Domain (BDesArch Studio)

37

SYDNEY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND PLANNING

2019

‘Fold’ Rachel Liang

38 SYDNEY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND PLANNING

Domain

Architecture Studio 3B

BDES3027 Semester 2 2019

Catherine Lassen

Tutors Sean Akahane-Bryen

Justine Anderson

Jason Dibbs Nicholas Elias Maren Koehler Zoya Kuptsova

Tiffany Liew Mahroo Moosavi

Mano Ponnambalam Kieran Richards Lachlan Seegers Thomas Stromberg Mitchell Thompson

Between the urban environment of Macquarie Street and the landscape of the Sydney Domain, students in this studio proposed a public space for performance, display and discussion. Located behind the Mint on Hospital Road, their speculative designs sought to negotiate the historic built setting together with the politically charged urban void.

Selected for its legibility, Jørn Utzon’s methodological work afforded an additional disciplinary, proto computational context from which to imagine new possibilities. Framed as rule governed, his design thinking spans scales ranging from urban ambitions to assembly details. Retroactively imagined as parametric, thoughts that inform geometry can be seen as connected to attitudes towards structure and material components, extending to performance requirements such as acoustics.

Attention was paid to techniques of architectural representation to conceptually clarify design direction as well as generate potential projections. Through the iterative re-drawing and re-making of what one ‘sees’ and ‘reads’ students were asked to isolate architectural aspects or strategies, leading to a precise yet abstracted, open-ended depiction of the studied architectural work or urban context.

Clarification through parametric schemas offered extended tools for establishing an internally coherent new framework; explicit representation helped promote intuitively driven designs toward realised intentions. Architectural agendas were framed in relation to larger urban attitudes. Structural and material thinking was encouraged in alignment with broader design priorities; part and whole were seen as continuously interconnected. Multiple modes of making helped to manifest intelligible, inventive, digital, as well as material, propositions.

Threshold

Focussed by close readings of projects or buildings via measured drawings in the online Utzon Aalborg Archives, students posed their own designs in critical counterpoint.

2019