Architectural Culture: New Perspectives 2016 by Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

ARCHITECTURAL C U LT U R E N E W

P E R S P E C T I V E S

Architectural Culture: New Perspectives © 2016 ISBN: 978-0-9808689-8-2 Made for CODA, the Graduate Architecture Exhibition 2016. First published in 2016 by Harvest: Fresh scholarship from the field (Freerange Press imprint). Freerange Press is an online and print publishing co-operative based in Australia and New Zealand. Freerange’s focus is on global issues of design, politics and life for an urbanised humanity. Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning University of Sydney Wilkinson Building, 148 City Road, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Editor: Sandra Löschke Coordinating Editor & Designer: Adrian Thai Printer: Oxford Printing

CONTENTS

Contents Editorial Sandra Lรถschke

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MARC5001 Graduation Studio Graduation Studio 1: Exhibiting Architecture - The Architecture of Exhibitions Sandra Lรถschke Graduation Studio 2: The Architectural Drawing Foundation Ross Anderson Graduation Studio 3: Speculative Urban Futures Ross Anderson Graduation Studio 4: Rough Poetry and Foregrounding the Cultural Artefact Nicholas Elias Graduation Studio 5: Nexus Studio Catherine Donnelley Graduation Studio 6: Sydney Square David Burdon Graduation Studio 7: The Event Horizon Thomas Stromberg

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BDES3027 Studio 3B Proto-Computational Hacking Catherine Lassen, Rizal Muslimin

International Studios Venice Architecture Biennale Batik Urbanism Broken Hill TU Munich Workshop

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Essays Architecture and/or Infrastructure Franรงois Blanciak Parenthetical Architectural Theory Chris Smith Adventures in Flatland: Drawing and the Architectural Imagination Ross Anderson

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Honours

Graduate Exhibition Studio

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Tin Sheds Gallery exhibitions

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Student Excellence

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Supporters

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Architecture Graduate Exhibition 2016 Tin Sheds Render, James Feng

EDITORIAL

Observations on Architectural Culture Sandra Löschke

Within the context of the graduate exhibition, the individual endeavours of our students reappear in a different light and take on a new significance that unfolds at a larger scale. What appeared without direction, becomes recognisable as a line of inquiry; what seemed idiosyncratic, emerges as a thematic cluster; and finally, what were supposedly disparate projects, when seen in relation, begin to outline a culture of architectural production that is powerful, intelligent and unique to this school. A bigger logic emerges that positions the annual graduate exhibition as a prime place for transition, where student works make the passage from the institutional framework of the classroom to the mainstream of the profession, transporting academic production to the centre of a shared architectural culture in which we all participate: students, academics, professionals, industry and the community.

The nexus between research and teaching is a fundamental and distinct part of our architecture program. Beyond providing students with effective skills that lead them towards professional registration and prepare them for global practice, we impart clever ways of thinking that grow with our students throughout their lives. The synthesis of research and design excellence cultivated by our staff and students fundamentally re-envisages what architecture is, tackling the complex challenges of contemporary life with intelligence and vision. The 2016 graduate exhibition showcases the work of students from the Master of Architecture and the Bachelor of Design in Architecture programs. The exhibition concept, in a metaphorical and in a literal sense, transforms the Tin Sheds Gallery and the Hearth into places of transition and transport with a network of highways, towers and houses that carry the work. Together with the exhibition catalogue, these works open up glimpses into the vibrant educational culture of the school: its engagement with Australian communities, its international studios, and the excellence of its students and staff, evidenced in numerous awards and prizes. The best architectural research and design challenges us to reimagine the possibilities of the future in profound ways and this is evidenced in this exhibition and publication. We thank the students for their unwavering dedication and enormous achievements. We also thank our colleagues, our tutors, our practice and industry partners for playing a vital part in helping us to forge new directions in the architectural education of the next generation of aspiring architects. It is with immense pleasure and delight that we launch this review of the year’s work and we wish our graduates the best of luck in their future endeavours. And as we send them off, we also invite them back – as future tutors, critics and research students – we are and always will be your Alma Mater.

SANDRA LÖSCHKE

This capacity to transport visionary ideas into mainstream culture allows us to make a fundamental difference to architecture and the built environment. And this is why we are recognised as one of the most inspiring and inventive architecture programs in the world. The “tradition to break with tradition” lies at the heart of our architectural culture: whilst the University of Sydney is Australia’s first and oldest university, it was founded with the aim to be a modern and progressive institution. Built on the belief that great research translates into great teaching, it has been a true Alma Mater, literally a “nourishing mother,” to generations

of students who have shared our knowledge, expertise and approaches.

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Architecture, much like all cultural endeavours, evolves in peculiar ways. And as English publisher and art dealer Karsten Schubert points out, “what seems chaotic and directionless tends with hindsight to appear logical and extremely focused.”1 This observation applies particularly to the activities of our students. The works that emanate from architecture schools predominantly constitute a field of special interest for educators and students. Much of it only surfaces sporadically in reviews, on university websites, and occasionally in student prizes or awards. Focused on ideas that challenge rather than affirm the accepted standards of the architectural profession, student projects can fascinate and provide fresh perspectives but at the same time, may seem unrealistic and inconsequential, particularly when seen in isolation.

Karsten Schubert, The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day (London: Ridinghouse, 2009), 143. 1

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Final Presentation Noah Shirley ’A Cultural Lobotomy’

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Exhibiting Architecture The Architecture of Exhibitions Sandra Löschke

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Semester 1 2016 Students: Paolo Apostolides Ying Chen Stephanie Lok Yee Chiu Matthew Sean Gardner Qian Liu Danna Rasyad Priyatna Julien Sauca Mohammed Imran Uddin Suk Min Yoon Yi Fan Zhang

The room should be a kind of display stage [Schaukastenbühne] on which the images appear as actors in a drama (or a comedy). It should not imitate a room for living. Nothing should not be built upon colour, but upon the properties of the material – then the colour of the images, the paintings will roar (or sing) without restraint.1

In the late 1920s, architect and artist El Lissitzky set out to work on a series of experimental exhibition environments that he called demonstration rooms. These were not to be conventional spaces for representation and display, as he pointed out, but experimental spaces: they prompted the visitor to engage with the exhibition intellectually, by offering stimulating aesthetic experiences, and physically, by challenging them to participate in the organisation of the space. The activation of the visitors transformed the exhibition into something akin to a laboratory, where experiments were conducted not only with the displays but also with the viewers. Notably, Lissitzky selected cutting-edge materials such as Nirosta steel but also conventional materials such as timber, which he deployed in unconventional ways. The concept of demonstration (from the Latin demonstrare: ‘to point out’) links two vital aspects of Lissitzky’s project: The first is associated with the realm of art, and the second in the realm of science – namely, exhibition and experiment. Both are demonstrations – they show us something, teach us a lesson. Yet the means by which these pedagogical aims are achieved were long thought to be fundamentally different: in art, insights were thought to become accessible via processes of aesthetic reception and reflection, and in science by rational proof and logic. Lissitzky’s demonstration rooms contest these distinctions – a view supported today by insights in neuroscience and the philosophy of science.2 The studio asked students to continue this line of thought by designing an architecture museum for the AIA at Tusculum that fuses the architectural typologies of the architecture laboratory and the architecture museum. This two-pronged approach is also reflected in the studio approach, which fuses material experimentation and intellectual consideration – an approach that has become known under the heading of material thinking.

SANDRA LÖSCHKE

El Lissitzky, Letter to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 8 February 1926, Getty Archive Los Angeles. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994); Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (London: Routledge, 1985); Michael Polanyi, “The Tacit Dimension,” in Knowledge in Organizations, ed. Laurence Prusak (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997), 135-46. 3 Paul Carter. Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004). 1

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Fig 1.0-1.2 Danna Rasyad Priyatna `Void Aesthetic’. Void Aesthetic is a visionary project starting from an exploration of micro element in architecture. The experimentation attempts to explore new applications of timber, pushing the material limitation to unleash its full potential. The outcome, a skin system that is able to manipulate lights and provide shelter, is juxtaposed to the voids left in a heritage building located in Sydney’s most growing suburbs. The voids, abandoned, left over spaces of existing Tusculum Building are intervened with lights and shadows produced by the skin. This creates a new spatial quality and a ground for experimentation for a new cultural hub as a main program of the

building. Fig 1.3-1.7 Paolo Apostolides and Yi Fan Zhang `Kerfed Gills’. This project pursues a “material thinking” approach that consists of the play between experimentation with the material properties of timber and the narrative of architectural exhibitions and its potential futures. Through examining how modern technology and timber such as laser-cutting and manufactured plywood, can be pushed to its limits in response to treatment methods such as cutting, bending, kerfing, moisture and heat, whereby the results are then developed into a single ceiling module capable of controlling light and volume qualities within an existing ‘shell’ of a building, such as that of a potential exhibition space for ‘an architectural museum’.

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The Architectural Drawing Foundation Ross Anderson

Semester 1 2016 UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: Julian Scott Badman Georgia Brennan James Anthony Cristallo Alice Elizabeth Cutcliffe Pamela Victoria Degabriele Lea Eva Fernandez Yiran Hu Sherrie Huang Tahnee Alisha Ironside Katherine Emily Irwin Faulks Shayne Jewell Ho Chuen Antonio Leung Nicolas Locane Martin Stanisic Logar Xaever Mand William Lachlan Marshall Thong Hoang Mau Ammar Zuhdi Bin Mohd Alayudin Jaye O’dwyer Chong Pang Adiba Mohd Abdur Rahman Pascale Sophie Pilcher Roberts Weijie Shen Jordan Silver

The Architectural Drawing Foundation project called for the design of a substantial cultural institution in Sydney dedicated to architectural drawing. It was to house an archive, reference library and education facilities that will serve the academic and professional community, but it is also to have a gallery, bookshop and café that will engage the general public. Unlike many other cities, Sydney does not have a prominent institution that is devoted to the compilation, preservation, study and exhibition of architectural drawings. The project acknowledged that there exists a necessarily enigmatic relationship between a drawing and the architecture that it intends, since it is impossible to represent a building in its full plenitude. There is necessarily a discrepancy that means a drawing can never be impartial – it always filters, selects, edits, emphasises certain aspects of reality and discards or downgrades others. A drawing might be analytical, rational and technical or it might be preparatory, coaxing, poetic or whimsical. Architecture owes much to the speculative propositions of ‘paper architects’ including Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ÉtienneLouis Boullée and Ivan Leonidov, and more recently, by architects like Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Lebbeus Woods. Although many of their propositions remain unbuilt, they have helped to expand and propel the discipline of architecture. It was intended that students interrogate, and then mobilise, various modes of architectural representation in order to develop an imaginative alliance between the architecture of the proposed Foundation and the collection that it holds and celebrates. Students were required to determine for themselves the focus and character of the collection. Whilst ultimately requiring a studied response to issues of site, context and program, the Architectural Drawing Foundation project was principally seen as an opportunity to explore deeper issues around the transactions between drawing and building.

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Chong Pang Architectural Drawing Archive

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Fig 2.1-2.3 Nicolas Locane and William Marshall `The Foundation of Architectural Knowledge’. Archives are crucial institutions, as the preservation of architectural drawings has undoubtedly furthered the architectural profession, for a drawing is a visual manifestation of knowledge. However, the concept of an archive as a repository is static, and although it preserves knowledge, it does little to advance it. The project seeks to address this disjuncture of knowledge stagnating once stored by proposing a framework that encourages both its transference and advancement through interpretation, construction and exhibition. Archived drawings are systematically studied and from them, fragments,

models and structures are built - creating opportunities for re-engagement, re-interpretation and innovation; and thus furthering architecture’s body of knowledge. The project was imagined as a series of tower propositions that house the growing collection of fragments, the tower themselves metabolising and becoming a part of their own process of construction; growing forever upwards. Fig 2.4-2.6 Jordan Silver `The Drum, The Beak & The Block’. The life of buildings cannot be limited only to drawings. Their narrative evolves in a variety of mediums and materials including sketches, paintings, models, writings and photographs. Combined, these parts of architecture mobilise a process of discovery and exploration that is known

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well to architects and less so to anyone else. By assembling the program of The Foundation in a sequence of formal spaces, each one dedicated to either the birth, life or death of buildings, their narrative may be understood. Three forms are to be assembled on site. A block, a drum and a beak house The Foundationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s three institutional identities: a submerged archive, a suspended public forum and a raised exhibition space.

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SECTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

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Speculative Urban Futures Ross Anderson

Semester 2 2016

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Students: Bronwyn Ee-Lyn Lee Sheng Li Manhwai Ly Thomas Richard Minifie Rio Murase Alia Nehme Peter Quang Nguyen Mitchell Robert Page Hae Woo Park Diego Elias Quinones Xiaoyi Shen Ana Trifunovska Sook Yan Wong Jia Yu

The Speculative Urban Futures project called for the design of a cultural institution in Sydney dedicated to the generation, discussion and dissemination of speculative urban and architectural propositions for the contemporary city. It was to host studios and workshops, an archive, reference library and education facilities that will serve the academic and professional community. It was also to have a gallery, bookshop and café that will engage the general public. Speculation on ideal cities and the conditions of their inhabitation have attended human culture since ancient times. From Plato’s ancient Greek Republic, through St. Augustine’s City of God in the Middle ages up to Le Corbusier’s radiant Modernist City of Tomorrow, radical utopic visions have undoubtedly served to both criticise the inadequacy of current conditions and inspire an often beatific future. They are, however, known for the ‘bigness’ of their vision, and tend to seek to account for all people in the same way – silencing the conflict that is necessary for a genuinely rich civic life. There is necessarily a tension between the messiness of the lived city that is impossible to apprehend in its fullness and its symbolic fulfilment in a comprehensive, and usually tidier, better self. Although speculative utopic visions remain unbuilt, they have a heuristic value. The Speculative Urban Futures project, sited on a sliver of a site that opens on to the newly constituted Ultimo Pedestrian Network (Goods Line), sought to harness the imaginative verve of utopian thinking and to couple it with concrete concerns for, and engagements with, the contemporary city.

