments, when supported by a spatially unifying concept, offer the possibility that learning communities in the digital city can be both more decentralized and more intensely related than heretofore.
G A MR UNIT : space edition
TUTORS: PATRICK MACASAET & ANDRE WEE PREREQUISITES: Due to the intensive nature of the elective, prior knowledge of Unreal Engine 4.27 or 5 is required. Open to Bachelor and Masters students. EQUIPMENT: Laptop required with Unreal Engine meeting minimum hardware requirements. LOCATION: RMIT Design Hub. Lvl 10. Pavilion 1. INTENSIVE ELECTIVE TIMELINE: Weeks 1-6. x2 sessions per week. Tuesday 2.30-5.30pm / Friday 1.00-4.00pm Week 1 - Tuesday 19/07 and Friday 22/07 Worlding Polemics, Narrative & Ideation (Focus Groups) Week 2 - Tuesday 26/07 and Friday 29/07 Immersive Modelling, Environments and Real-Time Collaboration (Focus Groups) Week 3 - Tuesday 02/08 and Friday 05/08 Worlding Polemics, Narrative & Ideation (Elective Cohort). Friday Mid-Crit. Week 4 - Tuesday 09/08 and Friday 12/08 Immersive Modelling, Environments and Real-Time Collaboration (Elective Cohort) Week 5 - Tuesday 16/08 and Friday 19/08 Immersive Modelling, Environments and Real-Time Collaboration (Elective Cohort). Competition Production. Week 6 - Tuesday 23/08 and Friday 26/08 Immersive Modelling, Environments and Real-Time Collaboration (Elective Cohort) Competition Production and Final Presentation STUDENT PARTICIPATION AGREEMENT Students will be required to complete a Student Participation Agreement form. Students will be required to formally assign to RMIT their interest in any IP which may be created as a result of involvement in the studio. Students will receive credit for the authorship of the projects produced in the elective if they are included in future exhibitions, publications and presentations as well as an acknowledgment of the context that their work was produced in – that is the ‘GAMR UNIT: Space Edition’ Architecture Elective at RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design.
01 Image: Super Heavy B4 before and after the start of Raptor heat shield installation - SpaceX.
GAMING, ARCHITECTURE AND MEDIA RESEARCH UNIT. This nascent research group explores questions and potential contributions for architectural design, pedagogy and practice through emerging gaming and contemporary media techniques, software and processes. Students will be exposed in three areas of investigations.
1. Worlding Polemics: Narratives and Contemporary Culture. Students will engage with topical contemporary concerns, potentials, and culture to surface possible areas of explorations as departure points for narratives, cultural and architectural positions. These investigations will assist in the design of worlds, architecture and environments loaded with cultural commentary and ideas. 2. Gaming Intelligence: Immersive Modelling, Environments and Collaboration. Students will explore and be exposed to a range of modelling and worldbuilding tools available in Unreal Engine – simulating a feedback loop beyond architecture and the environment with immersive real-time impact and effects. As a cohort, students will develop, share, and catalogue a taxonomy of immersive modelling capabilities as design tools. Students will also be exposed to collaborative multi-editing tools via Unreal Engine
allowing real-time immersive collaborative work.
