2017

Groundbreaking

..a design studio with Ross Brewin & Laura Harper on Wednesdays

BROAD RESEARCH THEME
In the context of the increasing urbanisation of our world, it is important to consider the corresponding and counter issues facing regional areas beyond the city. In what ways can architecture contribute to the recognition, revitalisation and resilience of regional towns and places?

STUDIO CONTEXT
Regional areas have particular attributes that mean they are suited to experimentation and innovation; including abundant and accessible natural resources, ample space, lower costs, geographical separation, dark skies, left over things (such as mining infrastructure), and an engrained can-do attitude.

This design studio pursues the idea that regional towns and places have the potential to be framed as ongoing outposts for groundbreaking ideas and inventions. The studio will think about this from an historical perspective and consider how this attitude / idea could be used in thinking about the sustainable futures of regional towns and places. The studio will use the regional Victorian town of Stawell as the site to explore the potential for this idea and the role of architectural design within this.

STUDIO FOCI
GROUNDBREAKING: IDEAS FOR SITE + PROGRAM
Stawell was originally born out of the 1858 gold rush and has been associated with this industry ever since. Now with the imminent closure of the largest underground gold mine and the subsequent loss of hundreds of jobs and associated foot-traffic through the town, the council is looking for new ways to generate economic activity in the area.

One idea for this is the soon-to-be-constructed Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL). The SUPL facility will be built inside the former gold mine tunnels, utilizing the existing infrastructure to build a laboratory to search for Dark Matter some 850m under ground, where it is relatively free from atmospheric ‘noise’. The SUPL project is an interesting contemporary case study in the potential for groundbreaking research and ideas to take place and affect a regional township.

The studio, supported by the North Grampians Shire Council will explore the siting and programmatic potential for a SUPL visitors centre. The studio will think about how this new facility not only supports the public communication of this groundbreaking research but might also itself be a kind of physical armature for the testing and development of possible groundbreaking architectural ideas and approaches. Extending the thematic of Groundbreaking even further will be a literal consideration of where and how to ‘break ground’ for the project.

GROUND BREAKING: THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT IN RELATION TO RESOURCES, GEOLOGY, MATERIALS + TECHNOLOGY
Regional towns often rely on industries which relate to the natural resources and characteristics of their geographic location. In Stawell these have included over time gold-mining, brickmaking, quarrying of sandstone, steel engineering (associated with the goldfields), wind farming, tourism and now scientific research which each draw on resources specific to the geology, climate and physical context of Stawell. All these industries affect the built environment – where buildings are located, how the town is organized, what buildings are made from and what kind of buildings are constructed. This studio will study the industries and natural resources which make Stawell specific, consider how these have influenced the urban environment in the past, and experiment with how they could be used deliberately used to make interesting architecture which is specific to Stawell.

In parallel to site and urban research, the studio will undertake a series of small esquisses exploring materials (including gold, clay, sandstone, crushed quartz and steel) as well as innovative technologies from the past, present and possible future for Stawell (including mining and quartz crushing machinery, wrought-iron and steel manufacturing, robotic stone carving and milling, 3D printing of stone rubble, clay and metals). The esquisses will be used to build up a catalogue of Stawell specific parts and methods to be used for architectural propositions on the various possible SUPL visitors centre sites.

NOTE: Students will be expected to make a number of organised and self-guided trips to Stawell (approx 3.5 hours drive from Melbourne)

ARC 4002 + 5002
MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO
SEMESTER 2 2017

Punk Buildings

“Punk is unimaginable in London today.”
Mark Fisher (†)
Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London
Author of Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (Zero Books)

This studio offers the opportunity to explore how architectural design can be exercised as a form of political resistance. Inviting students to engage with the design process through civilised forms of dissent and disobedience, the studio seeks to find if architecture can become a tangible manifestation of counterculture, as well as an effective instrument for political activism.

What’s the point? In a historic time marked by increasing marginalisation and inequality, the studio suggests that architecture, first and foremost, must attend the basic needs of the most vulnerable social groups. These include migrants, the poor, the young, and other segregated minorities, who are more likely to be affected by austerity, deregulation, bigotry, racism, and trickle-down economics.

So, how to do this? Students will be invited to debate their points of view, and discuss the relevance and validity of the studio’s central argument. Then, they will investigate several of the correlations that exist between neoliberal politics and the post-capitalist configuration of public and private space — for instance, did you know that currently in the UK less than 1% of architects work in the public sector, as opposed to 50% in 1970s? We will discuss the implications of this kind of alarming facts, particularly for architecture, the city, and culture at large.

Later, students will analyse examples of spatial segregation in the contemporary city, framed by discussions of texts by people like Mark Fisher, Michel Foucault, Anna Minton, George Monbiot, Alexander Vasudevan, and others.

