RMIT ARCHITECTURE BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO BALLOTING POSTERS SEM 1 2017
son of sam.
.../---/...
Dash - Dash / 2017-S1 Bachelor Design Studio / Mon 2.30 to 5.30 / Thurs 6.30 to 9.30
This studio is engaged in the shifting relationships between architecture and culture, with specific focus on the intersection of contemporary art, community and economics. The studio premise is adapted from a real architectural competition for a new regional art gallery, SAM, but instead of a rural setting three hours from Melbourne, students will design a new gallery within the Contemporary Arts Precincts in Collingwood, 3km from the CBD. Formerly the Collingwood Technical School, the CAP site is symptomatic of the development cycle, which builds and undermines the value of inner urban culture. Higher rents push out manufacturing, and creative industries rush in, only to be replaced by the promise of higher yields from multi-residential development. Taking SAM as the model for a new public gallery in Collingwood, Son of SAM will try to engage with the local and specific, as an attractor for the global and generic tourist visitor. Gertrude Contemporary, a gallery soon to be homeless, will be the ‘anchor tenant’ for the project. Design proposals will be informed by research into type, place, art practice and cultural economy. Investigation of precedent galleries, talks and tours of contemporary art spaces, and intensive research into contemporary artists will be paired with urban site studies. Art practice and process will be adopted as a methodology to incite unexpected and propositional outcomes.
BIRRARUNG DREAMING
A National Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Federation Square East
A By
LARGE Stasinos
SCALE Mantzis
BACHELOR’S and Christine
In this studio, you will be asked to design a new building for the National Gallery of Victoria sited at Federation Square East. It will house new and old Australian aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art works, performance spaces and outdoor public space and gardens. Situated adjacent to Federation Square and bounded by the Yarra River and Flinders Street, the site raises challenging urban issues which will be investigated throughout the semester. Given Federation Square has been criticised for its poor connection to the Yarra River, how can a new gallery better connect to the river and also connect with the city and Federation Square? The commodification of Australian aboriginal art has been contested by notable figures like Richard Bell, but the current lack of a major public gallery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island artworks is also problematic. As architects, this building will raise the question of how non aboriginal architects should best engage with cultures and histories that are not their own and how aboriginal architects can contribute to this complex problem. The studio will form part of our ongoing research into the idea of building type and how this can be reinvented, in this case, a public gallery, as civic and public spaces. We are also interested in the cultural, historical and material conditions of a site and how an examination of these conditions can help construct a new civic narrative for the area.
STUDIO Phillips
The studio objectives are: • Research and develop a critical architectural response to the art gallery as a type. • Research and respond to the cultural and historical context of the site. • Research and respond to the civic and social conditions of the site. • Research and explore the rich history of aboriginal art and dance in Australia how this might inform an architectural proposition. • Research Australian landscapes and the landscape of the Yarra River and how this might contribute to the design. The studio will be structured around the production of bi-weekly esquisses carried out by students both collaboratively and individually for the first half of the semester. Working in pairs, the second half of semester will focus on the development of the final project.
Classes will be held from 6-9pm on Monday and Thursday evenings
DEVOTION
continues a lineage of studios (Viv, Viv, Vivian!, NoHomo!, Dick Black, SCUM & Fucking Dainty) that are framed by methods and approaches that emancipate and sustain a queer life. In doing so these studios have suggested how the problematizing of the threshold between an abject and a normative condition contributes new insights into the production of space (and inherently form) and hence the implications this problematizing has for new architectures. The studio confronts how the practice of improvisation and its associated instruments of production could be tasked with elucidating the difficult plurality of concerns that tentatively outline this space whilst countering homogeneity. This studio continues the assault on Jack’s Magazine, a colonial gunpowder storage facility along the Maribyrnong River. The 3m high bluestone walls and 10m high earth blast wall are as alarming as anything by Lequeu, Ledoux and Boullee. A studio program, as such, is described as a Funeral Palace. It is an attempt to take into account the medieval. In part this has been prompted by the fictocritical framing of previous studios, the want to continue investigating exhaustive methods in architecture, and the desire to emerge regaling against the backdrop of extraordinary loss. The existence of Carlo Mollino will not be entirely ignored. The studio has a clear approach that will be put to work. 1. the explicit aleatory alignment of things 2. the negotiation of scales that approximate the molecular, the mesopotanic and the muscular 3. iterative enquiry through an extended negotiation of the archaeological 4. the appropriation of any and every thing that can account for our gluttonous joy and unimaginable hope This studio asks: How devoted are you to your Mother?
