RMIT ARCHITECTURE BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO BALLOTING POSTERS SEM 2 2017
E D D I E H U B
LARGE SCALE BACHELORS DESIGN STUDIO Stasinos Mantzis & Christine Phillips
Monday/Thursday e v e n i n g s : 6.30 – 9.30pm.
D O C K L A N D S
In this studio, you will be asked to design a new film & media precinct on the stie of the Docklands (Film) Studios Melbourne. This media centre will accommodate a range of facilities from film studios, virtual reality and gaming studios, along with an RMIT Media & Communications Education precinct. The studio is a partnered studio with McGuire Media who will be our client for the semester. The premise of the studio is to reflect on cultural readings of the program along with its siting to inspire a narrative driven architecture that considers how it will be viewed and experienced. As there are two main aspects of the program, the film production side versus the new media education side, what kind of narratives might collide with each other? How might these create an architectural gateway viewed from the car on the Bolte Bridge? Key Research Questions: • What are the cultural implications of the recent shift in film production from the big scale productions to small-scale high quality television productions (Netflix, E-Sport etc) and how might these drive an architectural narrative about contemporary media and the way it is experienced and consumed? • What do recent developments within VR technologies contribute to postmodern readings of hyperrealities and how might this propel an architecture of altered perceptions and cinematic experiences? How might this fit into a broader history of architectural illusions? The studio will be structured around the production of biweekly esquisses carried out by students both collaboratively and individually for the first half of the semester. This will involve watching films, reading texts, studying architectural precedents, fieldtrips to media/gaming centres, and VR labs, producing models, collages plus lots more! Working in pairs, the second half of semester will focus on the development of the final project.
Landscape in the Landscape July 2016 Richard Black
Marking the Earth 1997:2017 Bachelor Design Studio RMIT University semester 2 2017 > 3.30-6.30pm Monday and Friday : Richard Black + Todd De Hoog
‘As each year post-settlement in Australia grinds on, how should we conceive of our place in the landscape, of the continent we have claimed as our own: are we custodians, masters, brokers, servants – and what is its place in our world of thought?’ Nicolas Rothwell, ‘The
Landscape Behind the Landscape’ Eric Rolls Memorial Lecture, National Library of Australia
STUDIO AGENDA: It is these questions and more that frame the agenda of this studio. As architects how should we conceive of our place in the landscape and of the landscape itself? How should we respond to it, represent it and ultimately, what should we make in it – do in the landscape? What attitudes to the landscape do you bring and what new ones can be revealed and discovered? Using literature, artworks, installations, drawing, mark making, cartography along with your individual experience and encounter with the culturally significant landscape of the central highlands of Victoria, you will explore these questions. The central issue driving the studio is therefore to formulate a contemporary engagement with landscape. This agenda forms part of a longer-term research position that critically re-assesses architecture’s relationship to landscape in Australia that extends material published internationally in (Black and Johnson’s book) Living in the Landscape (published by Thames and 2016). Broadly, this project situates contemporary architectural and artistic responses to landscape culturally, environmentally and qualitatively and forges new territory with indigenous histories and occupation of place. SITE: an abandoned quarry in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park (110km NW of Melbourne). It’s a place of national significance, for its historical cultural landscapes of exceptional heritage value. The Park is also a fragile Box-Ironbark ecosystem while also an open and accessible landscape for a range of recreation, education, tourism and research activities. The park lies within the Country of the Jaara Jaara people who are part of the Dja Dja Wurrung. The syllabus is structured around two projects, the first provides a structured set of tasks for you to imagine the site and its relationship to the landscape, and then secondly, you are to make an Observatory that emerges from this site knowledge. MARKING THE EARTH: a series of structured tasks that will introduce you to the conceptual ideas of the studio. Presence and absence: uncovering the site, its past histories, its present condition. The familiar made strange - the strange made familiar. The relevance of abstraction. Form studies originating from a close reading of the site, making installations, on site drawing, mapping, cartography, photography, reading, research, speculation and propositions about your encounter with the site and the broader landscape. Introduction to case studies in art + architectural projects + key texts on site. On -site intensive workshop Saturday 22 / Sunday 23 July (approx. $70. You will need access to a car). OBSERVATORY: design proposal for an observatory – to be sited within the abandoned quarry. To observe: 1 Perceive, mark, watch, take notice of, and become conscious of. 2. Examine and take note (phenomena) without