MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE THESIS DESIGN STUDIO
SEMESTER 2 2012
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
EDITED BY ROSS T. SMITH | SUB EDITOR BYRON KINNAIRD
INTRODUCTION BY VICTOR SIDY
© COPYRIGHT 2013 SUB ROSA STUDIO MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN, FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND PLANNING, 2013. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY COPYRIGHT OF THIS PUBLICATION BELONGS TO THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND PLANNING, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE AND THE RESPECTIVE AUTHORS OF THE INCLUDED CONTENT. DISCLAIMER THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE HAS USED ITS BEST ENDEAVOURS TO ENSURE THAT THE MATERIAL CONTAINED IN THIS PUBLICATION WAS CORRECT AT THE TIME OF PRINTING. THE UNIVERSITY GIVES NO WARRANTY AND ACCEPTS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF INFORMATION AND THE UNIVERSITY RESERVES THE RIGHT TO MAKE CHANGES WITHOUT NOTICE AT ANY TIME IN ITS ABSOLUTE DISCRETION. EDITOR ROSS T. SMITH SUB EDITOR BYRON KINNAIRD PUBLISHER UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE BOOK DESIGN PATRICK HEGARTY SAGHAR HENDI BOOK COVER SAGHAR HENDI INSIDE COVER FENINA ACANCE ISBN 978 0 7340 4816 5
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY. THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE. 1968. 138.
STUDENTS FENINA ACANCE JACK CAROLANE CLIVE CHIN JASLYNE GAN ANDREW GARDAM HELEN GUO SAGHAR HENDI LASSE KILVAER ADELINE LENG JEFF LIU EMMELINE ONG GILAD RITZ KATIE SKILLINGTON RIVKAH STANTON EURIC THOR
‘MY
BODY
AS
A
VISIBLE
THING
STUDIO LEADERS ROSS T. SMITH BYRON KINNAIRD
IS
CONTAINED
WITHIN
THE
FULL
SPECTACLE.’
THE TEACHERS AND STUDENTS OF THE SUB ROSA STUDIO WISH TO THANK THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE FOR THEIR SUPPORT DURING THIS THESIS DESIGN STUDIO: PROF. PHILIP GOAD FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE GAYLE GALL DOOKIE CAMPUS COORDINATOR JACQUI CHAN, CHRIS COTTRELL, TANJA BEER, AND PROF. DON BATES REVIEWERS OF INTERIM AND FINAL PRESENTATIONS SPECIAL THANKS TO: VICTOR SIDY, DEAN OF TALIESIN, THE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, U.S.A. WOODS BAGOT FOR THEIR GENEROUS SPONSORSHIP TO ASSIST IN PRINTING THE BOOK. THE TEACHERS AND STUDENTS OF THE SUB ROSA STUDIO ARE VERY APPRECIATIVE OF THE MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN AND FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE FOR THE SUPPORT GIVEN TO THIS MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE THESIS DESIGN STUDIO, THE DOOKIE PROJECT, AND FOR PUBLISHING THE BOOK. ROSS T. SMITH WWW.ROSSTSMITH.CO.NZ BYRON KINNAIRD WWW.DRAWNANDWRITTEN.COM
VICTOR SIDY DRAWING PHOTOGRAPHY FILM ANIMATION ROSS T. SMITH
REMOTENESS AND SHELTER STUDIO PROFILE BLIND DRAWING THE BODY AND INTERIOR STOP MOTION GALLERY EXCURSIONS EXPERIENTIAL WISDOM PROCESS DOOKIE INTENSIVE STUDIO THE BIG DRAW FINAL PROJECTS EXHIBITION
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REMOTENESS AND SHELTER Victor Sidy Go, my sons, buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the deep recesses of the Earth. In this way and in no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the nature and properties of things. – Severus Sebokht, 7th Century. We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden. When thinking of remote places, I am compelled to think of the Bradshaw Mountains in Central Arizona. There are certainly places far more remote than these mountains, but this is where I go to shed city life and feel danger and awe. There are vultures and cougars here, but also people: around a century ago, gold fever swept across this territory, exterminating the native Indians and leaving behind rusted nails and strands of private land. Several years ago, when land prices were especially low, I purchased an old mining claim in these mountains – a waterless ridge with twisted dwarfs of trees, barely accessible via an overgrown jeep trail – with the intent of discovering what might be the ‘essence of shelter’ through the process building on the land. My ambitions were, I thought, fairly modest: a permanent version of a camping tent, something that would provide shelter against the cold winter winds and provide shade in the summer. A place where I could focus on writing or designing, alone or with my lover, and occasionally share with friends. I loved the idea of having a remote place that would hold the three chairs of Thoreau (‘one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society’) within a place where the ‘tonic of wildness’ could be drunk. I designed an eighty five square-foot structure (eight squaremeters), roughly the proportions of a small camping trailer. Inside, it would feature a combination dining room/bedroom and a mini-kitchen. I envisioned a slightly remote outhouse and outdoor shower. Water would be harvested from the roof or brought in on visits. Electricity would be generated by solar panels and stored in a deep-cycle battery. The size of the design needed to be small enough that I could build it with my rudimentary skills in my spare time, and yet big enough for Thoreau’s three chairs. I found a place on the property with a grand view, concealed from where the jeep trail ended (about the distance of a good stone’s throw). Carefully I threaded a path between the wizened trees from the end of the road to the building site.