DEVOTION RMIT ARCHITECTURE & URBAN DESIGN
BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
MONDAY & THURSDAY 2.30-5.30PM
A JUNG-IAN WAVE Time: Brief: Site: Tutors:
Monday & Thursday evening 6-9pm ‘Renaissance Centre’ A secondary school in Melbourne Andre Bonnice & Anna Jankovic
This studio is based on architecture’s necessity to experiment and explore. Pursuits are expansive and problematic. 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-visit the past (both global and local) to uncover methods and processes to address the dilemmas of our time. This semester students will interrogate of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods of art and architecture - from which there will be an emphasis on accumulating a catalogue of types, to understand the history, form and scale of things so that we may capitalise on their accumulated knowledge and formal-vocabulary. There is a commitment in this Studio to fully explore the paradigms of interest - with a thoroughness of research. The studio will begin with a focus on researching and developing a repertoire of design techniques through a series of culturally embedded design exercises. These explorations will be a ‘triptych’ of digital craft, history & architectural elements; with the aim of developing students’ computer literacy, presentation skills, their application to investigation and critique. Students will then develop designs for a “Renaissance Centre for Learning” for a local secondary school in Melbourne’s inner north. We will exploit generative techniques and their potential to evolve our methods and medium, as we pursue an engagement with the digital. Through the exploration of complex geometrical ideas the focus will be on the resolution of considered formal compositions and sophisticated urban responses. Compositions should reflect a well-considered critical arrangement to develop a rich architectural expression of relationships between form, program, site, materiality and the user’s experience.
DEVELOP, DELINEATE This studio is based on the simultaneous opposition of two ideas, one about process and another about type. We believe that architecture can hold ideas and that for a design to be successful it must hold multiple ideas together in tension. The opposition between these ideas must be legible and the conflict between them must register not only in the aesthetic but also in the programmatic function of the work. By pursing this agenda the studio will challenge the dominant paradigm that process is perfect and reductive. We see diagram architecture as the ultimate symbol of reductive, pseudo-objective architectural process and as a result it seems the ideal medium to begin the critique. This studio will subvert the diagram in the pursuit of an architecture of buried artefacts, memory, mending and repaired missteps. We propose a discursive process that compounds gestures, both successful and unsuccessful. Rather than going back to a blank drawing board each week to refine a process, students move forward with baggage in tow. They must heal any missteps with another gesture in the hope that the finished project tells the story of its own making. We are not proposing a collage but instead a directional accumulation of design. The studio will also be a detailed study of the medium rise mixed use type. Students will investigate both pragmatic technical aspects of the building type as well as the history and social/political implications it carries. We will question the dichotomies of private/ public and podium/tower that are inherent to the type. By the end of semester students will develop their own critical position and use this to inform their final proposal. The studio will investigate this agenda through a variety of techniques. These will include digital, analogue and written. In addition, we will provide a series of cultural reference points in the form of readings and precedent buildings for students to respond. Importantly, students will also produce a highly detailed genesis story for their projects.
Tutors:William Brouwers + Jack Ryan Time: Monday/ Thursday 6.30-9.30
T hepur pos eoft hes t udi oi st oi nv es t i ga t ea r c hi t ec t ur et hr ought hel ensoft ur bul enc e( di s r upt i on, unea s i nes s ) . T hea i mi st ous ea ndex pl or edi gi t a lpa r a met r i cdes i gnt ool si nor dert oc r ea t e ev oc a t i v es pa c esa nda r r a ngement si nor dert oa c hi ev ea r c hi t ec t ur a l out c omest ha twi l lgener a t e r ea c t i on, di s c our s e, a nddeba t e. I twi l l emba r konf unda ment a l s pa t i a l ex pl or a t i ons , pa r t i c ul a r l yf oc us edona t mos pher e, t hebody , a nds i t e, t o beex pl or edi nc onj unc t i onwi t hba s i ct opi c sofs c a l e, pr opor t i on, c ompos i t i ona ndc ont ex t . S t udent sa r eex pec t edt oc a r r youtav a r i et yofdi er entex er c i s esdur i ngt hes emes t er . I nt egr a t edi nt ot hi s s t udi owi l lbea nenv i r onment a ls t udi esc omponent ,whi c hex pl or esa r c hi t ec t ur ea ndi t spl a c ei nt hebui l t env i r onmentt oc a r r youtav a r i et yofdi er entex er c i s esdur i ngt hes emes t er . As pec t sofpopc ul t ur ewi l l a l s o beex pl or edt hr ought hes emes t eri nor dert oev ok ei dea s . T hepr ogr a m wi l lbeami xbet weeenpubl i c / pr i v a t es pa c e,a tamedi um s c a l e,wi t ht hes i t et obel oc a t ed wi t hi nt hec ont ex toft heMel bour neCBD.