aid of experiment. You are to form an architectural response – whatever that might be to the complex site conditions of the quarry, the surrounding landscape, and Rothwell’s provocation. The Observatory will also organise and structure movement into and across the site – to create a place to mark and register the complexity of this landscapes cultural heritage – while engaging with the everyday use of this landscape. As an architectural scale installation in the public domain, your observatory will provide a place for local pride and identity, through history and storytelling of the Park’s Cultural Heritage. The studio requires you to work across a range of different scales. From large scale readings of the landscape down to a one-to-one scale encounter with the Heritage Park. The Observatory will be small in scale, but resolved conceptually and spatially, as well as in its material and formal identity. There will be a further 2 site visits planned for later in the semester. Richard Black + Todd De Hoog
BOETHIUS & HIS WHEEL Time: Brief: Site: Tutors:
This studio is based on architecture’s necessity to experiment and explore. We believe in a multiplicity - in which no single history, software, process, expression or medium will provide the answer. We want to engage with the nuances of translation - re-visiting the past (both global and local) to rescue good, provocative and Monday & Thursday evenings 6-9pm inspiring ideas - in order to utilise them for the dilemmas and problems of our time. High school campus This semester students will interrogate the history of city planning through art and architecture to design a new high school campus in Port Melbourne. The campus as a city. There will be an emphasis on the exploration of complex geometrical ideas, the resolution of considered formal compositions and sophisticated urban responses. Port Melbourne We will exploit generative techniques and their potential to evolve our methods and medium, as we pursue an engagement with the digital. Compositions should reflect a Andre Bonnice & Anna Jankovic well-considered critical arrangement to develop a rich architectural expression of relationships between form, program, site, materiality and the user’s experience.
MONDAY & THURSDAY 6:30 - 9:30
(A).TYPOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT S .+ RULE-BAS ED .PROC ES S The studio will be a workshop of typological experiments investigating how contaminations and transformations of ‘other’ typologies can assist in re-imagining core architectural elements (form, circulation, program & spatial arrangement, ornament, etc.) to generate new propositions and prototypical spatial & formal models for alternative housing. Rule-based process experiments will be deployed to assist in manipulating, distorting, amplifying, shattering, dispersing, and {insert action here} the behaviours and qualities of existing types to affect the architectural elements of the ‘Skinnyscraper’ typology. The studio will not only be interested in a process based approach but more so, what could be generated in terms of architectural propositions in this specific way of working. (B) HOUSING ALTERNATIVE M O D E L S +.SUPERSLIM.TOWERS Housing is one the most complex challenges cities face today. With Melbourne’s population growing rapidly; housing affordability, density and liveability are continually questioned. How can we learn from and generate new housing typologies out of existing housing types (courtyards, granny flats, Victorian terraces, co-housing, micro apartments, shophouses, tubehouses, etc.)? How can we refashion them into a vertical condition? How can we embrace past ideas in order to approach the future? What might emerge from hybridised housing types? What might all this look like through the lens of narrow urban infill sites? The studio will rethink strategies for alternative housing models from macro to micro scales with a specific interest in narrow urban infill sites. Normally associated with luxury living, we will re-imagine ‘skinny skyscrapers’ as viable alternatives for affordable housing models and mix. At an urban scale - we will question civic presence and amenity; social – exploring engagement and interaction between units as well as public and private spatial connectiviy and arrangements; and the living units – examining its internal specificity promoting variations of housing mix, access and ownership. This studio is dedicated to a research and design led exploration of and speculation on housing alternative models (H.A.M) through specific site conditions and typological rule-based experiments. Site:
Melbourne
CBD
P A T R I C K M A C A S A E T MONDAY&THURSDAY 3 . 3 0 - 6 . 3 0 P M
LIVING.FRONTIERS:
S U P E R S L I M