More about the inaccessibility of my property: indeed, the main challenge of the site is actually getting there. The journey from the city starts smoothly: for the first hour, a well-maintained freeway sweeps us into the foothills. At the exit labeled ‘Bumble Bee / Crown King’ we leave the freeway and quickly find ourselves on a ‘primitive’ gravel road. Forty five bone-rattling minutes later, we’re in the town of Crown King – the last outpost – boasting around seventy year-round inhabitants, the General Store, the Mill Restaurant (catering to off-roaders), and the Saloon, the ‘longest continuously operating bar in Arizona.’ Many ghost town guidebooks include Crown King, (where ‘only the strong survive’) in their lists. During my first visit to the Mill Restaurant, I became fast friends with Mike and Sam, the proprietors. Mike’s enthusiasms for the town’s future seemed to be improbably fueled by his own setbacks – the home he was building with second-hand materials on the ridge above the town blew over one December night. ‘The jet stream will drop clear down to the mountain tops,’ he’ll tell you. As I contemplated my project: ‘make sure you use metal siding – you never know when the next forest fire will break loose.’ Beyond the town, roads require four-wheel drive and resilience, and crawling along for another twenty minutes towards my mining claim, we emerge on the Lincoln Ridge – views over high desert for hundreds of miles in each direction, always windy. The old jeep trail was impassible from here to my land, and until I purchased a high-clearance vehicle, cleared brush, and filled in the ruts, we would hike in the rest of the way – another twenty minutes. As getting to this land requires a reliable vehicle and a healthy commitment of time and valor, I determined that I would work as little as possible on the land, and rather prefabricate the bulk of the structure on my patio in the city. When I had the time, I would take day-trips to the site to construct the foundations. After digging the holes for the stem walls, I hauled in lumber for formwork, and then bags of ready-mix concrete (twelve per trip) and jugs of water. By sundown, my foundations would be another foot higher, and I would be caked in concrete dust. Back in the city, I gradually prefabricated the floors, walls, and windows of the structure, roofed and skinned it, and finished the interior. But all the while I had to plan how to disassemble and then reassemble the structure, as every component had to be reduced to a size that could be walked to the site by hand – the final stretch, after all, was a single-file path. This meant, however, that lightweight materials were better than heavy ones, and that a surprising number of conventional construction methods had to be ruled out – except for the
REMOTENESS AND SHELTER
small pieces, the materials were screwed, not nailed, together. Also ruled out: adhesives, caulking, staples, and plaster. When the structure was complete on my patio, I hosted a party and took photos; soon thereafter, with some time off from work, I disassembled the structure (carefully labeling each part), and in four truckloads brought the majority of the materials to the building site. By the end of the week, with help from family and friends, the floor and walls were up and the roof framing tied everything together. Still to be installed: metal roof and cladding, door, windows, electrical system, interior panels, and built-in furniture. But the structure already asserted itself within the landscape as I had hoped it would, views were framed exactly as I had envisioned them to be, and suddenly, the land didn’t feel as remote: we had a foothold in the wilderness, a place that kindled the feeling of home. Back in the city in the afternoon of my day off, I got a call from Mike at the Mill Restaurant. ‘There’s a fire.’ He was breathless. ‘Are you up there?’ The wind was picking up from the west; my property lay to the northeast. Over the course of the next two weeks, the fire exploded through the mountains. The town was evacuated as it became clear that the fire would leap over the gravel road that connected it to the freeway. A few diehards remained in town – Mike and Sam refused to leave (several days later their restaurant kitchen was serving meals to the firefighters on the front lines). From my computer in the city, I pored over the fire progression maps regularly posted by Incident Information and kept in touch with the town’s evacuees. We saw the fire head east, and then swing around to the north. By day four, the map showed my property overtaken by the red line.
Jaslyne Gan
i-ii
When the fire was finally contained, an area larger than the island of Manhattan had been consumed. No lives had been lost – it is mostly uninhabited territory, after all. Later, when I picked through the ashes – twisted screws like pine needles about the concrete foundations – I pondered my next steps amidst the ruins. The feeling of home felt far away, a flat joke forgotten. A sudden gust rattled the charred branches on the slope above. Looking back on my attempt to build shelter in a remote area, I’m struck by how powerful the wild can be – its forces fickle and final. We remember this after a natural disaster. Remoteness is a knowledge in your bones that you are away, beyond: alive at the whim of something beyond your control. Perhaps I’ll try again to build upon the still-strong foundation, this time in a different way, the fire in the back of my mind. And what is shelter? It is a defense against our fears and discomforts; it is also the embodiment of our presence within a landscape. And in this balance between shelter and remoteness, we find a paradox Thoreau would approve of. As he mused in Walden: ‘At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.’
Victor Sidy Dean Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture Taliesin West, Arizona, February 2013
STUDIO PROFILE Sub Rosa (under the rose) denotes secrecy or confidentiality. The term is also used to express silence, mystery, and the hidden. The theory of the Studio is based in carnal phenomenology which reveals such concepts as the erotic body, touch, flesh, the material world, the visible and the invisible, time, silence, the liminal, the sublime, and the ephemeral. These notions are considered in relation to the physical and the psychological, and how we articulate an architecture of our existential being regarding Self, others, and nature. Experimentation and risk taking is strongly encouraged in process, design, and presentation by using a multitude of integrated techniques. Therefore the aim of this Studio is for each student to develop their own theoretical thesis and architectural brief to express their ‘deep concern’ as an interpretation of Sub Rosa which permits an expansive range of ideas and concepts in response to this central theme.
Studio Leaders: Ross T. Smith | Byron Kinnaird
‘I have learned to know art, when fresh, vital, and alive, is a sign of the artist’s youthfulness of mind. And, because I have learned to know this already for a long time, then, already long ago I decided that, no matter how old I might grow in years, I always will stick to the young. And so I have endeavoured to do.’ Eliel Saarinen
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BLIND DRAWING Blind drawing is a way of shifting from an intellectualised head-space to a deeper intuitive awareness of your body and mark making. Many students believe they cannot draw, or think that drawing is a process of accurate representation of real objects, accurate perspectives, and rendered interiors, so they are stifled before they even begin, and can easily develop a fear of the blank white page. This exercise, to blindfold students and ask them to draw, simplifies the act of drawing by removing sight, and exaggerating the sense of the hand on the paper. As an exercise in week two, blind drawing immediately heightened energy levels in the studio. Each student generated a set of drawings quickly and without the usual strain of making ‘good’ drawings. The first drawing asked for was of a ‘tree’ – not the look of a tree, but the essence of a tree; how it felt, what it sounded like, its movement, density or lightness. Because the students were not able to perceive the visual quality or accuracy of their drawing, they shifted very quickly into expressive, energetic mark making.