The studio is a continuation of the SUPERWORK series that simultaneously explores; typological experiments through rule-based process techniques and; speculating on new experimental models for the contemporary work environment. SUPERWORK3:CO will be a “live” design-led research running in parallel to a real world project of redesigning an existing industrial warehouse to a collaborative co-working space. Located at the Docklands Cotton Mills complex in Footscray, the studio will be run in collaboration with the building owner, Red Tree Trust, and the DCM Body Corporate who are interested in understanding alternative creative solutions to aid future owners in the development of other warehouses in the area as DCM transitions into largely a hub for creatives, small businesses and startups. The studio will aspire to create a repository of spatial prototypes for the development of future co/working spaces (and work environments in general). The studio will also tackle the social and communal aspirations of the DCM Body Corporate investigating ways on how the warehouses’ ‘public interface’ and façade can contribute to the DCM Complex rather than isolated individual hubs.
SUPERWORK3:CO THE DOCKLANDS COTTON MILLS PROJECT PAT R I C K M A C A S A E T - M O N D AY & T H U R S D AY - 2 : 3 0 - 5 : 3 0 INVESTIGATION 1 RULE-BASED PROCESS EXPERIMENTS + CONTAMINATING TYPES
INVESTIGATION 2 EXPERIMENTAL WORK ENVIRONMENTS
The studio will be a workshop of typological experiments looking at how contaminations of ‘other’ typologies can assist in re-imagining core architectural elements (form, circulation, program, spatial arrangement, ornament, etc.) to generate new propositions or new prototypical spatial models for the contemporary work environment.
The studio will explore the changing nature of work, its continued evolution and contribution to our cities. We will speculate on new spatial prototypes for work environments.
Rule-based process experiments will be deployed to assist in manipulating, distorting, amplifying, shattering, dispersing, (insert action here) the behaviours and qualities of existing types to affect the architectural elements of the work 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. What will it look like? What’s next?
In addition, contemporary work terms such as; activity based-working, Bleisure Zones, the Frictionless Office, Flexecutives, Convergent Workhouse and more are beginning to emerge. The studio will also explore how these emerging workplaces and organizations can inform architectural ideas and cater for the multitude of emerging working types and conditions.
MICHAEL ARTEMENKO & ADI ATIC
present
“Tour de Yarra� will focus on the sites along the Yarra river which form the southern edge of Richmond & Cremorne. Students are encouraged to go on a journey of discovery to engage with the site and its users. How can we use architecture to engage the public with ambiguous/functionless urban leftover environments and how can these environments be used, appropriated and transformed and as such integrated into the urban structure? The Yarra Trail bike path and Yarra River must be considered as integral parts of the design response. Students will develop skills in exploring the constraints and opportunities of the site, context and urban issues and make propositions that negotiate the constraints of the existing river edge/bike path. Students are asked to take a position on their discovery of opportunities for the public to engage with the left-over environment and how that can translate into an architectural response. We ask them to identify and map these concentrated voids. We are looking to turn the functionless into an opportunity. How does the public use these spaces and how do they behave in them? Students will be exposed to a range of planning exercises, both at a macro scale i.e. master planning and the micro scale of the design and detail of individual proposals. The studio explores the manner through which architecture can be understood through scale, materiality and a level of ambiguity. The reading of the immediate context of the adjacent existing conditions and the macro context of the urban adjacencies, will set up a catalogue of constraints and opportunities through which the students can develop a framework for their design response. We will explore the notion of the poetic through the manner in which we skin the project and the relationship between envelope and the spaces it creates, both internally and externally. In the first half of the semester, Students will explore the constraints and opportunities of the site, context and urban issues. They will be asked to complete a series of design exercises that address their discoveries along the way. In the second half of the semester we ask the students to develop a building, based on a discovered program, brief and discovered site.