Ex Nihilo is a bachelors design studio that will run as an intensive during the first 7 weeks of semester. The studio will investigate the relationship between mixed reality representation, craftsmanship and the construction of architecture. Students will work with Hololens headsets to represent and build their ideas through shared collaborative holograms at 1:1 and in situ, shattering existing barriers of interdisciplinary communication, expertise, drawing convention and even conventional understandings of how we occupy and produce space. We will focus specifically on the qualities, constraints and fabrication of intricate bent and welded steel structures. Ex Nihilo means “creation from nothing�. How might we move towards a future of architectural practice without drawn documentation, instead using holographic models as guides for collaborative fabrication? What new forms of architecture might this mode of documentation and production enable? This polemical position attempts to refigure the tropes of digital design not as a means of working to high degrees of tolerance and precision but instead as a return to craftsmanship whereby the capacity of the builder to make intuitive design decisions and adjustments in-the-making will take on renewed significance in architectural production. To this end the studio will introduce students to advanced digital skills sets (in Maya / Rhino / Grasshopper / Nursery) but will seek architectural propositions that have been abandoned by the digital epoch and are not defined by (or indexed to) these techniques of production. What new architectural forms might be found in this superposition of the digital and the craftsman? Ex Nihilo runs all day monday/thursday. Mornings will be hands on sessions working with workshop equipment and the Hololens to fabricate full scale steel prototypes. Afternoons are intensive design development and skilling sessions in studio. Weeks 1-3 - Researching fabrication strategies Weeks 4-6 - Resolving design propositions / agendas Week 7 - Final crit
ex nihilo:
Intensive Bachelors Design Studio Gwyllim Jahn / Sean Guy Mon/Thurs Design Hub Level 10 Longroom (Week 1 through 7)
THE LAND BETWEEN 3.0 NIC AGIUS + CLAIRE SCORPO - MON & THURS 6:30-9:30 This is the third iteration in a series of studios that focus on the diverse ecological and economic agents that have shaped the regional centre of Warrnambool. The interest lies in uncovering the value of site through thorough investigation of local archaeologies. By means of a parallel investigation of local site histories and architectural precident we aim to unpack vestigial narratives that give us agency to develop an architectural infrastructure that will contribute to the current draft masterplan of the Lake Pertobe Reserve. There is a 3 night intesive field trip to Warnambool in the first half of semester. Students will immerse themselves in the town, its locals and gather first hand research through measured drawings, site analysis and guided tours. An exhibition and public discussion of the student work will be held in Warrnambool at the end of semester. There is a focus on developing material understanding through rigorous model making and testing broader contextual relationships through considered drawing.
Thematic Drawing for Central California History Museum - Perry Kulper
Heist! Loren Adams
2017 RMIT Bachelor of Architecture Studio Mon & Thurs, 6:30pm - 9:30pm
You will be required to plan an art heist. This heist will take place at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square. Working with physical models and conventional architectural drawings, you will be asked to design an architectural-scale installation at the site of the crime, in accordance with the brief set out in the annual NGV Architecture Commission Design Competition. The staging of this proposed architectural installation will be the mechanism through which you are able to steal an artwork of your choosing. You will be asked to communicate the unfolding of your heist using a series of explanatory diagrams, storyboards, and photographic montages – think Bernard Tschumi1 meets The Thomas Crown Affair.2
The purpose of this exercise is not to fetishise the transgressive. Rather, it is an opportunity to examine the ways in which architecture is complicit in the commodification of public space in Australia – particularly spaces of overt cultural significance.3,4
KEY TEXTS : Blasbichler, A. (2011). Blasbichlers Twentyone (A. Blasbichler & S. DeMartino Eds.). Innsbruck, Austria: University of Innsbruck Press. Deutsche, R. (1992). Art and public space: Questions of democracy. Social Text(33), 34-53. doi:10.2307/466433 3 Hutter, M., & Throsby, D. (Eds.). (2008). Beyond price: Value in culture, economics, and the arts. New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press.4 Kerbel, J. (2000). 15 Lombard St. London, U.K.: Book Works. Manaugh, G. (2016). A burglar’s guide to the city. New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. McTiernan, J. (Writer). (1999). The Thomas Crown Affair. In M. Tadross, P. Brosnan, & B. St. Clair (Producer). United States: United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.2 Tschumi, B. (1996). Architecture and disjunction. Cambridge, M.A.: The MIT Press.1
URBAN
DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR AN ARCHITECTURE OF LIVEABILITY
GENEROSITY Tutor: Scale: Time:
Enza Angelucci Small/Large Monday 5.30 - pm 5IVSTEBZ QN
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Architecture clothes the culture of the city; architecture prompts the city’s imagination and has a profound impact on civic amenity. The proliferation of human activity in our cities has given rise to the nature of cities as a place of exchange and surplus, a place of urban generosity. This studio will commence through the observations of the local, to define the architectural nature of the place in which the architecural outcome is to be housed. Through a series of group and individual esquisses the studio will become a process of discovery in how architecture can extend beyond an object/place paradigm, into a place of civic surplus. The studio will concentrate on three specific architectural design strategies: the edge condition, porosity and ‘nature correctednesss’ to design a medium density housing proposal located in the inner city suburb of North Fitzoy.