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Fig 3.0-3.3 Alia Nehme `The Dream Factory’. Sited on a sliver of left over space, is a building where dreams are made, the world is reimagined and the parameters of reality disappear. The Dream Factory is a film studio in which architectural visions for speculative urban futures are realised through film. The proposal is experienced through an articulated light bridge that reveals the narrative of the Dream Factory’s five distinct pavilions, seasonal green rooms, animated facades, surreal staircases, perceptively impossible cantilevers and dramatic level changes. The studio allows a rare window into the world of film production by visually engaging the public, while strategically offering moments to pause, reflect and appreciate the architecture of dreams. Fig 3.4-3.5 Peter Nguyen `Terra Libera’. Terra Libera is a micronation within Sydney dedicated to the absolute pursuit of freedom for the

individual. It is envisioned as a utopian system of governance manifested in an architecture that is simultaneously symbolic and infrastructural in nature. Terra Libera positions itself as a non-interventionist state, rejecting authority and regulations which tend to stifle the flourishing of free society. Inspired by the autonomy and industrial aesthetic of German WW2 submarines, the project presents a vision for the first stage towards a free society, providing the necessary institutions for a future nation. These include border control, thorium nuclear reactor, high court, national library and stock exchange. As more funds are raised from investment activities, adjacent sites would be purchased to allow for the expansion of the nation, eventually engulfing the city.

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Rough Poetry and Foregrounding the Cultural Artefact Nicholas Elias

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Semester 2 2016 Students: Amina Atteya David Owen Brading Hannah May Devine Jet Geaghan Alexzandra Issa Jamileh Jahangiri Alexandra Ellen Harrington Yamin Mo Daniel Boesen Nolan Gajan Punnia-Moorthy Noah Roy Shirley Scott Terry Miljun Celeste Wong Ling Zhai

The project ‘Rough Poetry’ presents the opportunity to engage in the discourse of value from both an architectural, educational and socio-political position. Within the present political climate, value is often critiqued through a financial lens, with lesser thought given to the social, cultural and educational artefact of both the built form and the historical programmatic underlay. In this context Rough Poetry calls for a re-conceptualisation of the Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) from its existing and currently debated Rozelle location into the highly contestable Sirius building and larger site in The Rocks. Both the Sirius development and the SCA share parallels as being considered in the current political climate as non-essential, unviable infrastructure. In the case of the SCA this was manifested in the proposed merger with the University of NSW. Whereas the Sirius development has always had a troubled history, the NSW Government at the present time has not listed the building on the State Heritage Register meaning a full demolition and new development on the site could be one of its options. Ultimately Rough Poetry, invites students to reconsider the sterile, visual and ‘pro beauty’ casino model museum to attract overseas visitors and instead seeks to re-foreground cultural and educational infrastructure in the city. In this sense Rough Poetry has the potential to be a dynamic and fundamentally humanistic space and place where art and architecture will have the opportunity to benefit from their respective future challenges.

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Fig 4.0-4.2 Alexandra Harrington`Consciousness and Memory’. The Sirius development is burnt into the consciousness of Sydneysiders. If, as in the words of Alison and Peter Smithson, the city is a ‘historical section, a narrative of urban evolution,’ we must not underestimate the concrete form that architecture gives to society and its urban dynamic. Today Sirius stands as a monument to brutalism, humanist architecture, and its potential to promote wellbeing. This project aims to expand the existing Sirius site while enhancing its value through the inclusion of the Sydney College of the Arts and a new public plain that facilitates continued social and cultural interaction.

Fig 4.3-4.6 Noah Shirley`A Cultural Lobotomy’. A Cultural Lobotomy engaged with the architectural, educational and socio-political climate of the infamous Sirius Apartment building in The Rocks and the forced exodus of the Sydney College of the Arts from its current location in Rozelle. Solace has been found from the mounting capitalist pressures that face both communities - physically below and within the existing structure of Sirius, out of sight and out of mind to the bourgeois society that surrounds the school. Unencumbered by civic responsibilities, both building and art school can survive and thrive, developing as a free form organism that sustains Sydney’s forgotten cultural necessities.

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Nexus Studio Catherine Donnelley

Semester 2 2016

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Students: Yufeng Gao Stephanie Gotis-Graham Jonathan Kim Nektaria Anastasia Kounavis Timothy Qi Nan Li Daniel James Terry Jianzhang James Wang Yuqing Wei Chuyue Yan Tingyu Yang Hanlin Zhu

Catalytic Cultural Hubs celebrates the Ferguson Legacy. Nexus Studios conjoins catalytic culture, architectural activism and visionaries, in an opportunity to celebrate a deep expression of unity through diversity in the built environment. Explorations carefully examine the vision and legacy of eminent indigenous historic figure William Ferguson. Outcomes are contextualised, in the real time activation of a nationally significant social movement surrounding his re-discovery, marked in a fusion of architecture, art and landscape. Architecture, indeed a social art, is utilised as an enabling and demonstrative tool. Through a visceral response to community engagement, the students have developed a rigorous ethical position of inclusion to fully empower their implementation of honed skill. This is reflected and manifest in a myriad of building typologies and outcomes. The architectural propositions intend to ‘perform’ as both iconic symbol and active ripple. Situated in Wiradjuri country, Church St, Dubbo, regional NSW, this studio navigates the polarities of our role as architects, by grounding in real temporal, social and physical contexts for cultural sustainability. The proposals test the contributions architects make in society, while developing social consciousness, through design integrity. Responsive briefs, formed through ‘deep listening’ in community engagement, reflect considerations of individual embodied experiences and personal resonance, as extensions to public practice. Historical truths, connection to country and community, have been seminal in forming interpretive positions on contemporary culture. Inspired proposals have been developed, facilitating prospects of ‘lived’ cultural expression as visions of hope for a collective future. The ‘self designed programs’ for these Catalytic Cultural Hubs are derivative of voiced and realised inherent community hopes. Students have revised more conventional programs, adapted and realigned to engineer diverse and unique visions of architectural propositions and generative landscapes.

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While simultaneously honoring Australian history and respecting Ferguson’s legacy, this studio is acting as provocation for real conversations regarding Australian identity.

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Fig 5.0-5.2 Hanlin Zhu `Dubbo Dancing Workshop’. To celebrate aboriginal culture and William Ferguson’s achievement, the embodied experience of the site and community engagement has resonated with a visceral echo through this proposal. Inspired by aboriginal dance, this project subtly translates the artistic language to an architectural language. At first, the Dubbo Dancing Workshop articulates a dynamic rhythm, sensitively addressing the metaphors of body movements of aboriginal dance. Movable walls strive to respond to the uncertainty of function through the variability of space, and bring the backstage life to the front. In addition, the landscape strategy recalls the spirit of dance through a

series of nodes of social engagements along the Church Street in Dubbo. Fig 5.3-5.5 Jonathan Kim`Nexus Project’. The Nexus Project seeks to recognise a misunderstood and silenced culture through honest engagement with community and the built environment. Explorations involve careful examination of an indigenous historic figure, William Ferguson, who had a vision to unify Australia through equal rights. The site is located along Church street in Dubbo, NSW. The proposal involves a rejuvenation of the central pond in Victoria Park and the construction of a Youth Centre facing Macquarie River. The central pond, once utilised by Aboriginal mobs for survival, is revitalised into a memorial that resembles the cupping of

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hands when drinking water. This personal engagement invites the public to a felt experience of the past. In remembrance of Aboriginal history, hope towards a future rises in the construction of a Youth Centre. The building facilitates rock climbing as an activity to engage the youth and reflects the aspirations Ferguson had in climbing towards hope in a time of adversary.

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Sydney Square David Burdon

Semester 2 2016

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: Ali Basim Abass Arif Imran Bin Isman Mary Trisha Gomes Dongdong Ju Ioannis Karmaniolos Matilda Wilhelmina Leake Dong Ho Lee Victor Xian-Hao Li Zhai Ling Stephanie Marian Boulden Longmore-Dodd Glenn Mcintosh Mehmet Ali Semerci Mei Lian Wan Hong Yin Matthew Yun

The project, Sydney Square, focuses on the urban possibilities that lie at the heart of great cities. The project calls for an investigation into the growth and development of a central part of the city focused on Town Hall and St Andrew’s Cathedral, and the long-called for establishment of a public square in this area. By coming to a thorough understanding of a place, its history and context, a series of individual programs will develop. As early as 1812, Governor Macquarie proposed a “Great Square” with a noble church in the centre, and on 1 September 1819 he laid the first stone of the new cathedral.1 Almost two-hundred years later, Sydney still awaits Macquarie’s square, and the opportunities afforded by the new light rail in George Street give pause to reconsider the merits of such a scheme in a city where the Council estimates that congestion is estimated to cost Sydney residents and businesses $7.8 billion annually by 2020 if nothing is done.2 Core to this project will be the integration of transport links, both the existing underground railway and the proposed light rail. Connected with this, a building of a public nature is to be delivered within the vicinity that speaks both to its location and beyond through the sharing of knowledge. As Ken Woolley has observed, “in old cities the market place, the cathedral, the town hall and the rulers’ palace were the sites of major civic spaces. The interaction between them forms the fundamental communication structure of the city.”3 This project affords Sydney the opportunity to communicate not just with itself, but beyond.

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Morton Herman, The Early Australian Architects and Their Work, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1954), p.70. Bridget Carter, “Vision splendid for Sydney civic square and boulevard” The Australian, April 12, 2012. Ken Woolley, ibid, p.95.

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Fig 6.0-6.3 Dong Ho Lee `Town Hall Public Library’. The Town Hall Public Library design proposal acts as an extension of the future-pedestrianised George Street, and endeavours to improve the experiential quality of Town Hall and its surrounds by introducing an internal public space to the surrounding cityscape. The library plays a vital role as the ‘public room’, in its unique position as one of the few free-of-charge interior public spaces. Located directly opposite to Town Hall, the library stands as an open and permeable building that seeks connection with the ensemble of Sydney’s finest heritage items in order to create a new civic heart of Sydney. Careful consideration was placed towards the surrounding heritage fabric, and

the building height was restricted in order to reinforce the symbol of the Town Hall clock as a beacon for the city. Rather than simply a repository of books, the library focuses on not just providing knowledge through its written media but through the most fundamental form of learning: social interaction. Fig 6.4-6.6 Matilda Leake `Town Hall Square 2016’. “Town Hall Square 2016” is a project that looks to create a large scale square for wider Sydney through the integration of the existing Town Hall Station with the proposed Metro alignment along Pitt Street using a distinct and singular architectural expression. This scheme aims to establish a clear architectural identity for a multi-transit interchange with in the heart

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of Sydney. Borrowing form the iconic image of Sydney Town Hall and St Andrews Cathedral and re-enforcing the visual datum along George Street, the architecture both frames its context and establishes a locating icon for the station. Through utilising the heavy transit corridors currently existing across the site, the architectural program purposes to add multiple function to the currently wholly transit urban environment in the area.

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The Event Horizon Thomas Stromberg

Semester 2 2016

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: Sam Oliver De Jongh Georgia Flint Danielle Frances Fonseca Georgia Forbes-Smith Georgina Kreutzer Jia Li Rui Li Wanyi Liu Kit Kevin Ngan Camilla Louise D’apice Phillips Yifei Wang Yuqing Wei Yixuan Wu Guoliang Zhen

The Event Horizon project seeks to explicate the relationship between our ontological framework and the human compulsion for star gazing by proposing a Museum of Space and Time. While, pragmatically, the brief is a hybrid museum, observatory and planetarium, the overarching conceptual objective is to use the brief as a catalyst to formulate a critical architectural response to the seemingly ubiquitous celestial search for knowledge and understanding. Some of the most powerful architectural gestures in history accommodate the compulsion to gaze at the stars. But in stark contrast to the static and absolute values traditionally ascribed to the universe – religiously, philosophically and scientifically – our current model of the universe is significantly more complex and dynamic, particularly since Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1915). This presents a challenge to architects who can no longer rely on static platonic solids and simplistic imagery to convey the complexity of space-time. Thus the question is: given the exponential accumulation of scientific data on the composition and structure of the universe as well as the growing intricacies of this knowledge, how can contemporary architecture reflect the current ontological framework in science and facilitate a broader dissemination and appreciation of that framework? As the site is located overlooking the sea, a core thematic element of the program and the site is the conflation of physical and metaphorical horizons; that of time, that of our mind, that of the sea and that of outer space. As such, the thematic focus is on the nexus between astronomy and ontology, as a link between the furthest edges of space and the enquiring mind. The conflation of horizons engenders a study of thresholds and interstitial spaces to physically anchor the thematic aspects directly to the site and integrate them into the project. Consequently, students are expected to maintain a strong thematic and analytical link between context, site and program.

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Fig 7.0-7.3 Georgia Flint `Traversing the Edge’. By measuring and mapping various physical ‘markings’ on South Head such as the daily tides, the moon’s path, the cliff’s stratification and localised shipwrecks, this project aims to connect significant earthly elements to a place and time in order to reveal the impact in human memory. The geological identity of the cliffs represent an ancient timeline in stark contrast to the daily tidal rhythms that can be observed by the eye. This very comparison of scale transforms the dramatic cliff edge of South Head into a monument to time – symbolising the interface between present and past, between the fleeting now and the enormity of geological time. The two shipwrecks, the SS Royal Shepherd and

the Dunbar, located near the cliffs, stand as a humanising link between each of the two time scales. They embody events that have occurred before any person alive today experienced but is also close enough for us to see their remains. They are used as beacons on the site, preserved to allow visitors to encounter its gradual decay. The museum acts as a structure dedicated to time, sitting on the ‘edge’, it signifies the starting point of a journey through time. Fig 7.4-7.7 Georgia Forbes-Smith `Architecture of Measure’. This museum has no entrance or exit, reception or brochure. It is a sequence of excavations across Watsons Bay and exhibits a series of architectural instruments confined within the void containers of the grid. The programs of

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the museum allow a measure of time at different scales: celestial, terrestrial and human. The architecture becomes an instrument of observation; a means to experience time through events. The crematorium as a square is a measure of the absolute human scale of time. The planetarium as a sphere is a measure of invisible events of the universe - those events which have passed or are theorised to happen. The museum proposes an understanding of the immensity of the universe through the observation of a collection of events.