In parallel, students will learn about vernacular design tactics and how they feed a number of architectural solutions, as precedents for the design of a controlled squatting prototype for a hypothetical abandoned building. Then, students will be asked to transform their prototypes so they can parasitize a specific conflicting spatial situation found in Melbourne, determined through their own particular investigation.

This studio is expected to provide students with skills to respond to a number of important questions, including:

* What is the role of disobedience in architectural practice?
* Should architecture contribute to the production of countercultural manifestations in society?
* Can architecture be an instrument to simultaneously raise awareness and provide potential solutions?
* If so, what does the discipline of architecture becomes then?

Punk Buildings is a Master of Architecture Design Studio offered by Eduardo Kairuz, based on his ongoing investigations around crisis and its dislocating effects in architecture and the city. It will run in Semester 2/2017, every Wednesday starting at 10 am, in a studio space still TBD. If needed, please send questions to eduardo.kairuz@monash.edu

Re-Imagining South Melbourne Market

Speculative Futures

Within the interconnected global flow of people, goods and information cities are increasingly competing to distinguish themselves and to attract and serve citizens, businesses and tourists. The global proliferation of city branding, theming, mega projects and mega events is steering cities towards standardised strategies. Architects can contribute to efforts to shape the world of tomorrow by articulating productive alternatives and proposing visions to catalyse discussions and actions across diverse audiences. Architects should be sensitive to local conditions and bold enough to help expand perspectives and possibilities. How might intellectual and design speculation help guide financial speculation to shape future growth and change?

Using Osaka, which is Japan’s second largest city and Melbourne’s sister city, as a testing ground, this studio will produce a suite of provocative urban proposals and stimulating architectural projects as speculative catalysts for the future of Umeda in central Osaka. We will examine diverse networks interconnecting the Umeda site. We will develop three-dimensional porous open space matrixes as armatures for coordinating diverse linked activities and catalytic interventions. Observations and analyses of existing conditions will fuel design speculations that envision the evolution and mutation of Umeda.

The studio will engage with complex conditions and constituencies, such as the Umeda Area Management Alliance. We will explore ideas through proposals and projects and pay careful attention to the multi-media communication of ideas. We will conduct fieldwork in Japan and collectively develop urban strategies with Japanese colleagues. Resulting strategies will provide a fertile context for individual design of interventions. Studio participants will produce a package of urban proposals and articulate architectural projects that re ect the rigorous investigation and materialisation of key ideas across multiple scales – from city to building to details.

Design explorations will combine Japanese architectural and urban developments with global discourses and practices. The studio will be paired with a Japanese architecture studies unit and a required three-week research trip to Japan including an intensive workshop with partners at Kobe University, as well as extensive travel to examine Japanese exemplars. The trip is sponsored by MGS. Design explorations will be located in the Japanese context, but help forge foundations for global speculations on urban futures.

ARI+EVIE Sem2-2017-Wednesdays

Stephenson Triangle

Thick Skinned

Fill Ya Boots!

Geology / Pottery / Typology

Radical Change

Swamp City

Future scenarios for Arden Macaulay

Site
Arden Macaulay is designated as one of Melbourne’s inner city growth areas. The reclaimed industrial history and its immediate proximity to the CBD and Parkville Employment cluster make the area ripe for future development. The investments in metropolitan infrastructure in and around Arden Macaulay support a high density living unlike other development areas in Melbourne.

Flood
The floodplain is an artificial, highly engineered landscape filled with objects and structures of other urban influences. Its central spine is a creek that is not a creek. Like many Australian watercourses it never really reached the sea but terminated in a swamp. The dredging of this swamp and the cutting of the creek towards it secured new land for sale and development in the late 19th century, while Melbourne was at the height of its global prowess. Now, a century later, while the land prices have skyrocketed and the attitude towards swamps and wetlands have changed, the floods return. The invisibility of older conditions may have been forgotten but in a future of changing climate and increased density these conditions resurface and disrupt the envisioned urban life.

Type
The high-density tower model we see going up around Melbourne seems past its financial and qualitative lifespan. The scale of these developments (too big) and the type of apartment living (too small) they offer leaves us with an unanswered question about public amenity. Due to this combination of uncertain future, changing demographics, proximity to the CBD and the University while having to surrender to the muddy conditions of the landscape under a scenario of climate change, the development area can accommodate new and unique building typologies.

Studio
The studio will investigate how underlying landscapes can inform building typologies and how at a time of new climate threats these typologies can evolve towards a liveable future. The individual and group work will culminate in an interdisciplinary public exhibition to be held in late June, incorporating the parallel work of CRC researchers and stakeholders.