URBAN
DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR AN ARCHITECTURE OF LIVEABILITY
GENEROSITY Tutor: Scale: Time:
Enza Angelucci Small/Large Monday & Thursday 5.30 - 9pm
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 RESTLESS CITY Semester 1, 2017, RMIT Bachelor of Architecture Studio
IAN NAZARETH
The city is characterised by continuous processes of making and unmaking. Its rapid transformation into intangible domains conveys an indefinite description and vague definition of its complexity. The city is more elusive than ever before.
Conceptually, could we mine the city and its ideas? Could this information be used or misused to generate architectural forms, processes, propositions? How might architectural hierarchies contend with urban drift? Could a building emulate a city? How might architecture be coded with an urban sensibility?
While operating within more immediate pressures and defined constraints, architects are compelled to react to complex urban issues with immediacy, albeit limited agency. Architecture’s seldom stoic resistance and passiveness is juxtaposed on to the city’s kinetic exuberance and wilfulness.
The Restless City is about the architecture of the city, deliberately refracted through a discrete building – a high-rise tower. You will work through iterative processes to demonstrate how the singular tower can come to represent a collective ambition and understanding of its place and role in the city. Projects will rigorously explore ideas of differentiation and architectural identity of the tower.
The Restless City will investigate the promiscuous relationship between architecture and the city, exploring the ambiguous territory of objects, forms, fields, systems and a variety of spatial occupations - living, working, etc. The context for the studio is the immediate and the improbable. The fleeting notion of permanence, the shifting roles and responsibilities of private and civic, the rise of socio-economic ecosystems built around the sharing of human, physical and intellectual resourc... metrics of density, liveability, sustainability, and the burden of political structures with an obligation to respond to a humanitarian crises of refugees (among others) are variables for contemporary architecture to confront. These scenarios will stimulate experimentation and the possibility to explore a counterfactual metropolitan architecture. The studio locates itself within a stream of ‘urban architecture’ - architecture recognised as a piece of city-making. The implicit understanding here is that the city and its buildings are diverse rather than disparate entities.
Over the semester, you will surround yourself with urban and architectural discourses, guided through a series of themes, agendas and spatial experiments operating between the architectural and metropolitan scales, and at varying resolutions of intensity. The Restless City will embrace the messy, contradictory, combinatory, uncertain and fantastical. Cities are primarily and necessarily about experiment. Mondays and Thursdays 14:30 - 17:30, Location: TBC
Image Credit: Herwig Scherabon
TRANSLATING MIES This studio is interested in perspective and the perception of architecture. Students will play, drawing iterations as a way of finding a process and an architecture. As a vehicle to explore these concepts, the studio will study the life and work of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, using Mies as the bricks and mortar for the exploration. Interest shall be paid to scale, distortion, placement, proportions, reprogramming, an anti-Mies, Melbourneisation (Yuncken Freeman), working through the lens and distortion by narrative. The studio will encourage the use of software’s, particularly generative technology. Students will be tutor one another in the use of softwares. In the spirit of Peter Corrigan’s studio formats, this studio will involve a series of weekabout esquisses and will include readings, art research, visiting exhibitions, watching videos, listening to music and looking at architects and architecture. Students will present predominantly on screen and collect a digital folio. Students will be required to critique one another. The program is for a 45 storey office tower over public space. The site is at Federation Square, the area occupied by ‘shard’ and 7 Eleven. The site is charged with politics and history forcing students to take a position. In the first half of the semester students will design a tower a week. The aim being two-fold, to get to know Mies’s work and to develop techniques for translating the work In the second half of the studio the best ideas from the first half of the studio will be collated to design a tower. The outcome will be a highly resolved and detailed architecture.