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Jeff Liu, charcoal on paper
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Jeff Liu, charcoal on paper
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Students: Jaslyne Gan, Andrew Gardam, Lasse Kilvaer
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Fenina Acance, charcoal on paper
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Gilad Ritz, charcoal on paper
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Rivkah Stanton, charcoal on paper
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Students: Gilad Ritz, Jeff Liu
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Students: Jack Carolane, Euric Thor
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Jaslyne Gan, charcoal on paper
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Fenina Acance, charcoal on paper
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Student: Clive Chin
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Clive Chin, charcoal on paper
Next the students were asked to draw ‘suddenness’. As absurd as the idea sounded, the blindfolded students were unhesitant to scratch and smudge charcoal across the paper’s surface with enthusiasm and confidence. When the students took off their blindfolds they were amazed and fascinated with their drawings – it is a sublime experience to see a drawing from your own hand that is completely unrecognisable. This exercise freed students from judging their drawing abilities, and was a significant turning point in the studio for students who actively took to drawing so they could express their ideas for the rest of the semester. BK
‘They may facilitate work and play, but computers do not fill one’s nostrils with the crisp scent of morning or ruffle one’s feet with evening purrs. Unlike redwoods and lichen and salamanders, computers don’t carry the baggage of vivacity. They are plastic and metal corpses with voodoo powers.’ Ian Bogost
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PHOTOGRAPHY: THE BODY AND INTERIOR Although the captured image is dominating life by increasingly overwhelming us with visual noise presented upon a flattened surface, photographs also allow us to halt time momentarily, to explore the nearness of shadows lengthening to become nightfall. Through the lens of a camera we can examine the subtlety and intimacy of the world around us. The subsequent ‘capturing’ of the image allows us to look closely at the details of things; often things we have never noticed before. The slowness of looking and the acuity of our sensory perception transports the revelation of un-saturated phenomena to the front of our consciousness. It is not in the suddenness of their arrival but the almost imperceptible and under-noticed aspect of their existence which is, at times, a surprising revelation. These phenomena are ones which pass by us without our obvious awareness; they circumvent the speed of our daily busy-ness. It is necessary to our self-awareness that we be attuned to the delicacies of life so we can design architecture that is beneficial to the body and meaningful to the mind. Juhani Pallasmaa says: ‘Architecture, more fully than other art forms, engages the immediacy of our sensory perceptions. The passage of time; light, shadow and transparency; colour phenomena, texture, material and detail all participate in the complete experience of architecture.’ i Photography, as light drawings, reveals the verity of being; an existence of exquisite nuance brought near. The loudness of the speed of life needs to be countered by the quietness of shadows shimmering on the surface of a pond. As Japanese writer Okakura poignantly said more than one hundred years ago: ‘Truth can be revealed only through the comprehension of opposites.’ ii RTS
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Andrew Gardam
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Katie Skillington
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Jack Carolane
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Jack Carolane
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Fenina Acance
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Jack Carolane
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Adeline Leng
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Lasse Kilvaer
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Euric Thor
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Gilad Ritz
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Jeff Liu
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Clive Chin
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Gilad Ritz
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Clive Chin
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Saghar Hendi
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Rivkah Stanton
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Euric Thor
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Emmeline Ong
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Clive Chin
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Gilad Ritz
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Jaslyne Gan
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Katie Skillington
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Rivkah Stanton
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Helen Guo
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Adeline Leng
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Fenina Acance
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Lasse Kilvaer
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Gilad Ritz
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Gilad Ritz
Pallasmaa, Juhani. Questions of Perception: phenomenology of architecture. 1994. 41. Okakura, Kakuzo. The Book of Tea. 2006 [1906]. 47.
‘I think we should encourage and cultivate the students’ naïveté. … Our role then is to draw these aspects out and encourage them to rely on their own backgrounds. … Based on students’ experiences in the world, we can instigate certain processes whose logics are consistent and controllable but whose outcomes are unpredictable.’ Dirk Hebel
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‘They [students] must discover what their own obsessions and design fascinations are – whether from the newspaper in the morning, on the Internet at lunch, or at the movies at night. One must be constantly on the lookout for design inspiration and opportunity. This is a projective act with critical potential.’ Marc Angélil
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FILM ANIMATION: STOP MOTION Making still images creates a quality of space for dynamic action and offered the students another method of expressing themselves creatively. Lyn Wilson, who worked in Paris for several years with filmmaker Michel Gondry, ran the three hour Studio.
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Lyn Wilson - guest teacher of animation studio
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Jaslyne Gan - ‘Untitled’
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Jack Carolane, Fenina Acance, Rivkah Stanton - ‘Juices’
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Euric Thor, Adeline Leng - ‘The Lady and the Moth’
The expectation that was through drawing, modelling, and movement the students would be able to make a short animated film. The students brought a few modelling things however discovered unexpected other materials and equipment around the Faculty to put to use; overhead projectors, bits of wire and plastic, paper and cardboard, fly-wire screens, gel, whiteboard markers, and used the luminosity of windows, light tables, and mobile phones to create lighting effects. All films were shot using small digital cameras on a tripod by taking single still images that were then edited together to make a moving sequence. Finally adding a catchy soundtrack and, voila, a film is made. Nearly all of the stop animation films were loaded onto You Tube that night. Film making offered the students another way of expressing and creating architectural experiences in a way that still drawings are unable to do. Film is just another way of seeing the world. BK
‘We must constantly ask ourselves – and the students – to think about the exceptions to a system and about ways to misuse standardized techniques.’ Marc Angélil