The memorial historically has played an important role in the definition of ‘monumentality’ and has provided a significant contribution to urban planning. An object, a space, a place that is representative of a significant historical event or individual. NEGOTIATING builds on the thematics explored in the previous design studio REMEMBERING. The studio will question the role of the memorial on a day to day basis - the provision of an important social construct. Place making. Taking on board the current proposal for the Cascade Female Factory competition located in Hobart, the studio will reconsider this site. A site that once housed female convicts is now a site for remembering, reflecting, exposing. Memorials are traditionally considered as an object, landmark or landscape. The studio brings into question what role the ‘canopy’ may play as an architectural typology in defining implied space, building but not a building, enclosure but not enclosed. The site is classified as a World Heritage Site and therefore the role of archaeology as a reference for remembering is considered. How may this inform the memorial associated with such a site? Students will be engaged with model making, rigorous site, program and precedent analysis reviewing the role of the memorial as a civic entity. Sections, sections, sections. BA DESIGN STUDIO S2 2017
MONDAY 6.30-9.30PM THURSDAY 3.30-6.30PM
AMY MUIR
NEGOTIATING
TARDIUPGRADE
What makes a city resilient? Can we upgrade a city to be as adaptable to shocks and stresses as the almost indestructible tardigrade? We will study the 100 Resilient Cities project, and urban design precedents to develop strategies for radical adaptation of a civic/ recreational/ educational precinct in Richmond, with the New Richmond High School as a catalyst. The studio will involve the upgrading of various buildings and public spaces around the site, and propose various forms of intensified occupation.
BACHELORS STUDIO Mon 6:30pm-9:30pm Thur 9:30am-12:30pm TUTOR: VICKY LAM
PAINTERLY FORMS
MORE BLING THAN THE BAROQUE AT HALF THE PRICE OF AUSTERITY
LOWER POOL STUDIO ROLAND SNOOKS This studio will explore the design of intricate forms, their atmospheric affects and strange qualities. Advances in robotic fabrication and building-scale 3D printing is about to radically change the relationship between cost and form, with highly intricate geometries becoming cheaper than conventional fabrication of rectilinear geometry. What does this mean for architecture? What are the ethics of aesthetics when formal complexity is separated from expense in a time of supposed austerity. This studio will explore the notion that form is no longer descriptive of the socioeconomic status and instead shifts the focus onto the qualities of form itself. Within this context the studio will develop a design process that combines painterly direct operations with emergent algorithmic approaches to create a strange hybrid of the two. The studio will explore forms that are becoming possible with emerging building-scale 3D printing, in an attempt to articulate what the forms of 3D printed architecture might be and how these could be a radical departure from current architectural form-making. Architectural forms will be interrogated for their affects, poise, and strangeness. A constant interaction between painterly and algorithmic strategies will be encouraged within the studio, so rather than a linear or sequential relationship between various aspects of the design process - these will be explored simultaneously, interacting within a continuous feedback. No experience with algorithmic tools is required, however a willingness to engage in these tools and highly iterative processes is essential.
MONDAY 3:30 PM - 6:30 PM THURSDAY 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM