ALTER TO MAKE OTHER

Design Studio Leader: Brent Allpress

Mondays and Thursdays 2.00-5.00 pm

This studio investigates design questions involving practices of alteration, extension and addition Many significant buildings have reached an age where they have needed to be renovated, refitted and otherwise altered or extended. This studio develops design strategies and responses to alteration and extension as a specific category of design practice activity. Modernist architectural theory resisted the additive and promoted the tabula rasa as a means to ensure the autonomy of the new original modernist work. Adding to and altering a modernist building presents an internal conflict and contradiction to be worked through.

Ornament haunts architectural discourse and practice. Theories of the ornamental within the canon cross and interrupt the central texts of the architectural tradition, both constructing and dividing them with unresolved uncertainties. Modernist theory negated the supplementary role of applied ornament. Modernist practices however involved radical ornamental operations employing abstract spatial surfaces as semi-autonomous systems The representational role of ornament in contemporary architecture remains complex and contested. This studio provides a framework for investigating the complexities of the legacy of the Modernist prescription against the additive and the ornamental. It also provides an opportunity to reconsider and revise postmodern accounts of the role of ornament and the status of context. Non-standard digital technologies that revise modernist economies of standardization also shift the debate on the role of figuration beyond representation and communication towards performative architectural actions.

Precedent projects will be analysed involving alteration, extension and addition strategies. A specific local or international modernist architectural project will be selected as the site for a new alternation, extension or addition. Site selection will be negotiated. The design brief of this new architectural complex is to remotivate existing program and provide facilities for a proposed Institute of Architectural Design Research that includes an architectural archive, temporary and permanent exhibition spaces, an auditorium, workshop and designer in residence facilities, along with other program relevant to the specific situation

Counter compositional strategies will be explored working with, across and against existing contexts This Design Studio provides a vehicle for research into significant modernist architectural precedent, provoking a critical and creative design response that focuses on qualitative and performative operations and outcomes.

DESIGN STUDIO: Alter

STUDIO LEADER: Brent Allpress