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GALLERY EXCURSIONS A day away from the University gave us the opportunity to visit several exhibitions. There was the work of international jewellers at the National Gallery of Victoria, kinetic constructions by Ian Burns, and new explorations in taxidermy and jewellery by Julia de Ville. Art can influence architecture in many subtle ways. The fine detailing and exquisite craftsmanship of jewellery was an obvious choice in relation to the considerations of ornament and patterning in this Studio which some students were pursuing. Similarly jewellery relies strongly on materiality, its combination and relation to each other, whilst the mad mechanisms of Ian Burns were a fascination of light and sound in the mystery of shadows. Jewellery can be likened to Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of writing: ‘For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings, ... they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.’ i RTS
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Ian Burns: ‘In The Telling’, ACMI, National Gallery of Victoria
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‘Unexpected Pleasures: the art and design of contemporary jewellery’,
National Gallery of Victoria
Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
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‘An intensive ‘atmosphere’ is the most valuable thing a student can receive.’ Karl-Georg Bitterberg
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EXPERIENTIAL WISDOM Ross T. Smith I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. i Experiential wisdom is a process of the body and our sensory exploration of the (im)material world as a self-directed adventure of the unexpected, and often, the unknown. It is a process of gaining qualitative knowledge when confronted with thresholds of both reality and the imagination. Experiential learning is not a blunt attack on the rocks and trees around us but a subtle, and at times, almost imperceptible contact with things: flesh, earth, wind, liquid honey. Philosopher Alphonso Lingis says: ‘To be born is not to be cast into the immanence of nothingness but to find oneself in a sustaining medium.’ ii Our existence is not a remote or virtual connection to an outsourced otherness, it is a real and immediate intimacy with all that is near, close, and tactile. Not only do we touch the world but it touches us back; we are in communion with it; we are the witness who verifies this mutual contact. Phenomenology in architecture can be considered the ‘lived fabric of inescapable connectedness between people and the world,’ says philosopher David Seamon, which defines meaning in a broader phenomenological perspective in a way that includes ‘bodily, visceral, intuitive, emotional, and transpersonal dimensions.’ iii Touch, at all times, becomes our connector to the physical whereas sight maintains one of our major receptors of the world. Touching and seeing function in very different ways. To touch determines nearness and keeps our body within reach of other bodies. Touch, or the lack of it, can also leave us with the pain of separation. Sight expresses distance, a view of the horizon and expansiveness, and clearly factualises near from far; the potential for prospect or refuge. Sight has become the predominant mode of experiencing the world through rapid visual telecommunication, yet we presume this to be the most crucial sense in determining our experience almost to the point of bodily neglect; a digital disembodiment of sorts. So often we accept every-thing as given and not as integral and influencing factors in our everyday life. The first response to phenomena is awareness: seeing is believing; touching is knowing; thinking is integrating. Phenomenology is an intellectual and philosophical means by which we are able to enter into a discussion with our self or others about the authentic and ahistorical ordinariness of elemental experience. Philosopher David Cerbone says: ‘Although phenomenology often, if not always, characterizes itself as a purely descriptive enterprise, the right descriptions can be thoroughly transformative, converting us from passive, thing-like beings
to lucid, active, fully attentive subjects of experience.’ iv In a physical profession such as architecture experiential wisdom gives us the knowledge to communicate with others. Primarily we require a sensitivity and a language to explain to ourselves our experiences of materials and atmospheres so that we can impart this to others. This is particularly so of the descriptiveness of the materiality of architecture in which the physical understanding of the textures and nuances of materials used to construct and inform our places of inhabitation express the subtlety of tactile information. Learning to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ are the most significant aspects of our sensory understanding and our human relationship with material and physical space. Our body responds to inflections of surfaces as our eyes glide across them and as our fingers caress the delicate layers of our palpable containment. Architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa says: ‘A building is encountered; it is approached, confronted, related to one’s body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things. Architecture directs, scales, and frames actions, perceptions and thoughts.’ v Experiential learning inserts knowingness directly into the body as haptic installation. Our body learns by doing and in so comprehends what is necessary to be done. Theory is at all times remote and often more complex than the practical application of it. In order to live a creative life in art and architecture it is necessary to relax some of our preconditioned and dominantly conscious barriers so we can intuit the subtlety of the given world. It is in these moments of relaxation that there is the suddenness of sensing phenomena that you had never experienced before: the multitude of colours shimmering in a flat metal sheet when previously you had only seen grey; the plopping sound of water dripping on the leaves of a forest although the rain has stopped; gliding your fingertips across the textured surface of drawing paper to feel the moth-like quality of pencil-lead on the page. Pallasmaa says: ‘Architecture in the real world has experiential qualities. The real task of architecture is to poeticise the ordinary. Make it humanly real, not fantasy.’ vi If we wish to be artist-architects then describing and showing are subjective essentials to our trade; otherwise we remain intellectualised and paper-bound. To become an attuned creator of our built environment it is imperative to understand the self and our response to the astonishing world in which we live. In the words of poet and writer Susan Stewart: ‘Nature produces beauty without human intervention.’ vii We only need to be aware of it, how it can inspire us, and how not to destroy it. Our physical, sensual and emotional contact as an extension toward things and others is carnal and poetic. It is unmediated as we touch, smell, see,
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taste, and hear the world. Intellectualisation comes after initial contact which is where the mind of science is located. Cartesian theory can determine the x, y, z of parametric variables but it does not describe the swoon of beauty, a slap across the face, or a bloody knee. Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon tells us. ‘Art is man added to nature.’ viii And French author André Maurois continues: ‘Nature provides the elements of drama: cries, passionate desires, unexplained murders; the poet seizes upon this confused material and fashions it into a smoothly flowing tragedy comprehensible and moving to the human spectator.’ ix Making contact with the living breathing world, becoming sensitive to the influences of time, acknowledging the imperfection and mortality of all things, and inserting our body into the mouth of nature can make us acutely aware of the molten core of our own existence.
i ii iii iv v vi vii viii ix x xi
Stevens, Wallace. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Stanza V. Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative. 16. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Seamon, David, ed. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter. 2007, Fall. Kansas State University, 1990 – present. Cerbone, David R. Understanding Phenomenology. 94. Bucks, UK: Acumen Publishing Ltd, 2006. Pallasmaa, Juhani. Stairways of the Mind. Encounters. 60. Ed. Peter MacKeith. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2005. Pallasmaa, Juhani. In conversation with author at Taliesin West, USA. November 2012. Stewart, Susan. The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. 17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Bacon, Francis. Descriptio Globi Intellectus (1612). Cited in Maurois, André. The Art of Living. 11. Trans. James Whitall. UK: The English Universities Press, 1940. Maurois, André. The Art of Living. 11. Biggs, John and Catherine Tang. Teaching for Quality Learning at University. 23. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, McGraw Hill, 2011. Proust, Marcel. Cited in Maurois, The Art of Living. 177.
Phenomenography is a style of teaching that directs students to discover their own learning perspective. x The emphasis is on changing the learners’ perception, how they see and experience the world, and how they represent this newfound awareness. It is a constructivist method which allows the student to construct their own knowledge from their activities and reflective practice. Experiential education encourages students to take control of their learning by developing a strongly personal and proactive role in their research and production of work. This is an educational process of conceptual change and not just the passive acquisition of knowledge. Architectural education is becoming physically disengaged; the hand has become the mouse that scurries around the virtual world in search of morsels to consume. Yet in this devouring of information there is no tasting or chewing, and no physical perception of these morsels we consume of life. The visual dominates the experiential and it is the mind which has to ‘digest’ this remote visual information. There is no sustenance in a cyber-chip meal; only empty pixels. Physical experience translates as haptic memories; this is our bodily wisdom of being engaged with the world. To be real is to be present in body and mind. French author Marcel Proust, in his novel Remembrance of Things Past (1927), observed: ‘I heard people saying that he looked his age and I was surprised to notice on his face several signs that are characteristic of old age. Then I understood that this was due to his being really old and that life makes old men of boys who live a sufficient number of years.’ xi
Adeline Leng
041-042
PROCESS Experimentation with image making and modelling is incredibly valuable to students who are developing their ideas in a studio environment. By exploring alternative types of making that can best express their approach to architecture, students develop concepts much more freely than is usually possible with conventional architectural drawings. Working in a playful and risk-free way, they develop beautiful and unique architectural representations of spaces, atmospheres, materials, and moments. The process of making images plays a significant role in the discovery and refinement of a personal architectural concern that they are exploring, because their concepts are literally ‘drawn out’ in their acts of expression on the page, screen, or with physical materials. Working iteratively through this process, their projects develop a visual language that is always deeply connected, and unique to the architecture that emerges from the work. Rivkah Stanton’s conceptual drawing on the page opposite is a beautiful example of work that emerged through pencil drawing, colouring, and the stitching of red thread. She carefully photographed this drawing to create a piece of work that expresses materiality, texture, and light as an evocative rep resentation that could filter through her architecture – from construction details, sectional design, siting, and presentation. The connectedness of all aspects of the project through this complex image is an important effect of experimental process drawings. Not all drawings are so lucky though, nor should they be, it is by playfully experimenting and taking risks that students produce their worst and best drawings. These drawings are either quickly relegated to the bottom draw (if they survive at all), or pinned permanently to studio walls as potent reminders of their project’s force. BK
(1)
Rivkah Stanton
(2)
Helen Guo
(3)
Emmeline Ong
(4)
Jeff Liu
(5)
Lasse Kilvaer
(6)
Saghar Hendi
(7)
Katie Skillington
(8)
Jaslyne Gan
(9)
Emmeline Ong
(10)
Emmeline Ong
(11)
Andrew Gardam
(12)
Emmeline Ong
(13)
Katie Skillington
(14)
Saghar Hendi
(15)
Jack Carolane
(16)
Jaslyne Gan
(17)
Lasse Kilvaer
(18)
Fenina Acance
(19)
Adeline Leng
(20)
Euric Thor
(21)
Jaslyne Gan
(22)
Saghar Hendi
(23)
Lasse Kilvaer
(24)
Jeff Liu
(25)
Rivkah Stanton
(26)
Jeff Liu
(27)
Adeline Leng
(28)
Gilad Ritz
(29)
Clive Chin
(30)
Clive Chin
(31)
Euric Thor
(32)
Emmeline Ong
‘One possibility [in design] is to operate with the things that are actually considered mistakes or failures of the system – the exceptions, the misfits, the deviants.’ Marc Angélil
(1)
PROCESS
043-044
(2)
PROCESS
(3)
(4)
045-046
(5)
PROCESS
(6)
(7)
047-048
(8)
PROCESS
049-050
(9)
(10)
(11)
PROCESS
051-052
(12)
‘There needs to be more blood in the Studio! If a student doesn’t have tears in their eyes [of joy or sadness], then the educational institute is not doing a good job.’ Juhani Pallasmaa
PROCESS (13)
053-054
(14)
PROCESS
(15)
055-056
(16)
(17)
PROCESS
057-058
(18)
PROCESS
(19)
(20)
059-060
(21)
(22)
(23)
PROCESS
061-062
(24)
(25)
(26)
PROCESS
063-064
(27)
(28)
(29)
(30)
PROCESS
065-066
(31)
PROCESS (32)
067-068
DOOKIE INTENSIVE STUDIO The Dookie Intensive Studio was a five day workshop as a complimentary teaching component to the Sub Rosa Studio. It was held in a remote rural location three hours out of Melbourne. The purpose of the workshop was to remove the students from the university and city environment and give them the space to focus on thinking and developing their design projects. The remote location slows the body and calms the mind; an important factor in bringing together the many threads of theory, experimentation, imagination, and questioning that had been enfolded into the first five weeks of the semester. Remoteness offers silence, not the absence of sound, but a reduction in the externalised sensory onslaught that the urban scene produces and the constant connection to sources beyond oneself. The wide open spaces of a country location bring you back to your body and to the ground. In response to Descartes view of the universe being vast, cold, inhuman and mechanical French philosopher Blaise Pascal, in the 1650s, said: ‘... the eternal silence of infinite space fills me with dread.’ Not much has changed for committed city-dwellers and it this which necessitates the need to return to the self and come to terms with space and silence, and one’s own intimacy.
‘Play becomes party – party becomes work – work becomes play.’ Johannes Itten
DOOKIE INTENSIVE STUDIO
069-070
DOOKIE INTENSIVE STUDIO
071-072
DOOKIE INTENSIVE STUDIO
073-074
THE BIG DRAW The winery at Dookie opened up its two great wooden doors to us. Empty but for a few remnants of the wine making that used to happen there; stainless steel vats, pipes and pipettes, and a few dusty bottles of Shiraz languishing in a wire rack. The walls were solid brick, painted white, and slightly subterranean to maintain an even air temperature, a vast coffee-coloured ceiling of timber hovered above a well-worn concrete slab. We taped a 10 x 1.5 metre piece of heavy drawing paper to the wall and made a series of ‘jump’ photographs for posterity. The idea for the group drawing was ‘Body and Landscape’. We gave the fourteen students options of charcoal and three colours of pastel and let them explore the idea, the paper, and themselves in creating marks of an intuitive outpouring. The drawing became an intensely active and energetic process; from individual obsessions to feisty ‘draw-wars’ (several students fighting for creative space). As the energy drifted the students would stand back, as a group, from the drawing to assess its progress, depth, colour balance, movement, and expressiveness. We would discuss what more or less the drawing needed, and how to continue towards a finishing point; a consensus of completion. John Dewey said in his book Art as Experience of 1934: ‘Order is not imposed from without but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another.’ i Over two hours the drawing became richer and stronger, more powerful and momentous as an exploration of the entire Studio’s commitment to the process. As a singular piece it had the quality of a great explosion of broad-stroke passionate energy, yet in the details were the delicacy and particularity of finely considered moments of silence. RTS i
Dewey. Art as Experience. 1934, 14.