3. Gaming and Future Practice. We will investigate the potential impact and contribution of gaming techniques and workows for contemporary architectural practice. 2022 INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE COMPETITION The elective will use an architectural competition hosted by the Fondation Jacques Rougerie - Institut De France as a platform for all the investigations and explorations. The elective cohort will simulate a ‘gaming architectural practice’ and produce a competition entry as a group for an infrastuctural orbital or star space port. “Exploring the solar system requires a whole new kind of transportation. It is inconceivable to imagine bases or villages on other worlds without thinking of the infrastructure that will connect them. With this in mind, when NASA and ESA plan to return to the Moon in the coming decade: their rst concern was to design the “Gateway”, a port station orbiting the Moon and which will serve as a feature union between the Earth and its natural satellite. It is important to note that this is not a town or a village but a place of transit.”¹ 1. Text from competition website - https://bit.ly/3IsmcOg
LITHIUM MINI INVERT 4.0 IAN NAZARETH & LISA GARGANO Metropolitan culture – from dense urban aggregates to suburban sprawl is saturated by collective imagery and pervasiveness of the motorcar. Our relationship with the automobile is complex, even polemical. No single entity, arguably, and certainly no other form of mobility has shaped the way we organise cities, infrastructures, economies, labour pools or even carve up a housing block, more voraciously than the car. Between limitless freedom and utter dependence, the motorcar permeates urban life. The 1969 Melbourne Transport Plan’s devotion to motorway provided the inertial force for an auto -centric development. The evolving affiliation with the motorcar is concurrent with the myriad ways in which new technologies have impacted the method and medium through which we engage with the city and the culture of consumption. The transition to renewable energy and the electrification of the car is a critical juncture. This does not replace the car per se, but rather transforms its agency within the city. We consider this an alibi to interrogate the states of entanglement of the car, energy regimes and the architecture of the city. Lithium that was once presented as a treatment for the fatigue that the capitalist economy exerted on the human body is now the lynchpin - encompassing economic, environmental, and social aspects in the transition to renewable energy. The projects are interested in typologies, topologies and scenarios that emerge from this discussion. We seek to explore the potential of a near-field urbanism – focussing on the liminal overrun between the electric car, charging stations, infrastructural terrains and networks, distributed platform technologies and peer-peer economies. The project will focus on sites of scalable potential that become an immediate and perhaps exaggerated register for change - commencing with land currently dedicated to the car – car parks, car sale yards, service stations etc. This transformation will be reviewed alongside shifting energy paradigms, emergent discourses of public and private spaces, car ownership patters, ridesharing, etc.
How might a technical change to the propulsion of the car from fossil fuels to Lithium-ion batteries become a catalyst for a new dimension of temporal urbanism? How do we embrace the latent potential of a new energy architecture and its material realities? How to we reorganise the relationships within the built environment around an ecosystem of Lithium? The output from this elective will include drawings, visualisations, simulations, and detailed physical models. This is an industry-partnered design research project with MINI and Green Magazine. MINI is brand pillar and subsidiary of the BMW Group. Projects will be featured in a public exhibition – MINI INVERT 4.0, alongside the work of leading architectural practices. Elective runs face-to-face, from Week 1- Week 12. Proficiency in Rhino 3D required. Knowledge of Grasshopper, Blender and Aftereffects is advantageous, but you can pick this up over the semester. Week 1 Monday 9.30 – 11.30 RMIT Design Hub | Week 2-12, Wednesday 9.30 – 12:30, 100.04.004
ARCHITECTURE DESIGN ELECTIVES WITH MASTER OF URBAN DESIGN
ECO URBAN PRACTICES:
AFTER CARBON GRAHAM CRIST and IAN NAZARETH After Carbon is concerned with the re-forming and re-organisation of cities in response to shifting energy paradigms – from fossil fuels to renewable energy and its impact on the urban peripheries in particular, where these car-dependency, mobility, connectivity are more acute. While certain aspects like carbon footprint are quantifiable, others are more abstract. Carbon and ‘Carbon Capitalism’ has been a dominant variable in the development of cities and patterns of settlement. ‘Carbon Form’ extends beyond urban and architectural types and energy flows. It dictates and defines how global logistics, supply chains, food and energy networks and cultural artefacts proliferate.