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STUDENT INDEX

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE

MARC 5001

Student Index

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Semester 1

Semester 2

Sandra Löschke Paolo Apostolides Ying Chen Stephanie Lok Yee Chiu Matthew Sean Gardner Qian Liu Danna Rasyad Priyatna Julien Sauca Mohammed Imran Uddin Suk Min Yoon Yi Fan Zhang

Ross Anderson Bronwyn Ee-Lyn Lee Sheng Li Manhwai Ly Thomas Richard Minifie Rio Murase Alia Nehme Peter Quang Nguyen Mitchell Robert Page Hae Woo Park Diego Elias Quinones Xiaoyi Shen Ana Trifunovska Sook Yan Wong Jia Yu

Ross Anderson Julian Scott Badman Georgia Brennan James Anthony Cristallo Alice Elizabeth Cutcliffe Pamela Victoria Degabriele Lea Eva Fernandez Yiran Hu Sherrie Huang Tahnee Alisha Ironside Katherine Emily Irwin Faulks Shayne Jewell Ho Chuen Antonio Leung Nicolas Locane Martin Stanisic Logar Xaever Mand William Lachlan Marshall Thong Hoang Mau Ammar Zuhdi Bin Mohd Alayudin Jaye O’dwyer Chong Pang Adiba Mohd Abdur Rahman Pascale Sophie Pilcher Roberts Weijie Shen Jordan Silver

Nicholas Elias Amina Atteya David Owen Brading Hannah May Devine Jet Geaghan Alexzandra Issa Jamileh Jahangiri Alexandra Ellen Harrington Yamin Mo Daniel Boesen Nolan Gajan Punnia-Moorthy Noah Roy Shirley Scott Terry Miljun Celeste Wong Ling Zhai Catherine Donnelley Yufeng Gao Stephanie Gotis-Graham Jonathan Kim Nektaria Anastasia Kounavis Timothy Qi Nan Li Daniel James Terry Jianzhang James Wang Yuqing Wei Chuyue Yan Tingyu Yang Hanlin Zhu

STUDENT INDEX

Thomas Stromberg Sam Oliver De Jongh Georgia Flint Danielle Frances Fonseca Georgia Forbes-Smith Jia Li Rui Li Wanyi Liu Kit Kevin Ngan Camilla Louise Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;apice Phillips Yifei Wang Yuqing Wei Yixuan Wu Guoliang Zhen

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

David Burdon Ali Basim Abass Arif Imran Bin Isman Mary Trisha Gomes Dongdong Ju Ioannis Karmaniolos Matilda Wilhelmina Leake Dong Ho Lee Victor Xian-Hao Li Zhai Ling Stephanie Marian Boulden Longmore-Dodd Glenn Mcintosh Mehmet Ali Semerci Mei Lian Wan Hong Yin Matthew Yun

Independent project Sascha Jack Solar-Marsh Harry Plato Catterns Venice Biennale Elective Giselle Marie-Claire Moore Alice Leida Middleton Rin Lynn Masuda Benjamin Jay Shand

B AC H E LO R O F D E S I G N IN ARCHITECTURE

Site Model Ben Dixon, Adam Madigan, Candace Ju

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P R O T O C O M P U TAT I O N A L THINKING: HACKING UTZON Catherine Lassen Rizal Muslimin

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Tutors: Ross Anderson Francois Blanciak Tia Chim Rachel Couper Ivana Kuzmanovska Catherine Lassen Jennifer McMaster & Sean Akahane-Bryen Raffaello Rosselli Thomas Stromberg

Between the digital and the physical, students’ close studies of Utzon’s architecture provided an opportunity for computational design thinking from first principles. Design discipline evident throughout his work spans numerous scales, extending for example, from broad organisational decisions to detailed prefabrication ambitions. Conceived as parametric, thoughts that inform geometry can be seen as connected to larger attitudes towards the program and structure, including performance requirements such as acoustics or light control. Beyond the building, this extends to a response incorporating urban or landscape conditions. His methodological process, framed as internally coherent or rule governed, offered a context via parametric design tools from which to imagine an external performance space. Behind the Mint facing Hospital Road, the project further accommodated a small associated gallery and archives. Students’ material and programmatic speculations proposed connections between the dense city grid of Macquarie Street and relative urban void of the Domain, as well as opportunities to investigate an architecture addressing the Domain landscape and the Art Gallery of NSW. Proposals were encouraged to suggest or represent contained content in experimental ways. Particular attention was paid to the conventions of architectural representation to doubly generate as well as conceptually clarify design possibilities. Through the iterative re-drawing and re-making of what one ‘sees’ and ‘reads’ students were asked to isolate particular components or strategies, leading to abstracted yet precise depictions of studied architectural and urban conditions. Structural, technical and material thinking was encouraged in alignment with students’ design priorities and with a studied historical and cultural awareness. Part and whole were seen as continuously interrelated. Depth of design development was promoted via a dual emphasis: early analysis of exemplary architectural (proto computational) thinking coupled with intensive, projective exploration. Digital modeling and strategic clarification via a schema offered extended tools for establishing an internally coherent framework in addition to imaginative testing of multiple output variations and unforeseen modes of physical production. Parametric schemas promoted explicit representation to communicate intuitive-driven designs and toward realised intentions. Speculative architectural thought conceived in parallel with multiple modes of making helped frame intelligible, inventive, doubly digital and material propositions.

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ROSS ANDERSON

James Feng A Cloud of Synchronous Encounters

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Fig 1.1-1.3 Chensitian Wang `Flexible Space’. Normally outdoor performance is to build up a stage and after performance, the stage is going to be demolished. This project we should design a permanent space for temporary performance and what I considered most is what should it be when there is no performance. So I decided to design a flexible space (achieving by movable walls), so that when there is no performance, it can be a entertainment or relaxing place for citizens. e.g. Street artists can perform here, like an art market; people can have coffee here and it also can be a outdoor gallery. Fig 1.4-1.6 Alexandria Galbraith `Void Perception’. A dynamic space of variable densities was developed in response to an

understanding of the manner in which architecture and spatial conditions can influence our inhabitation of spaces. Individuals’ inherent desire to occupy space or move through it can be rhythmically inferred through architectural form, and in this case, is prompted through dense circulation routes, opening up to moments of pause and inhabitation. The variable density of the built therefore form generates a dynamic spatial perception and allows visual porosity through building at specific vantage points, whilst obscuring a view through at other moments within the building.

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Fig 1.7-1.10 Sophie Lanigan `The House of Apollo and Dionysus’. Neitzche’s 1872 essay The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music explores the conflict between Dionysian intoxication and Apollonian restraint. Oskar Schlemmer explored this notion in a three dimensional way in the Triadic Ballet which represents the most romantic notion in the most austere form. The circle and square, representing intoxication and restraint respectively are geometrically married through the project as a manifestation of the idea that universal truths become evident through the subordination of the human body to abstract geometry. In doing away with the proscenium arch the utopic space of the performance is blurred with the dystopic space of the audience - fusing the audience with the action on stage. Fig 1.11-1.14 Adam Vandepeer `Adagio (u da zhe-o)’. A succession of slow, soft, lyrical and continuous movements.

Adagio creates the illusion that the positions flow from one into another. Adopting a Constructivist approach, a unique elongated spatial typology is formed running along a central axis stretching from Macquarie St to the proposed Ballet performance space in the Domain. The scattered composition of pure geometries, although appearing fragmented and disconnected, achieves an overall sense of balance, harmony and ‘Universal Proportionality’. This is a result of a systematic arrangement and parametric rule adapted from the canonical rubric of classical principles. A sensual journey of cognitive and sensory experience is created and echoes the rhythmic beauty and methodology of Ballet. Voids break the journey creating spaces of serenity and calmness ultimately leading to its climax of a grand central dome performance space.

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Fig 1.15-1.17 Yinong Lin`The Playgroundâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. This project is creating an extension of the Domain, providing a stage for life itself, a playground where people sit, talk, walk their dog, celebrate holidays and have a moment of relaxation, which are the most genuine exhibition of culture. Hospital Road is altered into the space in order to create inevitable encounter and engagement with passers. Building form is reduced to the minimal. Circulations and view frames are defined implicitly with limited intervention to set up a platform for daily drama and unexpected confrontation. The playground is a hyper-reality, where everyone is audience and everyone is a performer.

Fig 1.18-1.21 Emily Louie`Warp & Weftâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Warp and Weft: constructing a hybrid fabric that seamlessly connects the City to the Domain. Warp: A diagrid lattice extending from the city. Weft: plants embroidered through the warp. Focusing on the idea of public architecture as fluid, inclusive and permeable, water imagery has been employed to generate the design. The roof is an array of waves that drip into columns, creating ripples in the softly sloped ground plane. The ripples create an interlude of meandering paths and varied social circles. Passerbys are enticed to retreat from the fast-paced world of the city as they wander through a grove of steel lattice columns and animate glass galleries.

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Fig 1.22-1.24 David Gan `Theatre of Progress’. Envisaging the creation of a new theatrical space to accommodate Milk Crate Theatre, this performance space aims to denigrate social stigmas and societal attitudes towards homelessness and how it is perceived. Using the framework of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, this venue materialises Image, Forum and Legislative Theatre as three acts of one continuous and didactic play, encouraging active rather than the typical passive participation. Breaking down barriers through the blurring of performance and reality, these powerful experiences conducted within the processional architecture serve to awaken the realities of homelessness and inspire actionable change.

Fig 1.25-1.28 Adam Madigan `Fields’. Fields manifests the desire to design an architecture that produces an environment, a set of conditions. Rather than enforcing context, it allows context to emerge. It removes the idea of architecture as object. Fields proposes a topography. The distinction between inside and outside is ambiguous. Delineation is created through distance, levels, and turns. A continuous undulating structure forms a traversable landscape. Like a festival, various performances rotate and share a common space of staged ground. The spectacle of life occurs simultaneously. Angled rectilinear frames form windows of connection: performance is both combined and separated.

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Fig 1.29-1.31 Adrian Thai `The City Rings’. Pen and paper record the memories and places of those who wander, pertaining to the fixation with the visual in our world. But when was the last time a place was remembered for its acoustic qualities? Our obsession with sight has led us to create alluring places for our eyes but seldom are these spaces enriching for our ears. The City Rings investigates architecture as an apparatus for establishing and documenting a unique and profound cinematic soundscape. Notes form layers upon layers on top of each other, the serene rustling of Moreton Bay fig trees becomes an eerie hypnotism, the blaring of ferry horns emerge as a tidal wave, the booming of a summer afternoon thunderstorm turns cataclysmic. The cacophonous performance of the city reminds us to keep

our ears open, in a visually dominant world, where sound is all too easily forgotten. Fig 1.32-1.34 Matthew Aylmer `Domain Forum’. The project explores notions of the in-between in the mediation between traditional and forum theatre as participants move through the space and transition from audience to ‘spectactors’. This process begins with the excavated sandstone amphitheatre acting as an inverse podium and drawing participants away from the surrounding urban context. Inside, the steel towers articulate an abstraction of the city yet their framed structure suggests impermanence and transition. The space for forum theatre is a blank box, lit only by the sky, skewed from the gridlines of the rest of the building and detached completely from traditional architectural notions of the theatre.

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Fig 1.35-1.37 Timothy Huang `The De-constructed Theatreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Against the intactness of the city, inhabitants live out existences they have been cast into. Its completeness reduces the awareness of its construct. The theatre, deconstructed, presents itself as an apparatus that demystifies the wholeness of performance space. Performance results from the differences of time, action and movement. Through the annunciation of difference by stillness, movement, subtraction, addition, circular and linear, the unsettling nature of the space between can start to allow audiences to be made aware of its constructs and allow them to ponder if they reside as a performer or as the performance.

Fig 1.38-1.40 Ben Dixon `Osmosisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Osmosis explores the permeability of traditionally solid architectural elements to the media of light and sound. By day large walls and a plaza receive shifting patterns of sunlight and transmit it to interior spaces by means of optical fibres cast into the concrete. At night performances of video art are projection mapped onto the same surfaces. This light flows through the concrete, forming abstract patterns inside the building and in the constructed cavern beneath the plaza. The same cavern is calculated to act as an acoustic reverberation chamber coupled via a shaft to the plaza, allowing its unusual acoustic properties to support musical and sound performances in both spaces.

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Fig 1.41-1.43 Kira Ollmann `Here Means Nothing’. Of being a part of something, without feeling overwhelmed: such was the ethos that drove the design project. In generating a truly public performance space the intended performer is not the ballerina nor the actor, but nature itself. The design endeavours to mediate between both the urban and the natural, the land and the sky; with controlled views outwards and upwards defining the spaces through their astronomical and topographical relationships. To wonder and marvel at the sky is to be human, and to generate a space for this is at the core of the project: a space devoid of societal distinctions, united in the human condition - searching for our place amongst the stars. Fig 1.44 James Feng `A Cloud of Synchronous Encounters’. The cloud

is an ambitious investigation into rethinking the existing performance spatial typologies by computational means. The transitional threshold of the given site between the density of the CBD and the vast openness of The Domain is heightened by the ‘structural cloud’. The scheme proposes a ‘found form’ capable of possessing paradoxical qualities of chaos and synchronicity; of mass and non-mass; of individual and the collective; static yet ethereal – familiar qualities of public performance experiences. By focusing on and critically engaging with the concept, the project is able to methodically deconstruct these immaterial qualities and re-materialise them within the site to blur boundaries between performer and audience, between structure and space, between intent and discovery.

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UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

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Fig 1.45-1.46 Laura Payne ‘Performance Landscape’. The construction of a grid and overlay of circulation lead to a design that relinquishes its grid like origins and generates a new landscape. Movement was explored to generate a carving force that could organise and divide programs without the need for walls, columns and other separating devices. Here curtains replace walls, to visually separate and create curiosity, levels indicate paths of movement and areas of rest. The performance landscape lives and breathes through voids in its shell-like roof, light, wind and the sound of the city and park alike enter through these openings, revealing infinite expressions in time. Movement up and over the roof leads to an extension of the domain parkland, a little hill resting between city and park. In this setting where nature, art

and architecture come together joy, reflection and meditation take place. Fig 1.47-1.50 Praveena Sivalingam ‘Terrain d’Interprétation’. A desire to infiltrate the Domain with intimate performance spaces was balanced with the need to address the pre-existing conditions and uses of the public site. The meandering pathways that cut and weave through the domain and simultaneously connect and re-distribute the masses initiates this design. An undulating landscape forms the conditions that simulate spaces for congregating, wandering and resting. Modest hills and valleys contest the gridded landscape of the city that is represented by the delicate built forms that puncture the otherwise seamless transposition of space.