‘Sometimes I feel that it’s almost impossible to realize truly innovative ideas within the framework of already established institutions….’ Anton Vidokle
DOOKIE INTENSIVE STUDIO
075-076
DOOKIE INTENSIVE STUDIO
077-078
F I N A L P R OJ E C T S Sub Rosa is a research led Thesis Design Studio. It is the culmination of five years of education directed at becoming an architect (or perhaps something else…), and was the final opportunity for students to express what they really wanted to say before completing their formalised, university based architectural education. The expectation was for the student to descend into Pan’s labyrinth to discover and reveal their ‘deep concern’. The semester insisted on student-initiated projects whereby each project was developed and driven by the research and conceptual development of the individual student. Rather than a single Studio brief being prescribed for all students by a site, a building programme, a project, and a list of standardised outcomes they were supported to express, through architectural means and their imagination, their sub rosa desires, delights, and desperations. The Studio was informed by various media of art practice as a way of shifting the focus on creativity into a multiplicity of areas and not just a rehashing of current architectural trends. Indries Shah, Sufi master and academic, says: ‘Thought, not pattern-making, is the method. Thought must be for all life, not for small aspects of it.’ Therefore challenging students’ perceptions through philosophical examination of their experiential wisdom can sometimes throw them into turmoil and a crisis of direction. Hopefully, out of this, will arise inspiration and a realisation of their deep concern. Creativity must be individual and personal; it cannot come from regurgitation of the already-known or be approved by a checklist of design requirements. Throughout the semester a variety of techniques were experimented with such as hand-drawing, collage, photography, rough model-making, textural examinations, film making, CAD processes, and Photoshop reconfigurations. Final images were printed on a variety of papers, or totally hand-drawn on great lengths of artist’s canvas, were mounted as light box projections, or expressed as highly refined models. All presentation drawings were produced using a multiple layering of media to develop intensely rich and fascinating drawings. The Final Reviews were held in a similar manner to the Interim Reviews which offered a generous timetable for students, teachers, and reviewers to enjoy and appreciate each student’s effort and excellence. The Review sessions were held over two days, with four reviewers, giving the students thirty minutes each for their presentations. The Review session is when the student can publicly deliver their research, the concepts of their design project, defend their decisions, and the way in which they have expressed these in a thorough and architecturalised way. An exhibition was curated of the students’ final projects, process work, models, remote
studio, and animated films. The final Reviews were held amongst the exhibition which allowed for each student’s work to be presented in a professional and expressive manner rather than the usual very un-special and casual ‘pin-up’. Reviewing in the exhibition space enhanced a generous and celebratory atmosphere to the exceptionally hard work and dedication the students and teachers had put into this final exploration. A public exhibition gives other architecture students and faculty an opportunity to swap ideas, examine techniques, and become part of an open debate about theories and methods for teaching Design Studio. Ultimately however, the exhibition and this book, are an acknowledgment of the individuals who belonged to a special and wonderful group of people. RTS
FINAL PROJECTS
079-080
FENINA ACANCE
QUARANTINE
I am neither here nor there. I drift alone in the haze of the in-between… This project explores human migration; the physical and psychological implications of departure, arrival and a perpetuation of the in-between. It is a circumstance of wandering between states of longing and belonging, not knowing which you belong to and unsure of how to establish roots in either. In cases of voluntary migration, people lose the comforts of their inherent culture in an attempt to establish meaning in a transitional elsewhere. The architectural proposition is a Quarantine Centre which is embedded in the vibrant yet unforgiving Australian landscape. The Quarantine Centre negotiates the fractured and shifting forms of the landscape and the man-made which have been constructed and adjusted over many years of shared isolation. As a supposedly temporary home for its inhabitants the centre’s purpose remains intentionally ambiguous as it challenges concepts of remoteness, extrication, and estrangement.
‘Is there any reason … why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?’ Virginia Woolf
FINAL PROJECTS
081-082
FINAL PROJECTS
083-084
(5)
FINAL PROJECTS
085-086
JACK CAROLANE
HEROIN
This is not a utopian project aiming to cleanse the world of all inequality, pain and hardship, nor is this a pessimistic surrender to the overwhelming public dissociation with the insidious reality of addiction. Rather, a compassionate approach imbued with the hope that architecture can provide a sanctuary, a pillow, some other way of doing or knowing that helps, even for a moment, some of the most marginalised people in our city. It is hoped that the ephemeral qualities of architecture and the landscape can somehow connect with the fragmented collective psyche of this particular group of people, and create a place where wellbeing and dignity foster the possibility of a meaningful future; be that five minutes, one month, three years, or a lifetime.
‘My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure if the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty
FINAL PROJECTS
087-088
HEROIN - JACK CAROLANE - PLAN 1:1
FINAL PROJECTS
089-090
FINAL PROJECTS
091-092
CLIVE CHIN
SLAUGHTER DESPAIR DETERIORATION
‘What is meant to be hidden, but has come to light, all the more fearsome because apparently the same.’ Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919). Drawing from deep concerns of the obscure, the sublime, and the uncanny, this project addresses forgotten relationships between meat consumption and sacrifice, along with emotional resonances of despair and hopelessness in which their conjoining is mediated through expressions of gore and deterioration. The incitement of such unsettling experiences has been swept aside under an obsession with sanitisation which, over time, offers society the possibility to contemplate abrasions of the ugly. The architecture comprises a traditional slaughterhouse in conjunction with an eatery and butchery. This strange presence embraces the ugly in contra-distinction with the sterile city. As with spatial ordering, moments of emotional resonances and psychological associations unfold throughout, suggesting a reconnection of the consumption of meat and slaughter.
‘When the land subsumes the dead, they become the rich body of earth, the dark matter of creation. As I walk the fields of this farm, beneath my feet shift the bones of incalculable bodies; death is the sculptor of the ravishing landscape, the terrible mother, the damp creator of life, by whom we are one day devoured.’ Sally Mann
FINAL PROJECTS
093-094
FINAL PROJECTS
095-096
FINAL PROJECTS
097-98
JASLYNE GAN
THE JOURNEY
‘Imagination is autonomous in relation to perception, but also that it precedes perception.’ Gaston Bachelard This project investigates, through drawing, the journey as a transcendent potential between the real and the imaginary as a threshold between the body and the mind, the conscious and the subconscious, of being and otherness. The process of my work is a constant discovery of seeing with minimal control in the making of marks. I allow the ink, water, gravity and canvas to collide most naturally, with minimal interference of the brush and pencil. The result of the process embraces what is almost a child-like experience of ‘seeing for the first time’. These drawings evoke memory and desire and are intimations of our primal necessity to dwell. They hover on the periphery of architecture as form-making and mind-forming. Through subtle expression they aim to awaken possibilities of inhabitation and of one’s existence as an encounter between the real and its potential.