Adjacent to the discussion of carbon and the climate / ecological crisis, we now inhabit the post-pandemic city where the hierarchy and traditional role or the central city (i.e. the downtown and CBD) is challenged, elevating notions of decentralisation and localisation. In particular, this unleashes possibilities for the urban fringes as sites and scenarios to explore transitions and radical transformations. The seminar is focussed on the relationship between architecture, urbanism, the organisation of cities and its staged liberation from carbon. We seek to better understand new energy and the new possibilities for production and spatial organisation, that challenge the orthodoxies of cities, suburbs, precincts and architecture. We will review, analyse and speculate on the temporary and permanent transformation of the city and urban realm. How would new energy paradigms and distribution destabilise the matrix of rules and relationships that underpin the contemporary city? What possibilities does this offer for new economies of localised energy production, energy distribution, living, working etc? Eco Urban Practices extends attitudes and approaches to understanding, describing and speculating about an urbanism that responds to a particular ecological pressure, placed in the broader context of discussion of sustainability, liveability, mobility, transformation and counterfactual propositions for the city. Eco‐Urban Practices introduces you to the key skills, methods and practices of the urban design professional from a multidisciplinary perspective, and with a particular focus on environmental sustainability. The relationship between urban design and global pressures of population and climate change is a key focus, as well as urban shifts in infrastructure, technology and transport. You will explore the implications of these issues on urban design processes, projects and practices, while acquiring insight from industry and government professionals, following the sustainability paradigm. We will view design practice from a global perspective, with an equal emphasis on the local. This elective will also investigate precedents, utopias, theories and manifestos in order to understand the multiple scales and networks within the city. _ Thursdays, 1 pm - 4 pm, 100.06.006 IMAGE: Album Cover - Lorde, Solar Power
ELECTIVE BASED RESEARCH ASSISTANTS (EBRA) POSTERS There are a limited number of Elective Based Research Assistant (EBRA) Positions available - for which you do not need to ballot via the ballot form - refer to the poster, and contact the relevant tutor to lodge an expression of interest.
The RMIT Architecture | Tectonic Formation Lab is looking for several research assistants to work with the lab on live research projects. Research assistants will work in a team environment working with various members of the lab on research including: Roland Snooks, Hesam Mohammed, Nic Bao and Jackson Bi. Research projects this semester will focus on the following techniques and topics: a) WAAM printed finishes and assembly b) Incremental Sheet Forming c) Mycelium and bio-degradable materials d) Concrete casting of 3D printed columns Research assistants will be expected to undertake the work of this elective on-campus (including within the workshops) in a collaborative manner. No experience with algorithmic tools and robotic tools is required. However, engagement in both the workshop environment and iterative algorithmic tools is vital.
TECTONIC FORMATION LAB RESEARCH ASSISTANT RESEARCH ASSISTANT ELECTIVE ROLAND SNOOKS Please email Roland Snooks (roland.snooks@rmit.edu.au) directly to express your interest in this elective
Research Assistants Needed Approximately 5 research assistants are required to support the Super Tight research projects. Super Tight is an ongoing research project exploring design led research approaches to density in future cities. For more information please visit www.super-tight.com This semester students will work on ‘House, Precinct, Territory: Design Strategies for the Productive City’, a book publication exploring design led strategies for incorporating manufacturing, agriculture and production into dense urban environments. The book is in the late stages of production. Students will be involved in developing speculative design models, as well as diagramming drawing and debating density. Skills in drawing, diagramming and presentation rendering will be an advantage. All assistants involvement will be credited in published and exhibited material. We will meet weekly for 1-2 hours face to face. The time for meetings can be negotiated, but it is expected that this will be on Thursday or Friday. It is expected that the engagement will last for the semester, however there may be periods of greater intensity - particularly through the first half of the semester. The project will be led by John Doyle & Graham Crist These positions will not be listed on the electives balloting form. If you are interested in joining the team please email john. doyle@rmit.edu.au and/or graham.crist@rmit.edu.au
GRADUATE EXHIBITION ASSISTANTS
SEMESTER 2 2022
The Architecture Program requires 6 enthusiastic assistants to help with the organisation of the Semester 2 2022 End of Semester and Major Project Exhibition. You will work closely with the Exhibition Coordinator in the design and curation of the exhibition, graphic design of posters and PR materials, website, Major Project Catalogue and other items that go to make a succesful event. The majority of the work will be in the second half of semester, but you will be required to assist with organisation throughout the semester. There will be a crunch period in the week prior to the event, please confirm your availability over Week 13, Week 15, Week 16 and that you can attend campus for on-site orgnisation prior to enrolling in the elective. The team is limited to 6 people only. You will receive credit towards an elective for your time. This is not available through electives balloting. If you are interested please contact the Exhibition Co-ordinator Ian Nazareth (ian.nazareth@rmit.edu.au) directly.