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Fig 1.51-1.55 Paul Counsell `Meander in Formation’. The design fixates attention around findings from Utzon’s architecture as a built representation of the workings of Nature. The principles of additive, efficient architecture as inspired by nature clearly define a juxtaposition between the solid, undulating, plain below, and the temporal and permeable canopy or structure above. Using a brick as a module it becomes the expedient by which complex geometric elements are formed, creating the plain as a series of variable elements. This allows each space to be experienced through one’s ability to meander and rhythmically react to the changing architecture above and below.

Fig 1.56-1.59 Janelle Woo `Open City’. “Open city” is an exercise in architecture for the rehabilitation and reaffirmation of open, democratic, and freely expressive public space. The project is a formulated response, a joyfully-directed revolt, to the present decline in not only truly public space – or ‘open’ space, as defined by Kevin Lynch – but also in the richness and diversity of the sociocultural and artistic fabric of Sydney today. “Open city” is to be the collection point and amplifier for the incidental interactions of the city sidewalk; the busker, the speaker, the dancer. It is the open-ended microcosm of the city that is completed and constantly remade by the interventions and expressions of the people that inhabit it.

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Fig 1.60-1.61 Alvin Hui `The Mode Foundazione’. The basis of the design was to transform the quiet and concealed setting of the site to create a theatrical stage for fashion shows. Emphasising the existing circulation surrounding The Mint, the stage invites people from Macquarie Street to become part of the performance. The focus of the performance is in the ‘turn’ of the model – a highly dramatic display of attitude and beauty. With the focus set on this moment, the seating rises above Hospital Road, revealing a breathtaking moment for passing vehicles and pedestrians below. Fig 1.62-1.64 Max Jeffreys `Playspace’. I work at a primary school, focusing on children who are behind, who have difficulties or who do not have

a normal home life. The role of empowerment in these children is vital, finding something that they enjoy and are good at is key to getting them on track or attempt other tasks. This empowerment can massively change the way a child thinks about learning and how they treat people around them. Finding a space for this can be hard especially if the child is reluctant to begin things after previously failing at other tasks and not having the self-belief to see the task through. This project looks into how a building and a performance space could be the answer to this empowerment, a place that eases children into learning and provides them a space to grow.

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Fig 1.65 Xavier Junhua Lian `On Acting - Mirror and Smoke, Lost and Found’. Both labyrinth and theatre, a play on acting and viewing. I read Joan Didion and she wrote: “When Colombians spoke about the past I often had the sense of being in a place where history tended to sink, even as it happened, into the traceless solitude of autosuggestion. The princess was drinking pink champagne. High in the mountains the men were made of Gold. Spain sent its highest aristocracy to South America. They were all stories a child might invent.” And I invented this. Stories are yours. Fig 1.66-1.67 Courtney Raad `Fragment, Narrative: Stills of a Filmic City’. “Architecture is only a movie” – Anthony Vidler. This movie is composed

of several scenes: multiple stages, performances, audiences; a nexus of narratives that flow into one another in the city of flux. It begins with scenes of the city, projected onto and reflected by building openings; the often ignored fluid façade that flattens and fractures movement between concrete and steel. This architecture, this movie, reflects the city’s own logic, assembling overlapping episodes as audience members traverse multiple platforms. The viewers gaze across at a performance, down to a gallery or up to the city-projection, piecing together transient stills to construct their own fragmented narrative – and they, too, become actors on the stage.

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STUDENT INDEX

BACHELOR OF DESIGN IN ARCHITECTURE

BDES 3027

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Ross Anderson Michael Brewster Kwan Yee Charis Chan Clare Louise Dieckmann Alexandra Elizabeth Galbraith Joshua Thomas Grasso Grace Anne Grew Chakib Lawand Yilun Shen Benjamin Tang George Prentice Target Chensitian Wang Nicholas Woolley Shengyuan Yang Yihao Zhou Franรงois Blanciak Jackson Paul Birrell William Fraser Mckinnon Clarke Joseph Frank Emmi Sachiko Ishibashi Zhuoran Jia Mohammad Ali Kanbar Sophie Lanigan Annemarie Mcelveney Safiah Nafisah Binte Shari Wenxi Shi Adam William Vandepeer Anna Walsh Darren Weinman Henry Wong Liying Yang Yiran Zhou

Tia Chim Nick Gunn Lu Han Anne-Marie Sadek Hanna Angelo Jonathan Joseph Jun Ming Kong Tianzhou Liang Yinong Lin Emily Louie Sonia Millway Andrew Perich Daniel Mark Reid Graham Sutch Yuqing Diana Wang Sabrina Zambetti Xinyi Zheng

Student Index

Rachel Couper William Cairns Yingjia Chen Annabelle Kate Cruikshank Kanchana Devandran Wenhao Ding David Jacob Gan Helen Ho Candace Hann Shyuan Ju Wen Xin Li Jacqueline Junlynn Liang Karen Jiaying Lin Jiamei Liu Isobel Lord Adam Madigan Rachael Nicole Proksch Adrian Thai Nicole Zee Ivana Kuzmanovska Matthew Aylmer Bonnie Chang Danielle Candice Chaumeil Benjamin David Dixon Eleanor Gibson Dominique Patricia Heraud Ronnie Long Yin Ho Xuan Timothy Huang Rawail Khan Geun Mo Kim Hannah Lilian Jane Paduch Zaskia Tatjana Simmons Thomas Soccio Daniel Stojanovski Aimee Marie Stuart Jennifer Tran Catherine Lassen Rand Al-saeekh James Wen Yu Zhou Feng Emma Harrington Anida Kucevic Juliette Francesca Elaine Maurer Kira Celine Ollmann Elizabeth Relf En Joey Shi Praveena Selvakumar Sivalingam Michelle Stark Kate Wraight

STUDENT INDEX

Thomas Stromberg James Frederick Boden Sinta Cahyadi Xiaoyin Cai Shuyan Chen Nathan Andrew Evans Yerong Huang Courtney Jackson Maxwell Jefferys Ru Jia Junhua Lian Andrea Michael Courtney Raad Chi Leung Sun Xiaohui Wang Man Yang Ziyan Zhang Yicheng Todd Zhou

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Jennifer McMaster & Sean Akahane-Bryen Vivian Chan Paul Geoffrey Counsell Jessica Edejer Gabrielle Rachel Lawrie Elisabeth Lester Anson Li Yiming Lu Mustapha Malas Moris Odisho Laura Suzanne Payne Lynda Tran Marko Vujica Guillermo Wright Gastelum Ricky Zihan Ye Gyu Hyong Yi Tongxing Zhang Raffaello Rosselli Duong Minh Au Joshua Davo Camporedondo Min Sang Heo Alvin Hui Ravyna Rohit Jassani Gunjit Kaur Alice Mccosker Feliccia Mendes Monteiro Carter John Nelson Alexander Prichard Yuzhong Shi Meng Shi Janelle Woo Luxi Zhang Liangqing Zhang

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Camilla Phillips Sweden, 2015

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15TH BIENNALE OF ARCHITECTURE VENICE

Convenor: Professor Michael Tawa UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: David Brading David Cadena Santiago Catanzano Jet Gaeghan Alexandra Harrington Harriet Kensell Matilda Leake Rin Lynn Masuda Tye McBride Alice Middleton Lewis Miles Giselle Moore Benjamin Jay Shand Ana Subotic Johanna Wang Logistics: Victoria Jackson Wyatt Zoe Skinner Marketing: Michaela Dunworth Design Modeling & Fabrication Lab: Dylan WozniakO’Connor Majella Beck Rob Cohen

Zoon Politikon: The Political Animal Faculty of Architecture Design and Planning, University of Sydney Architecture Lab, Auckland University of Technology

Zoon Politikon comprises a series of architectural models of a speculative nature that take their bearings from the last lectures given by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, prior to his death in 2004. These lectures, The Beast and the Sovereign, concern a definition of the human as that being which borders both animality and the divine and, equally, as a being whose understanding of right or law curiously excludes both animals and gods. Our concerns are more essentially with the legacies of that sovereign exclusion in the field of architecture, bio-political legacies and implications of the construal of a humanist grounding of architecture precisely at a time of unprecedented global turmoil with respect to human settlement, ecological disaster, massive escalation in refugee populations, mass migrations and de-settlements. Our response to time, space, existence was therefore to call into question the anthropocentric legacies installed into the essential grounding of architecture as production that privileges the human as rational animal. Each model became an investigation into making processes expressing considerations and research into architecture and the political dimensions of the human, within four key tropes or epochal shifts in tectonic and technical capabilities of the political animal: Plato’s Cave – the hollow, The Primitive Hut – the outline, A Machine for Living In – assemblage and Virtual Worlds – networks. Models were developed in parallel design studios in Auckland and Sydney during January through to April 2016. A separate publication for each model offers critical engagement with the philosophical, tectonic and material contexts of investigations and propositions; and an app provides detailed background interviews with the young designers involved in the exhibition as well as further understandings of the scope and critical concerns of the project: http://www.zoonpolitikonapp.com. In his short essay “In Praise of Profanation,” the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, emphasizes how the same thing, or object, is able to pass from the sacred to the profane and from the profane to the sacred, from the divine realm to the human, or human to the divine, constituting in material things, living animals and fabricated objects, a threshold between the human and the divine. What links for us the four tectonic conditions of constructions, dwelling and their hybrids to concerns with materials and processes is precisely a concern with how we understand the notion of profanation, especially in the context of the enigmatic final sentence of Agamben’s text: “The profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation.”

Our investigations encountered a crucial problematic between representational and non-representational practices. The aim was not to `translate’ theoretical, political or ethical conditions into the configurations and materialities of three-dimensional form, but rather to enable spatial and material practices to emerge in parallel; to deploy a techne of propositional modeling that would constitute a means of research in its own right. Consequently, a persistent challenge was to maintain a mode of attentiveness to the formulation of ideas through making that had no prospective, teleological or formal ends – a process that Agamben refers to as a `means without ends.’ This also engaged another key motif for Agamben, the notions of potentiality, preservation and restraint that produce

H E Z L E T B E Q U E S T T R AV E L L I N G S C H O L A R S H I P

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Taxonomy: Rain Rin Lynn Masuda

H E Z L E T B E Q U E S T T R AV E L L I N G S C H O L A R S H I P

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Code: Emergence Matilda Leake

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a salvational condition in every act of creation. Directing our vigilance to the informational rather than formal – the presentational rather than representational – state of the models demanded attentiveness to the distinctive temporality applying in each case. In some instances, the durational aspect became explicit through mobility and interactive engagement; in others temporality was subsumed, in a Bergsonian/Deleuzian sense, by considering the work as a cross-section of duration; a momentary, temporarily arrested state, in which multiple timeframes and narratives were overlaid to produce dense, ambiguous textures of sense.

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Our concern was to work into the spatialities and materialities of the models, exploring how, on the one hand, space, geometry and volume, and on the other, substances, grain and timbre could be laboured so as to take them beyond normative limiting conditions of geometry, form and matter. Several trajectories, tied to the thematics of the project, directed these investigations. In particular, we were concerned with contesting the hegemonic, received rule of law – the sovereignty and verisimilitude of form over matter. Each model thereby presents a moment of crisis, catastrophe or profanation – whether in the breakdown of a sovereign regulatory system, the dematerialisation of an architectonic monumentalism, the ruination of a substance or the excessive proliferation of simulacrae that exceed the restraining force of sovereign power. The tripartite opposition that initiated the project – divinity, humanity, animality – is here brought into a phase of indiscernibility; into a state of exception wherein god and beast appear as so many indeterminable alterations and iterations of the one human world-forming impulse founded on exclusion and control.

Cosmetic Eventuation Johanna Wang 71

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DESA 3552

B AT I K U R B A N I S M Rizal Muslimin

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: Karen Lin Jia-Mei Liu Sonia Millway Adrian Thai Luxi Zhang

Batik Urbanism showcases an analysis of different modes of spatial and sensorial interaction in the Javanese urban milieu as a visual narrative. Students focused on the cultural hub of Yogyakarta, a city renowned for its historical, social and political significance. The term â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; was broadly conceived as the way citizens understand and represent their relationship with modern, traditional and environmental heritage. Supported by the Sydney Southeast Asia Center and the New Colombo Plan, students worked in interdisciplinary teams from across the University of Sydney together with students teams from the local university (Universitas Gajah Mada) to complete a collaborative project on this topic while in-country. The resulting narrative reinterprets and represents the local culture, using various mediation strategies to understand as well as confront the discrepancies between being-there and knowing-it. The aim was to weigh up personal experience and theoretical knowledge. Students produced numerous captivating visual narratives: a layering method of drafting techniques and images highlights one studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intriguing moments from the field, signifying the city elements through an ornamentation lens (Fig.1 Karen Lin). In one narrative, instead of appreciating the use of common materials such as concrete, bricks or timber, a student presented coffee beans, tire-rubbers, and sugar to evoke the experience of the coffee stalls (angkringan) that line the streets of Yogyakarta, thus creating a batik of material, sensorial and cultural experiences. In another narrative, a student reinterpreted the evolution of the basic geometries underlying the batik ornaments typical for this region and remade the batik iteratively with different materials, reflecting on the interrelations between cultural transformation and historic continuity.

C U L T U R A L I M P E R A T I V E S I N C E N T R A L J AVA

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Lost and Found Karen Lin

INTENSIVE WINTER STUDIO

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ARCH 9085

Broken Hill Michael Tawa (Architecture) Melanie Feeney (RARE) Cameron Logan (Heritage and Conservation)

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: Paolo Apostolides Benjamin Chen Paul Counsell James Ellis Eleanor Gibson Dominique Heraud Chakib Lawand Clare Leedman Andrew Perich Xiaoyi Shen Nathan Souriyavong Pearl Tan Nicole Thompson Jennifer Wang Miranda Wu

Between 2012 and 2015, collaborative studios were set up between Architecture, Heritage and Conservation, Business and Engineering at the University of Sydney; the Broken Hill University Department of Rural Health; the Broken Hill City Council; the Murdi Paaki Regional Council and the Broken Hill Department of Aboriginal Affairs to investigate innovative business and architectural propositions in the city and region. Over the years, students developed masterplans for the Broken Hill Film Studio site; designs for an Educational Rural Learning Campus; redevelopment plans for the iconic Palace Hotel; design propositions for a new town square and archive in Broken Hill, a food security project in Wilcannia and business plans that articulate and capitalise on an integrated approach to Australia’s only heritage-listed city and the region’s distinctive indigenous and non-indigenous heritage. In 2016, joint student teams from Business, Urban design and Urbanism, Urban and Regional Planning, Heritage and Conservation and Architecture worked on three projects in collaboration with the Broken Hill YMCA and three indigenous client groups: the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, the Broken Hill Local Aboriginal Land Council (BHLALC) and the Mutawintji Local Aboriginal Land Council (MLALC). Students worked together to frame these projects; to develop operational, business and marketing plans, as well as strategies for entrepreneurship and capacity building, and conservation of cultural, environmental and built heritage. Schematic designs were proposed within local and regional planning frameworks, and in response to cultural, community and environmental needs of the three client groups. The three projects were a new YMCA facility in Broken Hill City; a new administrative centre for the BHLALC on a town site in Broken Hill – incorporating offices for government and non-government agencies, teaching/training areas and a local Aboriginal museum/art gallery, cafe and shop and a new cultural centre at Mutawintji National Park – incorporating an arts and crafts shop, cafe, catering facilities, office accommodation and training areas for hospitality and tourism. These are real world projects, answering current needs, and providing students with the opportunity to work with indigenous communities on country, to learn about indigenous culture and cultural competence. The research that students carried out, together with the strategic/design propositions they made, will likely inform future development in the region and contribute to the ongoing service and engaged learning enterprise that the faculty is committed to. The project was supported by the Remote and Rural Enterprise Program (RARE) at the Business School, and the Wingara Mura Bunga Barrubugu Local Implementation Plan through the DVC Indigenous at the University of Sydney.

INTENSIVE WINTER STUDIO

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

TU MUNICH WORKSHOP

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MARC 5001

Second International GermanAustralian Architecture Wo r k s h o p : R e t h i n k i n g T i m b e r Sandra Löschke

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: Paolo Apostolides Stephanie Chiu Ying Chen Matthew Gardner Qian Liu Danna Raysad Priyatna Julien Sauca Yi Fan Zhang Mohammed Imran Uddin Suk M. Yoon Zoe Blanchot Moritz Rieker Victoria Blum Lukas Kaufmann Maximiliam Peter Max Hahner

During the past two years, the architecture departments of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Sydney have co-led an annual workshop that brings together twenty Master of Architecture students and three supervisors. The project is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and brings together two national leaders in architectural research and education (both the University of Sydney and the Technical University of Munich are ranked No.1 in the subject-specific QS world-ranking in their respective countries). The event is part of an ongoing initiative by the University of Sydney’s architecture faculty to advance the internationalisation of its curriculum and enhance the nexus between teaching and research. The three-week workshop familiariased Australian students with the technologicallyinformed design approaches of German universities, and in turn, introduced the German visitors to the research-based approaches to architectural design cultivated at the University of Sydney. The formation of German-Australian student teams provided valuable insights into a different cultures and taught students to work in international teams – a valuable experience that prepares them for international architectural practice.

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Nicolas Locane and William Marshall The Foundation of Architectural Knowledge

ARCHITECTURE AND/OR INFRASTRUCTURE

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A r c h i t e c t u r e a n d /o r Infrastructure François Blanciak

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

The recent trend of infrastructural studies in architecture schools brings into question the very distinction between building and infrastructure. In an attempt to map differences between these two notions, a number of criteria, such as size, location and a specific relation to time can be considered in order to better grasp their respective and evolving meaning. Because one relates to the rational and the pragmatic, and the other is associated with the artistic and the whimsical, the distinction between these two fields of intervention entails the dichotomy between the domain of architect and that of the engineer. This current trend recalls conundrums which have haunted the profession since the end of World War II.

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Common wisdom leads us to think that infrastructure exceeds by far the size of buildings. This is not necessarily true. Some buildings, such as schools in Australia, in fact qualify, according to local nomenclature, as infrastructure. The inner functioning of buildings, with its networks of corridors and spaces of flows, has also been likened to the organisation of roads within the greater landscape, leading to a design methodology characteristic of early modernism with its systematic use of the diagram as a rationalist technique for the planning of domestic spaces.1 This brings about not only the opposition between external and internal spaces, but also the opposition between internal spaces and what lies inside the planes – walls, floors, roofs, ceilings – that define these empty spaces. Reyner Banham, in his 1965 article ‘A Home is Not a House,’ asked a deceptively simple question: ‘When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse, disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters— when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?’2 Banham, enthused by Californian lifestyle, used this paradoxical observation as a means to exhort Americans to fully embrace environmentcontrol machinery and leave, together with their European heritage, the vestigial ‘stone monument’3 of the house behind. His views were illustrated in this article by François Dallegret, who proposed a prototypical transparent bubble which engulfed in its midst all the infrastructural appliances needed for a modern house to function, featuring both Dallegret and Banham as naked figures sitting in the unit. The provocation that their scheme represented raises the

now-returning question of authorship, by asking architects not to consider the growing importance of mechanical gadgetry as the end of their design agency. A similar, albeit inverted, architectural strategy can be sensed in the design of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where the intention has been to reject infrastructure to the outside so as to ‘free’ the interior of the building. The by-product of this radical gesture has been the aestheticisation of infrastructural devices into ornament, which recalls Jean Baudrillard comparing Beaubourg to a ‘vacuum-making machine.’4 Infrastructure does not necessarily precede the act of building either, and in fact is as much a result of this act as architecture. Retrofitting – building infrastructure after large buildings are built – is not uncommon in profit-driven urban form. This outer infrastructure, the most visible part thereof, can also be comprehended as an extension of the architectural realm. In his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Banham looks at the perception of the city from the point of view of the automobile driver. His fourth ecology, ‘Autopia,’ represents a further transfer of the qualities of the traditional house towards transportation infrastructure. ‘A domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles,’ he contended, ‘does not end so much at the door of one’s destination as at the off-ramp of the freeway, the mile or two of ground-level streets counts as no more than the front drive of the house.’5 In fact, he added, ‘the freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state if mind, a complete way of life.’6 This considered inclusion of the public, engineered realm within the architectural has also brought architects and city planners to speculate on their capacity to exert control over the design of infrastructure as carefully and artisticallyminded artefacts. In their ground-breaking 1964 book The View from the Road, Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer theorised the ‘Highway Experience’ for its kinaesthetic value within the city as a whole and implied that large-scale infrastructure designers should learn from architecture as a discipline concerned with aesthetics. ‘The sense of spatial sequence,’ they claimed, ‘is like that of largescale architecture; the continuity and insistent temporal flow are akin to music and the cinema. The kinaesthetic sensations are like those of the dance or the amusement park. . . These are all arts and situations from which the highway designer

ARCHITECTURE AND/OR INFRASTRUCTURE

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

FRANÃ&#x2021;OIS BLANCIAK

ARCHITECTURE AND/OR INFRASTRUCTURE

may begin to learn his technique.’7 Lynch further defined the term ‘motion awareness’ as the qualities which make sensible to the observer, through both the visual and the kinaesthetic senses, his own actual or potential motion: ‘Since a city is sensed in motion, these qualities are fundamental, and they are used to structure and even to identify. . . With increasing speed, these techniques will need further development in the modern city.’8 Lynch’s view sums up the conceptual idea that if one can perceive the city and move about it in a way that reminds of what it feels like to go around the different rooms and spaces that compose a house, then it should be designed as such.

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Is this the end or the beginning? The call for large-scale designs that encompass entire networks of transportation in a manner that recalls the aesthetic arrangements of architectural design has resurfaced. Alexander D’Hooghe, at MIT, more recently advocated the objecthood of infrastructure as a desirable and conceivable output, arguing that ‘rather than a system of transportation planning and engineering, we should read infrastructures as objects of cultural production with a spatial content not unlike that of architecture or sculpture.’9 In this process, he envisioned the possibility to grant extraordinary powers to a subjectauthor enabled to insufflate a human dimension into the design of machinic, infrastructural environments: ‘Territorial design of infrastructure should abandon its instincts towards the systematic (or the anonymous, absolute, dehumanised, totalising) and replace it with the cultural (authored, finite, crafted, subjectively positional).’10

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This yearning for the insertion of human authorship within the design of necessarily consensual territorial networks echoes the discourse of Le Corbusier and François de Pierrefeu in their 1942 publication entitled La Maison des hommes (The Home of Man).11 Coinciding with the desire to rebuild after the destructions of WWII, the authors presented in this book a series of large-scale projects corroborated by a theory that called for the redefinition of the field of intervention of the architect. They proposed the term Ordonnateur (somewhat clumsily translated as ‘Law Giver’ in the subsequent English edition),12 to describe this new actor, charged with the task to re-establish ‘demographic equilibrium between the city and the countryside, and economic equilibrium between agriculture and industrial activity.’13 For them, The Law Giver is to act as a ‘town modeller,’ able to manipulate elements – including dwellings and traffic – so as to conveniently dispose them over the entire territory of the nation, and as a ‘referee ... between geography and the activities of man.’14 This omnipotent actor was envisioned as a mix between the architect and the engineer, and the separation between the domains of intervention of these respective disciplines was rejected by de Pierrefeu and Le Corbusier. For the authors, it is only by giving away some form of rationality involved with the design of infrastructure that we can achieve a superior kind of built environment, seeing in this type of large-scale artefact a work that ‘neither the reckoner by the probity of his calculations, not the organiser by the rigours of his organisation’15 could properly handle, for reason, they thought, becomes a hindrance to creativity when it comes to

designing at such a scale. Quite at odds with Le Corbusier’s formerly advocated Esthétique de l’ingénieur, subjectivity was now to become reinserted within the most machinic aspects of man-made environment. Much suggests that the invoked aestheticisation of infrastructure comes from the designer’s eye, trained to see intentional patterns where there is often none. (What is design if not the act of projecting schemas into inert building material?) This propensity could thus be reduced to a question of perception. The distinction between architecture and infrastructure might as well now appear unnecessary to architects for the simple reason that they are increasingly inclined to expand their territories of intervention at the very moment when communication infrastructure, tightly associated with computer-assisted design software, threatens to undermine the relevance of their practice. In fact, that ‘architecture’ and ‘infrastructure’ have gradually become interchangeable words in the field of information technology serves as an indication that the operative domains of these previously segregated fields already find themselves integrated within the digital realm. Rather than ignoring this transfer of competence, architectural education can play a significant role in acknowledging the building as an interface between outer and inner infrastructural networks, as a means to reveal its bi-directional function rather than to conceal it behind the ‘stone monument’ Banham referred to. This is not as easy task. Maybe this requires less theorising infrastructure into an architectural product and more of an investment in the understanding of the specificity of infrastructure’s functioning at both large and small scales in order to increase the agency of architects in their conception and location of architecture in-between these two conditions. In 1992, Françoise Choay expressed the rather conservative view that, ‘[c]ontaminated by the logic of the networks, architecture’s status and vocation have changed. Individual buildings are increasingly conceived as autonomous technological objects, to be plugged in, grafted onto, or connected to a system of infrastructure and utterly free from the contextual bonds which used to characterise works of “architecture.”’16 Coining the term ‘cultural engineering’ to stress how the work of architects has been bypassed by external forces in this process, she observed that ‘[t] he engineer tends to replace the architect in the task of elaborating the tri-dimensionality of such objects with the help of all the resources of electronic virtualisation. . . At best,’ she added, the work of the architect ‘is reduced to a graphic or plastic activity which breaks with the practical, utilitarian purposes of architecture.’17 Rather than abiding by this reductive formula of praxis, one could conceive of a means to integrate infrastructure into architectural design that relates more to the concept of ‘Both/And’ than to that of ‘Either/ Or,’ to follow the terminological oppositions propounded by Robert Venturi in his seminal Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.18 One could thus envision a mode of practice which, at least experimentally, lets infrastructure ‘disturb’ architecture, leaving aside preconceived aesthetic intent, as a means to reach the ‘difficult whole.

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

See Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 2 Reyner Banham, “A Home is Not a House,” in Art in America 2 (1965), 70. 3 Banham, “A Home is Not a House,” 79. 4 Jean Baudrillard (Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson tr.), “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” in October 20 (1982), 3. (First published as L’effet Beaubourg: implosion et dissuasion. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1977). 5 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin, 1971), 213. 6 Banham, Los Angeles, 213. 7 Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 4. 8 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 107. 9 Alexander D’Hooghe, “The Objectification of Infrastructure: The Cultural Project of Suburban Infrastructural Design,” in Infrastructure as Architecture, ed. Katrina Stoll & Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis, 2010), 78. 10 D’Hooghe, “The Objectification of Infrastructure,” 78. 11 François de Pierrefeu & Le Corbusier, La Maison des homes (Paris: Plon, 1942). 12 See: Le Corbusier and Pierre de Pierrefeu (Clive Entwistle and Gordon Holt tr.), The Home of Man (London: The Architectural Press, 1948), 44. 13 Le Corbusier and de Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, 48. 14 Ibid. 15 Le Corbusier and de Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, 50. 16 Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 168. (First published as L’Allégorie du Patrimoine. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992). 17 Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, 168. 18 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966). 1

ARCHITECTURE AND/OR INFRASTRUCTURE

François Blanciak is a French registered architect and lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney. A graduate from the University of Tokyo, he has worked for architectural firms in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and New York, with architects including Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, before starting his own practice in 2007. Previously exhibited at the Canadian Center for Architecture and the Venice Architecture Biennale, his work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. François Blanciak is the author of SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms (MIT Press, 2008).