‘Art and architecture are frequently differentiated in terms of their relationship for ‘function’ or ‘use’. Unlike architecture, art may not be useful in pragmatic terms, for example in responding directly to social needs, providing shelter or somewhere in which to perform open-heart surgery, but we could say that art provides a place for other kinds of function – self-reflection, critical thinking and social change.’ Jane Rendell
FINAL PROJECTS
099-100
FINAL PROJECTS
101-102
FINAL PROJECTS
103-104
ANDREW GARDAM
4am
4am is neither last night nor tomorrow morning; it is the time most remote from the waking hours. 4am is when vision is blurred and dreamlike moments are found in a city submerged in darkness. It is an abyss but not a void, for the imagination senses what the eyes cannot. Activities continue. 4am is a time when objects and subjects merge with the field. This thesis explores the phenomenal condition of objects and subjects merging with the field, both tectonically and programmatically, or architecturally and socially, in a search for the lived dream, environments that can change behaviour and social rules that can be broken. Situationist theory, sex club design and the photography of Man Ray, Lucien Clergue and Solve Sundsbo have informed the recasting of the ‘boutique hotel’ as a night-time playground that hosts an exploration of one’s imagination and carnal desires.
‘When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riveted to this darkness, we have nothing to do with anything. But this nothing is not that of a pure nothingness. There is no more this, nor that; there is not ‘something’. But this universal absence is, in its turn, a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence.’ Emmanuel Levinas
FINAL PROJECTS
105-106
FINAL PROJECTS
107-108
FINAL PROJECTS
109-110
HELEN GUO
A PLACE OF NOTHINGNESS
Within the bustling lifestyle city of today’s cities, it is essential to have peaceful moments in which to pause and be still. This project offers a private and intimate space for busy workers to retreat within Melbourne’s CBD; it allows them to be calm, release their mind, and to meditate. It is a place for nothing, a sanctuary for the body to rest and mind to drift away from hectic daily routines; to wonder, imagine, and drift in the pleasure of day dreams. The bathhouse offers the ritual of bathing, solitude, and discreet socialisation. This project explores intimate moments within architectural spaces. The play of water, steam, mist, light and shadow resonate evocative and diverse sensual experiences for the users within a dense urban setting.
‘Have you ever heard a silence in a room at night or a great silence alone in the middle of a wood? Listen: for beneath the silence is a world where each separate silence takes up its pitch.’ Norman Mailer
FINAL PROJECTS
111-112
FINAL PROJECTS
113-114
FINAL PROJECTS
115-116
SAGHAR HENDI
THE FALL
War, as an event, is a threshold to a liminal condition: between knowing and remembering; between the present and the past. It is an unexpected pause which never leaves you. War is an undesirable journey which determines a transitional experience from one aspect of life to another. This project, a Circus in a Tower, is an abstract exploration of the vertical and transitional thresholds in architecture as a philosophical commentary on war. Architecture and war are conditions of man-made space; both control and determine our humanity, physically and psychologically. In war you exist, hovering in a liminal space of an unpredictable time frame, not sure of the future and unsure of the present. Once you cross the threshold of war you can never return to how you were before.
‘Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.’ Friedrich Nietzsche
FINAL PROJECTS
117-118
FINAL PROJECTS
119-120
FINAL PROJECTS
121-122
LASSE KILVAER
CHEMOTAXOPOLIS
Chemotaxopolis is an amalgamation of human biology and architecture. In a time where architects are searching for a naturalised built environment, the project suggests an organic intervention based on blood cells that reorganise and reappropriate the matter of the city. The project began at the fringes of culture in a mining landscape in Tasmania. Inspired by the writings of Robert Smithson and Manfredo Tafuri it investigates civilisation as a geological phenomenon and the politics of nature in architecture. If architecture will be instrumental in legitimising continuing construction, it will be so through establishing an aesthetic of naturalisation. Scale affects our judgements of the natural. At 1:0.0005 and at 1:50,000 humans, plants and concrete appear similar, but somewhere in-between, the man-made and the organic seem to part ways. This in-between zone is the state of Chemotaxopolis.
‘Beyond our biological essence and its constitutive meaning in architecture, biology – life in its fantastic multiplicity and creativity – will provide the most important models and areas of research for our future, and for our constructions – from landscape and urbanism to sustainable living and specific technical innovations.’ Juhani Pallasmaa
FINAL PROJECTS
123-124
FINAL PROJECTS
125-126
FINAL PROJECTS
127-128
ADELINE LENG
ORNAMENTAL FLESH
“The capacity of imagination does not hide in our brains alone, as our entire bodily constitution has its fantasies, desires and dreams.” Ornamental Flesh interrogates architecture’s capacity to hold meaning and ideas through the use of ornaments and aesthetics in addition to providing a critique on the ocularcentric nature of these architectural elements. Deconstructing the preeminence of vision in the practice, Ornamental Flesh privileges the body in the cognition of ideas as embedded in architectural forms. The project imagines ornaments as corporeal Beings and illustrates the body’s desire to meld with this flesh. Occupying space within the material shell of architecture, the Ornamental Being establishes a symbiotic relationship with built form while providing a different set of ”functions” as that allowed within physical space. These “functions” become carnal in quality and affords for a series of bodily movements as a means for our somatic selves to embody this ornamental realm.
‘The primary significance of being human is to exist in space as the ‘betweenness’ of extended embodied subjects that communicate through the intersubjectivity of space.’ Michele Marra
FINAL PROJECTS
129-130
FINAL PROJECTS
131-132
FINAL PROJECTS
133-134
JEFF LIU
MEMORY
‘Our greatest pretences are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.’ Eric Hoffer Memory is of past events and objects. We cannot carry all the objects of our life with us at all times, and it is only through memorialisation can the object become permanent and constant as memory. This architecture is an encoding mechanism for our memories in which physical absence is the presence of the emptiness of things. Instead of replacing one object with another, as for example a tombstone or an urn full of ashes, our memory perhaps is a more economical repository for our life experiences. As the objects of our life are burned the smoke rises through the chimneys to activate the tinkling of bells. This soundscape therefore is the transformation of the real, as a cremated object, to be transformed into an ephemeral representation as memory which we can then carry with us at all times.