Mondays 6.00 – 9.00pm & Thursday 9.30am – 12.30pm Bachelor of Architecture Studio First Semester 2017 Supervisor Rowan Opat
Big Foot BIG FOOT interrogates the relationship between changing demographics and the built environment. This studio will be driven by ideas around collective urban identity, experience, and the culture of a place. We will ask the question --- is gentrification ultimately a good or a bad thing? BIG FOOT is interested in the messy and the un-designed. It will explore how identity manifests in the interstitial, the opportunistic, and the incidental. It seeks to materialise the physical and tectonic qualities which embody, express, and communicate these concepts. Concurrently it will critique the process of urban sanitisation and investigate themes around equity and adaptation. The site of study is Footscray Market, with focus on reimagining the unused rooftop carpark on site as a community space. BIG FOOT will look at the cause-effect nature of architecture and human behavior, and speculate on the effects of gentrification and rapid change. We will investigate modes of occupation, the human experience, issues around preservation, and processes in erasure and re-appropriation. With Yvonne Meng, Mon evening/ Thurs afternoon
THE LAND BETWEEN 2.0 NIC AGIUS + CLAIRE SCORPO - MON & THURS 6:30-9:30 This is the second iteration in a series of studios that draw focus on material language within the Western district of regional Victoria. The interest lies in uncovering the value of site through thorough investigation of local archaeologies. By means of a parallel investigation of local tectonics and site histories we aim to tease out vestigial narratives that give us agency to develop a strategic masterplan and civic infrastructre to engage with the Lake Pertobe Reserve. Warnambool is located 3hrs South West of Melbourne at the end of the Great Ocean Road and forms part of the ship wreck coast. There is a 3 night field trip to Warnambool in the first half of semester. Students will immerse themselves in the town and 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 exercises and testing broader contextual relationships through considered drawing.
James Corner - Taking Measure Across the American Landscape
PETER BREW BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTECTURE DESIGN STUDIO MONDAY AND THURSDAY AFTERNOON
In
COMMEMORATION
Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) 'Socle du monde' (Base of the world) .
A memorial for the Monarch of Australia Elizabeth II in the 65 year of her reign. Architecture cannot escape its fate to be a memorial of the time of its conception for the passing of what was ephemeral presence, an anticipated future. Architecture has forever been confused with the memorial, its significance with that of the great feats of human achievement, the conquest of territories, the advance of civilisation, the achievements of commerce and industry, And as it defines its achievements by the vicarious proximity it has to significance it has difficulty in seeing the extent of things. – The project aims to tear apart Significance and architecture and then look at how they might find a new contemporary relationship . During the semester we will consider proposals that range from the purely symbolic, the opportunistic and the visionary in order to propose an appropriate scheme to put to the Queens representative for consideration. With the New Dam, the Freeway, the Speeding Train , The Museum wing and the Children’s Hospital ward, comes the ribbon cutting, the plaque, the cake, the ceremony , and then the maiden voyage, the first passage the annual services and the pledge for renewal , to not forget I am the first to argue that Architecture as an end in itself. To defend its Autonomy as a discipline, that the problems of making things as a valid and worthy challenge in and for themselves, though as soon as I say this I cannot help but wonder if this absolutism is just another kind of modern classicism where the everyday and the epic are in alignment.
working the ground LA Lower Pool Travel Studio,Wilcannia, NSW
Landscape might be considered as a space constructed at the interface between humanbeing (or being human) and the world through story. A critical vehicle of the story in a landscape sense is the map. A map tells a story and in doing so constructs landscape. Conventional maps often seek and/or produce fixed outcomes, becoming fixed cartographic artefacts which privilege and valorize particular stories whilst erasing and overwriting others, reducing and flattening landscape but also producing conditions of inequity. Drawing on the varied works of Alexander von Humboldt, Robert Smithson, James Corner and Robert Chambers, we will explore these themes developing cartographic methods of site exploration to inform site transformation. This studio will explore and develop a series of spatial design proposals to support the development of a Baaka Cultural Centre in the community of Wilcannia, western New South Wales, through the fostering of collaborative networks and knowledge sharing. The studio will seek to explore the ways that formal and material aspects of the proposed development may arise from but also impact upon the existing spatial, social, cultural and economic realities of the town and the broader region.
tutor : Jock Gilbert, jock.gilbert@rmit.edu.au studio times: Tuesdays 9.30 - 12.30, 5.30 - 8.30 commencing Week 4 This studio includes an 8 day camping field trip to remote rural NSW in Week 8 (conditions permitting). Associated costs for accommodation and travel expenses will be approximately $385.
We will develop techniques that will allow us to hear, recognize and map stories and their relationships with landscape in order to stimulate discovery through juxtaposition at a range of scales and proximities. You will be asked to engage with and share in a range of knowledge systems through digital, analogue, oral and experiential media. In approaching site in this way, we will engage with stories of the everyday in order to map what is there, forming traces and relationships to explore our own interests in a meaningful way.