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PA R E N T H E T I C A L A R C H I T E C T U R A L T H E O R Y

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Parenthetical Architectural Theory Chris Smith

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

In his text of 1982, Genesis, Michel Serres notes the manners by which complexities are all too often forced into overarching theories and formulations and he asks that we “raise the brackets and parentheses, syntheses, whereby we shove multiplicities under unities”.1 The philosopher of science’s position is simple. Commonly our tendency is to classify, codify, relegate and locate things into categories, theorems and formula. The stronger the theory the more forceful the shoving. Darwinism, or what is more appropriately termed ‘the theory of natural selection’, would be an example of an ‘overarching theory’ that would be a key point of unity, in this case, for evolutionary biology. Every curve of every fern leaf, the coo of every pigeon and the flaming stripes of every tiger would be forcefully defined in the functional terms of adaptation, survival and propagation of the species. The multiplicities of life on the planet came to find themselves wedged into a powerful theoretical framework.

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The primary assertions of the ‘long argument’ of Darwin were to be corroborated in a theoretical union with the discourse of Mendelian genetics, establishing the genetic theory of selection, known as ‘the modern synthesis’. The fundamentals of Darwinian theory: that evolution is a dual process where random variation (micromutation) provides the material upon which the driving force of natural selection would push evolution, and that evolutionary change is a gradual process, are significantly substantiated by the synthesis.2 The preeminent palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, suggests that notions contrary to the discourse of gradualism are, under the authoritative self-confirmations of the modern synthesis, routinely ‘corrected’.3 Will Provine, the historian of science, describes the modern synthesis of Darwinian evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics as a ‘construction’ for the rejection of non-Darwinian theories: a tool (or weapon) to deal with competing ideas: orthogenesis, Lamarckism and mutationism.4 The schemata that emerges to articulate the synthesis in biological theory approaches the monolithic descriptors of Kuhnian normal science and the State science to which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer. Gould suggests that the synthesis progressively ‘hardened’ from the 1930s to the 50s against those theories that promoted pluralistic forms of non-adaptive trends in the evolution of species or the formation of bodies.5 According to Gould; “[r]andom forces were pushed to a periphery of absolute unimportance”.6 This ‘hardening of’ is not merely the creation of a homogenous disciplinarity but also the

creation of a homogenous body to populate that field. The complex multiplicities of the fern, the pigeon and the tiger were all shoved under one theory. The hardening that occurred in the life sciences from the 1930s to the 50s under the banner of the ‘modern synthesis’ has its architectural counterpart. Its banner would be plain and simple: ‘modernism’. The impulse was similar: the establishment of a theoretical framework under which all the pluralities of architecture might fall. Le Corbusier would be architecture’s Darwin. Formulating the logics which might subsume all architectural history and dictate its future. Corbusier reignited the Enlightenment fascination with forms of knowledge that went back to ‘first principles’ and a belief that uncovering a cause would allow a better articulation of an effect. In modernist architectural manifestoes this position is often posed as a questioning of architectural traditions and conventions. Traditional and vernacular forms of architecture were presented as belonging to realms of faulty logic. They were not necessarily presented as bad solutions per se but rather as solutions that failed to address real problems, largely because the problems themselves were not well articulated. Le Corbusier states the position in Darwinian terms in his manifesto of 1923 Toward a New Architecture: Architecture is governed by standards. Standards are a matter of logic, analysis and precise study. Standards are based on a problem which has been well stated. Architecture means plastic invention, intellectual speculation, higher mathematics. Architecture is a very noble art. Standardisation is imposed by the law of selection and is an economic and social necessity. Harmony is a state of agreement with the norms of our universe. Beauty governs all; she is a purely human creation; she is the overplus necessary only to men of the highest type.7

Le Corbusier’s text, replete with late Victorian humanisms, sexisms and fixations with the problem/solution dualism, is still a standard on the reading lists of architecture schools internationally and its version of causality is still prominent in architectural pedagogy today.8 The ‘problem-based learning’ of most architecture schools relies on the premise that in a question lies a solution, if only the diagnostic skill of the architect might uncover it. In the discourse of modernism every rational question contained a solution and every solution was functional, utilitarian. The key cause that is dealt with in modernism is function. Architects were

Michel Serres, Genesis, (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4. The compatibility of the notion of ‘variability’ within the discourse of Darwin to the concept of ‘mutation’ (principally as micromutation), within the discourse of mutationism, fostered the modern synthesis. 3 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘The hardening of the modern synthesis’, in Dimensions of Darwinism, ed. Marjorie Grene, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71 93. 4 William B. Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 5 Gould, ‘The hardening of the modern synthesis’, 71-93. 6 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘The Ontogeny of Sewall Wright and the Phylogeny of Evolution’ (Essay review of William B. Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology) Isis, vol. 9 (1988): 277. 7 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, (London: The Architectural Press, 1927), 135–138. Translation of Vers une architecture, (Paris: Les Editions G. Crès, 1923), by Frederick Etchells. 8 Le Corbusier, Toward a New Architecture, 10 and 102. For example: “Standards are a matter of logic, analysis and minute study; they are based on a problem which has been well ‘stated’” (10); “The lesson of the airplane lies in the logic which governed the enunciation of the problem and which led to the successful realisation. When a problem is properly stated, in our epoch, it inevitably finds its solution” (102). 9 Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750-1950 (Kingston: University Press, 1998), 155. 10 Bernard Tschumi, ‘Advertisements for Architecture’, in Architecture Concepts: Red is not a Color (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 45. 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 362. 12 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 473; concluding sentence of ‘7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture’. Translation of Mille plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrénie, (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980) by Brian Massumi. 1

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If we are to accept Serres’ challenge to ‘raise the brackets and parentheses, syntheses, whereby we shove multiplicities under unities’ we will need richer, more complex and nuanced theoretical tools (weapons) to do so. Architectural theory may be a training ground for the introduction of such tools. It is appropriate that we arm architecture students with tools necessary for the sabotage of dominant systems of thought and with incentives to attack any lazy reliance on singular or unified theorems. For the philosopher Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Guattari what matters is “revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations

Dr Chris L. Smith is the Associate Professor in Architectural Design and Technê in the School of Architecture at the University of Sydney. Chris’s research is concerned with the interdisciplinary nexus of philosophy, biology and architectural theory. He has published on the political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; technologies of the body; the influence of ‘the eclipse of Darwinism’ phase on contemporary architectural theory; and the medicalisation of the body. Presently Chris is concentrating upon an Australian Research Council project focussed on the architectural expression of scientific ideals in bio-medical laboratories and a soon to be published book titled Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

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It’s a difficult tension to negotiate: the complexities of instances and historical and disciplinary positioning that seek singular readings and understandings that might be referred to as fact; and the fluidity and richness of the multiplicitous understanding of complex events and occurrences that might be referred to as fabulation. They proceed in two different directions. In one, we start with a sense that there are dominant categories and classifications into which any piece of architecture will (must) fit. In the other, we start with the architecture itself. Its image, its detail, its curve, its coo and stripes. The aim is not to start here only to discover the underlying foundations of its place within the dominant system but rather to let the architecture itself open up a fresh and novel territory. Deleuze and Guattari pose the issue in Darwinian terms ‘[o]ne does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species […] but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an “event”’.11

of the axiomatic”.12 A revolutionary connection is the novel construction of that which has not traditionally been connected, or likewise, the connection of regular elements in novel manners. It might involve the exploration of one of Le Corbusier’s architectural details in connection with Virginia Woolf’s sense of the self as a swarm; or the experimentation with the Tyger verses of William Blake in confluence with an image of Villa Savoye from the grassy hill below. Such connections are transformative. It is not about containing or subsuming a concrete example into a pre-given theoretical system (conjugation) but rather about the liberations involved in exploration and experimentation. Real transformation in a given field requires the recombination of elements in mutually supportive and productive ways. By this logic, architectural, social or political assemblages are truly revolutionary only when they involve assemblages of connection rather than conjugation. The key values of architectural theory are the promotion of connection over conjugation; of particularity over generalisation; of problematisation over axiomatic formations; of experimentation over interpretation. A softening and fluidity rather than a hardening. Such values work toward liberating multiplicities from unities. It is perhaps a parenthetical point.

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to appropriate from the sociologist, anthropologist and biologist Herbert Spencer the catch-cry that ‘form follows function’9 and indeed all possible causes were to ‘follow’ function – fall behind its logic, fall under its weight. It remains hard for a student of architecture to operate otherwise – outside this guiding principle of the discipline, often framed innocently under the question posed ad nauseum in every design critique: ‘What does it do?’ All justifications become functional justifications and even stripes on a wall have to be defended in terms of function. If our first engagements with design pedagogy tend toward a single logic of functionalism, our first impulse in exploring extant architecture can also tend toward the acts of shoving multiplicities under unities: locating the building in its moment of historical emergence, its pinpointed geographic context, its fixed place in stylistic transformations and assigning definitive authorship. These are the demarcations about which architectural historians are particularly pious. The rich complexity and particularity of a piece of architecture, an urban setting or an architectural detail is ‘shoved’ into broader and less specific dominant coordinates. Below an image of Le Corbusier’s once decaying Villa Savoye, in one of Bernard Tschumi’s Advertisements, the provocateur was to suggest ‘[a]rchitecture only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it. Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it’.10 This may, indeed be the role of architectural theory.

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E S S AY

Adventures in Flatland: Drawing and the Architectural Imagination Ross Anderson

“… I see no Solid, but a Plane such as we infer in Flatland; only of an Irregularity which betokens some monstrous criminal, so that the very sight of it is painful to my eyes.”1

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Adventures in Flatland is a musing on the status of drawing in the contemporary architectural imagination. It is animated by Edwin A. Abbot’s curious and captivating 1884 novel Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions. The narrator of the novel, a proud square who inhabits Flatland, is feeling superior because he has one more dimension than the inhabitants of Lineland, but he has his worldview unsettled by an emissary sphere from Spaceland who brings the gospel of the third dimension. The captivating story tenders both digestible lessons in Euclidean geometry and provokes analogical thought on the imaginative act that fantasises rich spatiality into an architectural drawing that exists solely as gathering of drafted lines on a flat page (fig. 1). Drawing, as such, was the topic of the Architectural Drawing Archive project offered as one of this year’s Master of Architecture graduation studios at the University of Sydney. The studio called for the design of a substantial cultural institution in Sydney dedicated to the storage, study and celebration of architectural drawings. Recognising that there is necessarily an enigmatic relationship between an architectural drawing and the building that it might

conjure into existence, the studio invited collusion between the architectural program and the means of its gestation, development and final representation. An architectural drawing might be analytical, rational and technical or it might be preparatory, coaxing, poetic or whimsical. It can never be impartial – always filtering, selecting, editing, and emphasising certain aspects of reality and discarding or downgrading others. Students were prompted to challenge the apparently selfevident primacy of the orthographic trio of plan, section and elevation. As Robin Evans wrote in an essay entitled ‘Seeing Through Paper’ ‘few things have had greater historical significance for architecture than the introduction of consistent, coherent parallel projection into architectural drawing, and few things have been more transparent to critical attention than its effects.’2 This continues to be true in the digital age. Plans, sections and elevations are the stock set of drawings demanded both from students and practicing architects. One of the implications of the obligation to emphatically accord these drawings to each other on the drawing board or computer screen is the privileging of the right angle. Evans noted that ‘five minutes at a drawing board will convince anyone unfamiliar with the technique that this is the way things have to be set out. The instruments

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Fig. 1 (1) A cube as it appears to the inhabitants of Spaceland. (2) A cube as it appears to the inhabitants of Flatland. Abbott, Flatland, 101.

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Fig. 2 Alberti’s perspective construction (1436), drawn by the author.

done using lines and parallel sides, that never meet at any perspectival converging point.”6 The primacy of the eye, this time of the observer or architect, is similarly crucial to the success of one point perspective, which Alberti decisively codified in his 1436 text On Painting (fig. 2).7 Once the rules had been understood it didn’t take long to stretch and tease them to their extreme. Perspective was deployed at the edge of recognisability in the drawings of anamorphosis – a term that would loosely translate as ‘forming back again’. In Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous 1533 painting The Ambassadors a strange diagonal smear across the bottom part of the painting appears to deface the otherwise rationally accomplished work. It proves however to be deceptive. The smear reconfigures itself as a skull viewed front-on when the painting is viewed at a sharply glancing angle. In her project for an Architectural Drawing Archive Chong Pang imaginatively revived and redeployed anamorphosis within architecture (fig. 3). Her project appears as an odd collection of fragmentary building parts

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at your disposal will lead you to produce frontal pictures of the several sides of boxes as soon as you have gained the slightest idea of what you are doing. It is easiest to align the principal surfaces of an object with the surfaces on which it is drawn.’3 And Le Corbusier wrote in his 1953 Poem to the Right Angle, “the right angle, is as it were, the sum of the forces which keep the world in equilibrium. There is only one right angle; but there is an infinitude of other angles. The right angle, therefore, has superior rights over other angles… The right angle is lawful, it is part of our determinism, it is obligatory.”4 However there is actually nothing ‘natural’ at all about orthographic drawings. To succeed at all they require cultivation of the perceptual caprice of parallel projection. In 1595 Bonaiuto Lorini wrote that, conceptually, it is a matter of “drawing lines to infinity so that they fall perpendicular and remain parallel.” And shortly afterwards Pietro Accolti wrote in his Deception of the Eyes: Practical Perspective that “speculating, we understand that the Sun can not ever see the shadow side of objects … So we may say that this kind of drawing, being a representation of the Sun’s eye, can be

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Fig. 3 Chong (Bella) Pang, Architectural Drawing Archive, Plan Drawing (left) and Perspective Drawing (right) (2016).

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Fig. 4 Jordan Silver, Architectural Drawing Archive, Worm’s Eye Axonometric (2016).

strewn across the landscape of Sydney’s Domain when read in plan, or in fact in just about any other way. However, the fragments recompose themselves into a perfect circle when viewed from the privileged viewpoint of the panoptical eye of the archive that observes them from the other side of the road.