‘Atmosphere is the overarching perceptual, sensory and emotive impression of a setting or a social situation. It provides the unifying coherence and character of a room, space, place, and landscape, or a human encounter. Atmosphere is ‘the common denominator,’ ‘the coloring,’ or ‘the feel’ of the experiential situation. Atmosphere is a mental background, an experienced property or characteristic, that is suspended between the perceived object and subject.’ Juhani Pallasmaa
FINAL PROJECTS
135-136
FINAL PROJECTS
137-138
FINAL PROJECTS
139-140
EMMELINE ONG
ORCHESTRATION OF BEING
Humanity has become jaded to its surroundings as an adverse effect of our society’s rapid progression and growth. Juhani Pallasmaa says; ‘vision and hearing are now the privileged sociable senses’. We are distracted, our senses have become de-sensitised, and our consciousness is devoid of awareness of the world and of oneself. Yet the senses are not segregated, but experienced all at once by the body. Observing the Royal Botanic Gardens, this project manipulates and embraces elements of nature that reflect humanity. ‘Moments’ replayed on site are akin to instruments through which facets of life are ‘played’ back to us. This project admonishes us to experience and remember; to return to a deeper connection to the world within ourselves. It reminds us of our own mortality, and perhaps, through this journey, we gain some acceptance of it.
‘The poetic voice brings into the space of nothingness this dreamlike state of immediacy.’ Nishitani Keiji
FINAL PROJECTS
141-142
FINAL PROJECTS
143-144
FINAL PROJECTS
145-146
GILAD RITZ
ENVELOPING MADNESS
The places we dwell give form and mould the ‘life of the mind’. This placeless cerebral volume will influence human memories, feelings and thoughts. Therefore exterior spaces are interiorised and inner spaces are exteriorised by the mind. i Designing for a Psychiatric Facility, the following architectural exploration follows the idea that the world is perceived through the body and mind, which remain, intertwined and inseparable at the core of being. The perception of space and place is influenced by madness, which acts to alter the mind affecting ones inner and outer perceptions of self. The placelessness of the mind is occupied by a multitude of psyche states. Madness in the form of Schizophrenia for example is the incomprehension of the senses and the breakdown of thought amalgamated with delusions and paranoia, splitting the human functions and placing an individuals psyche in a sate of opposition. ii Architecture seeks to embrace the adolescent whilst in a period of constant change and separation of the senses. Creating an envelope around the individual and re-focusing their environment. Architecture articulates the landscape through Salutogenesis, an approach towards healing that focuses on factors that support human health and well-being. iii
i ii iii
Malpas, J. E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. p5. Jim van Os, Shitij Kapur, ‘Schizophrenia’, Lancet 2009; 374, pp. 635–36. Jan A. Golembiewski, Start making sense: applying a salutogenic model to architectural design for psychiatric care,Facilities, Vol. 28 No. 3/4, 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
‘The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself.’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty
FINAL PROJECTS
147-148
FINAL PROJECTS
149-150
FINAL PROJECTS
151-152
KATIE SKILLINGTON
SUB-FASCIA
Modern society craves the visually seductive; faultless and refined manifestations of completeness and stability. But our disproportionate preoccupation with architectural spectacle over existential space marginalises the important psycho-sensory relationship between body and the world, leaving us with lifeless, alienating and predictable environments. When the aesthetic preoccupation begins to decay, what kind of architectural experiences can be revealed? Sub-Fascia reasserts the value of all that lies beneath the spectacle. It is an interiorised exploration of haptic, honest and unexpected architectural experiences that solicit an active response from visitors and occupants. Drawing on concepts of home, memory and personalisation, this design for an integrated home and beauty clinic embodies a phenomenological staccato of sights, smells and moments that reconnect our bodies to the world. In Sub-Fascia, we are no longer passive receptors of architecture; we are integral to its existence.
‘When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did, in his sleep – not screaming, like the passengers in his car.’ Author unknown
FINAL PROJECTS
153-154
FINAL PROJECTS
155-156
FINAL PROJECTS
157-158
RIVKAH STANTON
THE EXCHANGE
February 7th 2009 will forever be known as ‘Black Saturday.’ It marks a day in Australia’s history when fire ravaged the Victorian landscape. -173 lives were lost -400 people were injured -2000 homes destroyed -More than 450,000 hectares of land was burnt. The challenge is how and what we rebuild to heal both physical and psychological scars? Like nature, Man also bears witness as bodily memory. The Exchange comprises Artists’ Studios and a Culinary School in which fire is the central focus of transformation from death to life. Clay is fired into pottery, flame moulds glass, and ovens cook food. This facility becomes a place of gathering, education and production. Fire can be both a force of destruction as well as regeneration of place, economy, and community. Therefore The Exchange is proposed as an architecture of resilience, restoration, and memorial.
‘Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse.’ Gaston Bachelard
FINAL PROJECTS
159-160
FINAL PROJECTS
161-162
FINAL PROJECTS
163-164
EURIC THOR
THIS IS NOT ARCHITECTURE
This project is a détournement; the deconstruction of a power structure that exists through the typological construct of the architectural institution and an interrogation of the institutionalisation of ‘architecture’ that governs tastes and pedagogical approaches in the New New Melbourne School of Design. Tip-toeing around the surrounding politics of the construction of the new architecture building, this design utilises the programmatic brief of the new school to uncover the embedded meaning behind its marketed intentions to portray an allegorical retelling of the brief. This project uncovers the asymmetrical warfare between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’, playing out in the socio-spatial arena of the typology and informs the gibbous relationship of prospective and refuge space. At the heated climax of this allegory, the institution instigates a cognitive subservience of the Society of the Spectacle (Debord) while a subversive few have begun to rewrite the spatial syntax; turning the expressions of the institution against itself… ‘The university just pumps out students like sausages …’ Anon.
‘Theory and practice are not only interwoven with one’s culture but with the responsibility of shaping the environment, of breaking up social complacency, and challenging the power of the status quo.’ Samuel Mockbee
FINAL PROJECTS
165-166
FINAL PROJECTS
167-168
FINAL PROJECTS
169-170
THE CHAIR AGAIN (THAT WASN’T)
171-172
EXHIBITION
EXHIBITION
173-174
‘The flesh can feel nothing without feeling itself, and feeling itself feeling (touched, or indeed wounded, by what it touches); it can even happen that it feels by not only feeling itself feeling, but also feeling itself felt (for example, if an organ of my flesh touches another organ of my own flesh). In the flesh, the interior (what feels) no longer is distinguished from the exterior (what is felt); they merge in a unique sentiment – feeling oneself feeling. Thus I can never put myself at a distance from my flesh, or distinguish or remove myself from it, or even less, absent myself from it.’ Jean-Luc Marion. The Erotic Phenomenon. 2008. 38.