OVERWRITTEN 2.

RMIT Architecture Elective 2023 Semester 1 led by Vicky Lam

Tuesdays 9:30 am - 12:30 pm 100.06.007

How do we live in unstable conditions? How can we adapt to environmental and cultural turbulence? This elective will explore who we can better understand and illustrate complex and unstable environments through animated drawings.

In Overwritten 2 Elective, students will develop communication skills to express how cities and built systems are observed, measured and visualized at different scale of physical space and time. Students will use Aftereffects as a tool to animate diagrams and maps and other types of drawings to express complex relationships.

We begin with individual mapping of linear structures that behave both as porous borders and hard boundaries. Previous chosen objects were the Large Hadron Collider, LA River, Rabbit Proof Fence, Peace Lines in Ireland.

We apply this way of seeing to map out linear conditions through an area around Hawthorn defined by an array of overlapping and overwritten systems such as drains, canals, rivers, train lines, flood plains and flight paths of birds and bats.

PART 1: Animating Drawings

Introduction to After Effects and develop techniques for animating diagrams, maps and drawings. Students will begin by researching key references and drawings by architects and designers such as Gandelsonas, Drawing Architecture Studio, James Corner to develop into a series of short animations.

PART 2. “Long things of Life”

Drawing , Animation, Writing to examine a chosen linear structure or border condition. Work individually to produce a body of research of through a series of drawings and short animations

PART 3: "Overwritten Hawthorn"

System Seeking in Hawthorn, following River/ Waterways, paths of flora and fauna, trains/ fencelines, Cul-De-Sacs, hidden or overwritten structures and landscapes.

PREREQUISITE: Architecture students in Bachelor or Master Program, skills in Drawing, Modelling in CAD program, Adobe Suite.

Week 3 - Animation/ Aftereffects Workshop on Friday 17th March 5:30 - 8:30 pm with Quan Tran

Week 5 - Walking tour through Hawthorn

PRE-AMBLE: We enable our environment to flourish through sustainable and regenerative thinking and behaviour change because our occupation has created a decline in the health of our eco-system. Inversely, this elective will (in part) explore how the environment can enable us and regenerate our capacity by applying design thinking to the spaces and places we use. In doing so we will explore, sometimes hidden, sometimes scaled differently experiences of place by those living with cognitive and other decline. In street design the modalities of ‘betweeness’, ‘intersection’ and ‘pausality’ are indicators of place engagement and for those with cognitive decline this might be experienced and challenged thru respite, distraction, or noise.

To study this conceptual polarity of shared adjacency we will refer to ‘calligraphic’ and ‘cartesian’ experiences as versions of the orthogonal versus organic. In the elective we will seek answers to propositional observations to queries such as - Should a modern city be multidirectional to accommodate the variety of ocular declines? Can a multi-focal approach promote inclusive longevity? Key terms of reference are Inclusion, Augmentation, Elasticity, Land use (de)Lamination.

We will explore these outcomes as a kind of biodiversity adaptability and the reality of what is an inclusive habitat. We will explore how can the environment be modified to accommodate or work to enhance beyond ‘decline’ in a future present sense.

Our man-made environment already performs the role of an augmented assistant. This is most evident in the mainstream dominant city and its civic spaces. We will explore what an assisted living urbanism could be. The concept of ‘street’ has become a mainstream metaphor in discussing masterplan arrangements and their functional diagrams. Hospitals, health clinics and residential aged care facilities imitate them generically without evoking the ‘uncanny valley’ as happens with ‘urban ventriloquism’ and the ‘vague familiar’.

WHEN: 6pm THURSDAY EVENINGS with Simon Drysdale and occasional guests