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Another mode of architectural drawing relies on aspects of both orthographic projection and perspective. Oblique parallel projection derives dimensional accuracy from the former and spatiality from the later. Now generically termed axonometric drawing, in its nascence oblique parallel projection was variously termed cavalier, military, or soldierly perspective. It is not difficult to see why it was esteemed as a mode of representation in military situations – because it is precise, reliable and measurable. Since there is no convergence of lines towards a vanishing point, as in proper perspective, accurate dimensions can be read off the x, y, and z axes. One is never closer or further away from one part of the drawing than another. This is of course hugely beneficial when, for example, calculating how long it would take for a battalion to deploy from one side of a fortress to engage an enemy on the other side. Writing at the end of the 16th century Diego Gonzales de Medina Barba underscored the existential importance of drawing accurately, asserting that “the imperfection of a line could lead to the loss of an army.”8 Oblique parallel projection was further developed in engineering-scientific vocations and seems to have first been properly described by William Farish in his 1822 essay in Cambridge Philosophical Transactions entitled On Isometrical Perspective. The essay was accompanied by an illustration of an ‘optimal grinding machine’. The French

architectural historian Auguste Choisy first marshalled the representational potential of oblique parallel projection in architecture proper. In a masterful suite of plates that were made to illustrate his 1873 book The Roman Art of Building, Choisy, who by the way had trained as an engineer, set out to both describe the monumental ruins of Ancient Rome and provide an architectural lesson in masonry construction.9 Recognising that the accomplishment of masonry buildings is often most evident in the vaulting, and wanting to simultaneously describe the disposition of the ground plan, he devised a distinctive kind of drawing that came to be referred to as ‘worm’s eye’ axonometric. For a long time this kind of drawing scarcely registered in mainstream architectural representation, but the British architect James Stirling came to deploy it with both rigour and imagination from the 1960s.10 In his ‘up axonometric’ drawing for the Bookshop in the Biennale Gardens in Venice from 1991 the viewer is invited to appreciate the involved profile of the timber-clad steel structure of the roof that also takes in circumnavigating clerestory windows that illuminate the low shelves of books in the small pavilion. In a text accompanying a 1974 RIBA publication of a collection of his drawings Stirling himself wrote that “what is left on the image is the minimum required to convey the maximum information with the greatest clarity - related to how we ‘understand’ the building as distinct from the way it might in reality look.”11 And Reyner Banham wrote in the introduction to the publication that Stirling’s “axonometric drawings relate to the kind of expository mechanical cut-away drawings of complex machinery to which Stirling and the rest of our generation were heavily exposed during the Second World War.”12 Jordan Silver’s final drawing for his Architectural Drawing Archive was stirred by

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Daniel Libeskind exploited the floating and inherently aloof quality of oblique parallel projection in his singularly inventive suite of Micromegas drawings that were exhibited at the Architectural Association in 1979. It isn’t at all clear whether these frantically replete drawings are to be considered

proto- or post-architectural. Profoundly disrupting the homogenous space of parallel projection, the franticly replete drawings that have titles like Little Universe comprise almost-rooms of spatial stability that are violated by gangs of lines that are both self-assertive and indeterminate. The eye of the viewer roves incessantly for a stable viewpoint from which to apprehend the composition. It is futile since the profuse and jostling fragments don’t refer to a whole. In a short text accompanying the exhibition Libeskind wrote, “an architectural drawing is as much a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges. In any case, a drawing is more than the shadow of an object, more than a pile of lines, more than a resignation to the inertia of convention.”13 As Evans noted in reference to Libeskind’s drawings in a 1984 essay entitled ‘In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind’, ‘in the uncompleted there is always possibility. In an event cut off from its origins there is promise.’14 Tom Minifie’s Institute for Speculative Urban Futures project was animated by Libeskind’s drawings. Much as the architect himself continues to do, Minifie traced the lines of some of the drawings, seeking to unleash their general latent potential within the limits of a particular architectural project. As gashes, they came to govern the location of apertures in the roof, issuing light down onto the minimal ground plane below.

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the tradition of the ‘worm’s eye’ axonometric of Choisy via the ‘up axonometric’ Stirling (fig. 4). Subtitled ‘the drum, the beak and the block’ his building is a measured composition of a mostly subterranean cube that holds the archive proper, an elevated triangular pavilion for exhibitions and a central cylindrical volume that holds a perfect orb shaped auditorium. Perched like Sputnik on a lanky tripod, the sphere is the heart of the composition. The three distinct and assertive forms of the drum, the beak and the block engage each other in a kind of architectonic conversation. The radial geometry of the drum meets the rectilinear geometry of the block and comes to an accommodation via a curving run of stairs, and the sharp exhibition wedge is held at arm’s length from the drum by cylindrical tubes that permit egress. The drawing adopts the paradigmatic 45/45 degree angle of axonometric projection. Each of the three forms is judiciously sectioned in a different plane to the others. It partakes equally in the technical precision of Farish’s ‘optimal grinding machine’ and the generous description of architectural form cultivated by Stirling.

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Fig. 5 Georgia Forbes-Smith, A Room for Play, Composite Drawing (2016).

A DV E N T U R E S I N F L AT L A N D Fig. 6 Hannah Anderson (aged 5), Easter Egg Hunt at Nan and Pa’s House, Composite Drawing (2016).

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The Barcelona architect Enric Miralles cultivated composite drawings that were as vital as those of Libeskind, but that were spawned by a different motivation. The drawings sought to embody in a single composition the entire architectonic aspiration for a prospective building. In an essay entitled ‘Place’, Miralles wrote “on these planes there is no concern to represent … it is a task of multiplying a single intuition; of seeing it appear in all its possible forms … of aligning acrobatically, like a game, all the rays of lines that go in a direction … of keeping all the aspects of one’s project on paper.”15 They are composed of the array of orthographic drawings that we are familiar with, but they are disposed all at once, at all scales and without hierarchy of location or line. The individual plan, section and elevation drawings seem to have blown off the page and been raked back together without concern for orientation or adjacencies.16 This is of course only at first sight. In reality each drawing has been very carefully considered. They are at once descriptive and evocative. Georgia Forbes-Smith adopted Miralles’ mode of drawing to develop her Room for Play project that was designed in response to an open brief for a Room for a Conversation (fig. 5). The square ground plan is divided into five narrow horizontal strips, each of which is endowed with its own distinctive architectural character. The composite mode of drawing permitted simultaneous consideration of the interior and exterior elevations, sections, and site plan that were made to more or less pin wheel around the plan that centres the configuration.

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From a drawing for a project for children, we can turn to a drawing by a child to discuss an intuitive mode of drawing that might be provisionally termed situational, or narrative. It deploys in a single work the battery of drawings that have been discussed, but it is blissfully free from convention, and is aesthetically uninhibited (fig. 6). The scene is a suburban house viewed from an elevated position over the backyard. Launching from the top left of the page, the narrative takes a counter-clockwise sweep. The excited journey starts at the front door of the double-storey timber-clad house. Unfortunately, this front door is, as it were, on the dark side of the moon, facing away from the picture plane. Undeterred, the drawing unfolds the front façade of the house and hinges it on the right edge of the rear elevation, in the manner of the 18th century unfolded drawings that Robin Evans described in his The Developed Surface essay from 1989.17

Having coursed through the house, the journey erupts into the back garden as a treasure hunt. A lightly curving dashed line leads to an X that marks the spot. Six proud eggs are gathered up. Then a butterfly is disturbed, long grass that gets stuck between the toes is navigated and more eggs are found–nestled into the branches of a small potted tree. The pot is drawn in plan, and it’s topping the tree in elevation. From there, the mission proceeds to the narrow paved side path that skirts the house, leading back to the front garden. It is drawn in perspective, whilst the resolute and flowering hedge that demarcates the neighbouring garden is arrayed as a flattened elevation that is rotated through 90 degrees in order to fringe the path. In all, the instinctual drawing embodies some of the unschooled qualities that Libeskind sought to recuperate in his Micromegas and Chamberworks drawings: I am interested in the profound relation which exists between the intuition of geometric structure as it manifests itself in a pre-objective sphere of experience and the possibility of formalisation which tries to overtake it in the objective realm.18

Definitions of the vocation of architectural drawing tend to veer between Paul Klee’s “taking a line on a stroll, for its own sake, without a particular destination”19 and the calculated precision of the instruction manual drawings that influenced Stirling’s generation. The point of view, quite literally, is the crux of the matter. The eye of the distant sun of orthographic projection sees the outline of everything perfectly, but has never seen a shadow. Alberti’s eye that is coincident with the ‘prince of rays’ always travels parallel to the ground, while Choisy’s axonometric worm’s eye looks up from beneath it. The continuing enigma of architectural drawing is the way that each kind of projection represents some aspects of reality, but never all of it. Our troubled square from the land of Two Dimensions was eventually able to infer the existence of a third dimension under instruction from the messenger sphere from Spaceland (fig. 7). By moving up through the horizontal plane that constitutes the entire world of Flatland, and demonstrating that his cross-section diminished as he did so, the sphere proved that he had a third dimension–that of height. Like an architect hovering over a line drawing the square came to be haunted by the desire to invoke up and down, in addition to north and south:

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Fig. 7 (1) A sphere appears as a circle to the inhabitants of Flatland. Its circumference expands or contracts depending on its elevation. Abbott, Flatland, 88.

Ross Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in architectural design, history and theory at the University of Sydney. He completed his PhD under the supervision of Peter Carl at the University of Cambridge with a thesis entitled From the Bauhütte to the Bauhaus. Oriented by phenomenology and hermeneutics, his research on German architecture and philosophy has been published in The Art Bulletin and The Journal of Architecture, and in edited volumes and conference proceedings. He is also engaged in creative practices that explore the imaginative roles played by drawing and photography in architectural representation and reception.

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Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London: Seeley, 1884), 101. 2 Robin Evans, “Seeing Through Paper” in The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), 108. 3 Ibid., 118. 4 Le Corbusier, Poem to the Right Angle [Le Poème De L’angle Droit, 1953] trans. André Otto (Osterfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012). 5 Bonaiuto Lorini, Delle fortificazioni (Venice: Rampazzetto, 1595), 32–34. Cited in Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 9. 6 Pietro Accolti, Lo inganno degl’occhi: prospettiva pratica [Deception of the Eyes: Practical Perspective] (Florence: P. Cecconcelli, 1625), 143. Cited in Scolari, Oblique Drawing, 13. 7 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting [Della pittura, 1436] trans. and ed. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956). 8 Diego Gonzales de Medina Barba, Examen de fortification hecho por Don Diego Gonzales de Medina Barba, natural de Burgos (Madrid: Varez de Castro, 1599), 5. Cited in Scolari, Oblique Drawing, 6. 9 Auguste Choisy, L’ Art De Bâtir Chez Les Romains [The Roman Art of Building] (Paris: Ducher et C.ie, 1873). 10 For a representative range of these ‘up axonometric’ drawings see James Stirling Michael Wilford, and Associates, Buildings & Projects 1975-1992 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994); and also the suite of drawings in “The Architecture of James Stirling 1964-1992,” OASE 79 (2009): 17–30. 11 Stirling, RIBA Drawings Collection (London: RIBA Publications, 1974), 16. 12 Reyner Banham, RIBA Drawings, introduction. 13 Daniel Libeskind, “Micromegas, 1979” in Countersign (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 14. 14 Evans, “In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind” AA Files 6 (May 1984), 89–96. Reproduced in K. Michael Hays, ed. Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 489. 15 Enric Miralles, “Place” in El Croquis 30+49, 50 Miralles/Pinós (1999), 28. 16 See for example the composite drawing by Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue for their House at La Clota, Barcelona, Spain, 1997. It is published as a double page spread in UME 11 (2000), 32–33. The drawing is deconstructed and then recomposed into a conventional suite of individual plans, sections and elevations in the pages that follow the original drawing in that publication. 17 Evans, “The Developed Surface” in Translations From Drawing to Building and Other Essays, AA Documents (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 195–231. 18 Libeskind, “Micromegas, 1979”, 14. 19 Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch [Pedagogical Sketchbook] (Munich: Langen, 1925), 6. 20 Abbott, Flatland, 117–118. 1

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“‘Upward, not Northward,’ haunts me like a soul-devouring sphinx. It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existence; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None.”20

HONOURS

Tracing End Space Matthew Asimakis and Liat Busqila

HONOURS UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

H A R R Y C AT T E R N S A N D S A S C H A S O L A R - M A R S H Sydney Studio

“The most radical building that I know of is a small building. I don’t think anything competes with a small building as being the most radical statement of all. There’s less to build. It covers less of the earths surface. There’s less to heat, less to cool, less to clean, less to furnish, less to pay back to the bank... It radically alters people’s lives when they build small.” Paul Pholeros

The aim of this studio was to develop a prototype for a small-scale, sustainable, low-cost residential building aimed at increasing density within the framework of Sydney’s existing housing stock. Our ambition was to explore ways in which architects can assume greater social and ethical agency in the design and construction process and sought to deliver real-world, practical design outcomes that are both ethical and economically plausible.

HONOURS

Over recent decades we have seen the proliferation of architecture that expresses the signature style of a celebrity architect or ‘Starchitect’. No longer bound by a defining architectural movement, a limited group of practitioners – dominated by those shown in 1988 in the exhibition titled Deconstruction – has exercised control over the profession with an unshackled individualism, placing emphasis on the image of both their architecture and themselves. Neoliberalism, the politics and economics of the Reagan/Thatcher era in the 1980’s, created the environment for this spectaclebased architecture to flourish in two key areas. Firstly, the financialisation of Western economies provided accessible streams of capital and sites for post industrial redevelopment, resulting in a market where property development was a key source of economic growth. Secondly, policies of decentralisation and privatisation led to the erosion of society’s reliance on institutions, resulting in an increasingly image based consumer society where individualism was encouraged. Daniel Libeskind, a member of the original Deconstruction

group, is an architect whose career exemplifies the influence that Neoliberalism has had on architectural production. Beginning a career in architecture with theoretical explorations through drawing, Libeskind’s practice has shifted since the success of his Jewish Museum Berlin. Libeskind has progressively developed a formal architectural signature, along with a celebrity architect persona, now internationally sought to provide projects with a spectacle of uniqueness while concurrently maximising profit for clientele who increasingly are represented by corporate finance. In the late 1980s architecture associated with Postmodernism was considered the exemplary architectural expression of Reaganism and Neoliberalism. However with historical distance and the events of the past twenty years, we are now able to reconsider this claim. This Honours report presents the Deconstruction exhibition of 1988, and the resultant emergence of Starchitects, represented by the work of Daniel Libeskind, as more accurately revealing the intersection of architecture and the Neoliberal reality.

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J A M E S C R I S TA L L O The Architecture of Neoliberalism: Market Speculation, Iconic Production and the Brand of Daniel Libeskind

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W I L L I A M L AC H L A N M A R S H A L L Memory and the Mundane: The Indelible Print of Former Pizza Hut Architecture

Memory and the Mundane focuses on the architecture of former Pizza Hut restaurants, and their connection to memory. Recently interest has been generated by these former Pizza Huts and their propensity to still be recognised in spite of the new functions that inhabit them. The paper proposes that the architecture of these fast food restaurants has come to occupy a unique place in the personal and collective memories of many. It sets out to unearth the factors that have provoked both the existence of this phenomena and the uniquely indelible thumbprint these ‘banal’ pieces of architecture have left on our collective subconscious.

With reference to philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin and his contemporary Siegfried Kracucer, it establishes a link between memory and the architecture of these former Pizza Hut restaurants. By studying the narrative of its emergence, it then aims to isolate the factor, or factors, that differentiate Pizza Hut’s form from a landscape of fast food restaurants and signs also vying for attention. Through this complex intertwining of design, time and memory is revealed.

HONOURS UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

M AT T H E W A S I M A K I S A N D L I AT B U S Q I L A Tracing End Space

This thesis operates as a study of the architect Daniel Libeskind’s 1978 collection of drawings entitled Micromegas: The Architecture of End Space. This study has been conducted in two interrelated parts: a collection of drawings that respond to Libeskind’s series through processes of tracing, erasure, and layering. And a body of written work that examines these processes through the theoretical implications summarised as follows. The project began with an enquiry into the manner in which Libeskind’s drawings interrogate the distance between a drawing and the thing being drawn. In architectural drawing this distance usually mandates that the drawing infers or projects the drawn thing (building, space, object) as a condition outside of itself, by means of a set of conventionalised marks and relations operating within itself. Furthermore, this set of relations determines both the relationship of the line – as the progenitor of

the architectural drawing – with the surface onto which it is inscribed, and also the manner by which the drawing comes to be read and interpreted (as the drawn thing). In architectural drawing, the line is inscribed onto a surface, but at the same time equates that surface as the drawing itself - as the space into which the drawing takes place. The white page ceases to be read as ‘blankness’ but rather both line and surface co-constitute the reading of architectural space; just as a solid wall and the open void it delineates co-constitute the spatial experience of a building. What might be seen to manifest by these initial observations is a fascinating circumstance occurring in the translation of the line in architectural drawing – that is in its capacity to be projected and read both as a mark on a surface, as well as, say, a wall in a building. It is this dual capacity – the line as a mark and the line as a sign – which our drawings probe and exploit.

HONOURS UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

JEFFREY BLEWETT Breathless

“[The] self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) following which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible.” Deleuze G and Guattari F (2004) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Continuum, 275

The thesis explores the philosophical and architectonic implications of the tracheostomy, presenting both a speculative design project for a respiratory clinic in Sydney’s CBD and a written exploration, utilising the post-structural philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. A tracheostomy is an intense surgical

procedure involving the removal of the larynx and the separation of the airway from the mouth, nose and esophagus as a means of relieving and re-engaging the function of the respiratory system, redirecting the windpipe to a permanent opening in the neck, called the stoma. Operating within the interdisciplinary nexus of architecture, medicine and philosophy, this project will engage precisely with the conditions of breathing, speaking and eating through this artificial opening in the neck. The stoma, and particularly the laryngectomy offers an alternative topology of the body, a new threshold and a heightened state of connection between the subjects interiority and exteriority. Drawing links between the parallel conditions and techniques of the laryngectomy and architecture, this project engages with different ways of thinking through and designing ‘clinical’ architecture, opening up the potential to enrich and breathe a new life into both site and subject.

HONOURS UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

ARIELLE MARSHALL Fleeing the Image

This project explores the tension of photography in the theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It aims to unravel the conception of the ‘photograph’ as a fixed, static and immobilised ‘slice’ of space-time, which opposes it to the logic of post-structuralism; a philosophy founded on rupture, instability, and chaos. The paper investigates the photographic potential for movement in space, in the subject and in time. By recasting the medium in terms of mobility, photography is set into a post-structural framework. The paper considers how Deleuzian concepts might be re-imagined in the domain of photography, drawing on three core texts: the enigma of Franz Kafka, discussed with Félix Guattari, in Toward a Minor Literature (1975); the painting practice of Francis Bacon, as per The Logic of Sensation (1981); and

the literary enterprise of Marcel Proust, articulated in Proust and Signs (1964). Three chapters unfold in relation to the figure that Deleuze fixates on in each account: Kafka, Bacon and Proust. Prompted by a close, critical and, at times, novel consideration of the original works, a specific moment within their oeuvre is isolated – one which demonstrates the relational, dynamic and radical potential of the photograph. These encounters bring the photograph to bear with movement – a spectrum of vectorial forces, flux and, at the extreme, chaos. Instances when the mobile potential of photography is realised provide a point of fixation for each chapter. By looking into the works of artists and writers, through which Deleuze establishes his philosophical position, this paper will reveal a latent potential for photography within the Deleuzian account.

G R A D U AT E EXHIBITION STUDIO

Iterative model Janelle Woo, Grace Grew, Annabelle Cruikshank

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Graduate Exhibition 2016: T h e Tr a n s p o r t o f I d e a s Sandra Löschke

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Students: Annabelle Cruikshank Grace Grew Aimee Stuart Ana Trifunovska Janelle Woo With the help of: James Feng Adrian Thai

This elective allows students to actively participate in the development of the 2016 Graduate Exhibition. The theme recognises that today, the spatial experiences of viewers and the representation of architecture as image are central to the communication of architectural ideas. In fact, the representation and experience of architecture have moved closer together than ever before. As Beatriz Colomina sharply observed, often the iconic buildings of our time are only known through models and images constructed in media, and our experience is guided by these perceptions – even when we finally visit the actually sites, we tend to seek out the particular view points and perspectives from which we initially know them.1 Exhibitions are therefore a prime means of communicating architectural culture, transporting ideas to wider audiences. Consequently, stimulating the awareness of the audience is of fundamental importance for the exhibition concept, as Henri Bergson pointed out: whilst we are always surrounded by what might be generally understood as images and objects, these are only “perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed.” But more importantly, these perceptions “act and react upon one another”2 that is, they are essentially relational. Drawing on these observations, the themes for the exhibition concept were intended to be combined in ways that aimed at activating the audience: TRANSPORT: flowing, temporal, spatial, multi-layered. COUNTRY: horizontal, small-scale, individual buildings. CITY: vertical, face-to-face encounter, clustered buildings.

Colomina, Beatriz. “Media as Modern Architecture.” In Clark Conference: Architecture between Spectacle and Use, edited by Anthony Vidler. Williamstown, Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008. 2 Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York, Zone Books, 1991. Originally published in French as Matière et Mémoire in 1896. 1

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Architecture Graduate Exhibition 2015

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25 FEBRUARY TO 24 M ARCH 2016

D E PA R T U R E S : Student Explorations in a Global Context Curated by Zoe Skinner and Christina Rita

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016 Pauline Winjono, Germany, 2013

The Faculty aims to cultivate creative, critical and innovative global leaders. Those with a desire to make lives better, to engage in a life of learning, to search for the best possible outcomes. Architects, designers and planners must be responsive to unfamiliar contexts and issues, open to new ideas and ways of thinking, and be committed to the social, cultural and environmental responsibilities that come with the aspiration to create an improved built environment.

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Our students are encouraged and supported to enhance their learning through the invaluable opportunities of international study within their degree or research. In the past 3 years, with the support and encouragement of the faculty, we have seen 228 students travel to 26 countries as part of their studies. This has been through design studio electives, international exchange or research fieldtrips. The photographic and drawn selection of work in this exhibition showcased the diversity and richness of these experiences. They are frank and genuine observations framed through the eyes of a student immersed in every facet of a life studying abroad.

Va c a n c y / N o V a c a n c y ? Urban Islands 2006-2016

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9 J U N E T O 1 5 J U LY 2 0 1 6

Curated by Mark Szczerbicki and Thomas Rivard

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Vacancy/No Vacancy?, Urban Islands 2006 – 2016 presented a collaboration of work from Urban Islands guests: Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix from design studio MAP Office; Jill Stoner, Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada; and Shaun Murray, practising Architect and Director of architecture firm ENIAtype. Our four guests explored architecture and related themes through a variety of nonconventional media and techniques, sharing an interest in issues of urbanism and ecology. The exhibition showcased some of their recent research and projects through drawings, audio/video installations and sculpture.

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The exhibition ran parallel to Urban Islands 2016, an independent cross university program hosted by the University of Sydney, bringing renowned architectural practitioners from around the world to Sydney’s Cockatoo Island.

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2 1 A P R I L T O 2 7 M AY 2 0 1 6

Robots in Architecture 2016 Developing the Future Curated by Dagmar Reinhardt

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Robots in Architecture 2016 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Developing the Future, curated by Dr Dagmar Reinhardt, showcased the latest developments of robotic applications and robotic research for architectural practice. The exhibition supported the Rob|Arch2016 - Robots in Architecture, Art and Design conference, hosted by the University of Sydney, conducted as collaborations between the Australian co-hosting Universities (RMIT, UTS, UNSW, Monash, and Bond), and international collaborators (University of Michigan, ICD Stuttgart, ETH Zurich, IAAC Barcelona, Harvard GSD, Virginia Tech, industry HAL Robotics, Sciarc and Odico Robotic Formworks). The exhibition was testament to the innovative capacities of robotics at the nexus of material research, interactive response and robotic fabrication. It included objects, projections of documentaries, and a series of 37 interviews with leading robotic researchers, educators, practitioners and robotic industry. These interviews provided information about robotic concepts, processes and tools used, and information about the impact of robotic fabrication on architecture and construction industry. 108

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City of Ideas: Architects’ Vo i c e s a n d V i s i o n s Curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

A multiplicity of voices is the defining feature of architecture today. Never before have there been so many distinctive and original visions. The time is ripe to raise the inevitable questions: How many architectures do we need? Can we remain critical by simply accepting such a diverse and contradictory contemporary panoply of ideas? Do we let go of all unifying principles? Can we operate without authorities? Should the present diversity be encouraged? Should the most distinctive voices be amplified? Should we continue celebrating ‘starchitects’ who haul architecture in many different directions?

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City of Ideas: Architects’ Voices and Visions, curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky, was a stage for 13 such voices to be heard, juxtaposed and interpreted. Presented through audio recordings, interview transcripts, quotes and images, this exhibition portrays today’s leading architects and society in general. Their voices helped us to challenge one fundamental question: what is architecture, here and now?

Designing Affordability: Q u i c k e r, S m a r t e r, M o r e Efficient Housing Now

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6 OCTOBER TO 18 NOVEMBER 2016

Curated by Mark Norman

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Designing Affordability: Quicker, Smarter, More Efficient Housing Now presents case studies from Australia and around the world that address ways of reducing costs without compromising design quality. “Affordable housing” typically refers to policy initiatives that ensure that residents at a certain income can qualify for housing units, but “affordability” is a broader concept. The exhibition examined how architects, engineers, planners, policy makers, tenants, and homeowners are crafting innovative ways to reduce the cost of housing by rethinking how we build, maintain, and occupy structures.

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STUDENT E XC E L L E N C E

NSW Design Medal - ‘Ligo’ Hope Dryden and Robin Lloyd

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Awards, Prizes, Scholarships

Australian Institute of Architects NSW Design Medal Ligo - Hope Dryden and Robyn Lloyd Australian Institute of Architects Student Prize 2016 Peter Nguyen First Degree NSW Graduate of the Year Award Sarah Mae-Siew Yap UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

First Degree NSW Design Award Runner-Up – Systematic Indeterminacy by Sarah Mae-Siew Yap Structural Innovation in Architecture Award Runner-Up – Folder Hypars by Zaever Mand and William Marshall Masters Graduate of the Year James Moulder History and Theory Prize Robyn Lloyd Construction and Practice Prize Isobel James Noel Chettle Memorial Art Prize 3D Processes Catherine Nemanic, First Prize Gabriella Boyd, Second Prize Josh McGillicuddy, Third Prize 2D Procceses Benjamin Dixon, First Prize Jiamei Liu, Second Prize Isobel Lord & Nick Hartley, Third Prize MADE By The Opera House 2017 Scholarship Eleanor Gibson, Jacob Levy, Nicky Shear Leichhardt Competition 2016 James Feng, Minh Au

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SUPPORTERS

Supporters

The Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning would like to thank the following supporters for their generosity in making the Architecture Graduate Exhibition 2016 possible. Platinum NSW Architects Registration Board FJMT Bosco Lighting

Silver Architectus Fox Johnston Hassell TKD Architects Trotec Bronze Carr Design Group Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects Utz Sanby Architects

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

Gold Bates Smart Stanisic Architects

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Project: 580 George Street Photography: Brett Boardman SUPPORTERS UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

We are pleased to be supporting architects of the future @fjmtstudio

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www.fjmtstudio.com

SUPPORTERS

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SUPPORTERS

Bates Smart would like to congratulate this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s graduates Supporting The University of Sydney, Architecture Graduate Exhibition 2016

www.batessmart.com | www.batessmart.com/journal

DESIGNING A COLOURFUL TOMORROW SINCE 1989 + www.stanisic.com.au /// career@stanisic.com.au +

UNIVERSIT Y OF SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE 2016

PICTURED Canberra Airport Hotel, ACT

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SUPPORTERS

S I LV E R S U P P O R T E R S

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BRONZE SUPPORTERS

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ISBN: 978-0-9808689-8-2

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Architectural Culture: New Perspectives 2016

Articles inside

P R O T O C O M P U T A T I O N A L THINKING: HACKING UTZON