Nigel Bertram with Rutger Pasman + Oscar Sainsbury
In association with the Co-operative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities

Wednesdays
arc 4/5001

Willful

adj.
c.1200 "strong-willed," from will (n.) + -fut. Willfully is late Old English wilfullice "of one's own free will, voluntarily;" bad sense of "on purpose" is attested from late 14c. Willful means "deliberate" or "stubborn." While being full of will, or determination, doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing, the word willful is negative in meaning.

Architecture is the direction of one's professional judgement - made up also, one might argue, of one's personal judgement - to appreciate a projects conflicting demands and work productively with these, in meeting responsibilities, while finding a rightness of fit between them.

Peter Rice, a renown structural engineer no longer with us, argued that the supposed rationality of a project's genesis is simply the wilfulness of the individual architect - falling back on their standard repertoire, personal values and problem solving technique to create a design (1).

We might agree that a strong degree of wilfulness is required to generate and keep project ambitions on track. However what distinguishes wilfulness from stubbornness? The resolution of conflict can lead to a design opportunity.

This studio will interrogate these kinds of questions by engaging with various constraints - regulatory, existing conditions, neighbourly demands, - to explore a productive balance between the wilful and the negotiated in urban placemaking. Our often unconscious reasons for our choices, the resulting conflicts and the processes towards resolving these will be examined during the studio process in order to recognise the organization and mediation required to establish, rank and implement a series of design intents.

An awareness of the varied consequences of 'wilful' decision making is an integral part of ethical practice. In 'Architecture Depends', Till propositions that ethical practice means "To assume responsibility for the other" (2). The other being "all the people whose lives will be affected by the construction of a building and its subsequent occupation. The environment is included in this understanding of other. Because the other is diverse and unpredictable an ethical stance must work with, assimilate and comprehend this difference rather than resist or supress it" (3).

New Urban Professionals (NUPs) will work in pairs (2 or 3 students depending on numbers) to develop an architecture project with in a new masterplan for the old Cartlon United Brewery's (CUB) site at the North end of the Swanston Street axis. NUP's will research relevant history of the city and the site heritage overlay,and test the various past and current planning rules. You will understand the reasoning and social evolution behind the planning rules for the site. Students will be given a developer brief (hopefully from Grocon) to test a range of planning constraints. The project will involve analysis of popular urban places and some site measures of existing context to reinforce an understanding of the anthropomorphic. NUPs will construct a 1:100 card model of the existing precinct context and working in groups will observe and analyse the context, critique the existing site solutions, diagram, propose and agree a masterplan and ground plan with new planning rules for the block. NUPs will work in pairs to curate authentic precedents, speculate on future programme, explain their relevance and provide a resolved design presented in plans, section with a 1:100 model. Each building will have to negotiate with their immediate neighbours within the larger whole. NUPs will be graded on their architecture project by a jury of OUPs, and as we all are, by the aggregate quality (shown by the new 1:100 models) of the whole CUB site.

Studio Time: Semester One 2017, 10am-4pm Friday (generally)
Studio will be led by Christopher Kelly, Principal of Architecture Workshop www.archwksp.co.nz and Laurence Dragomir, Publisher of Urban Melbourne urban.melbourne

Deliverables:
Combined Group: Masterplan with articulated ground plan. New group agreed planning / development rules used to generate card models for the whole CUB site.

Smaller Group (2-3): diagrams, architecture plans, sections and about 6 photoshopped images of the model showing the organisational elegance, beauty and utility of a piece of the masterplan.

Refs: (1) Peter Rice, 'An Engineer Imagines'. (2) Zygmunt Bauman, via Jeremy Till's 'Architecture Depends'. (3) Boyd Series Ethics talks - Kerstin Thompson

WIN! Ideas Competition

Satellite

New pedagogical spaces of the contemporary city

There is a sense the historical university campus is part of an unending historical continuum.

All has changed. Plummeting government funding, the need to ‘brand’ the university campus and aggressive higher education takeovers from vocational training providers means that the physical campus disaggregates. We are left with satellites of pedagogy. Consequently universities and architects will need to go out to the student — learning satellites will appear in transitory spaces like airports, shopping centres and train stations. These are the new pedagogical spaces of the contemporary city.

Students will analyse the campus (Monash Clayton) typology; design ‘learning satellites’ in the suburban expanse and finally radically re-introduction these learning satellites into the Clayton campus. Students will come on a wild ride through typology, negative space, process driven design techniques and urban form. You will take positions, create polemics and discover the Society of the Spectacle that was Monash student politics in the 1960s.

WHERE
Classes will be held in the offices of Paul Morgan Architects where you will get a taste of actual University projects. Occasional classes will be held at MADA.

HOW
The program will be in three stages:
1: Campus analysis; diagramming the process; concept investigations (3 weeks)
2: Process experiments (4 weeks)
3. Building design (7 weeks)

WHEN
Wednesday mornings and afternoons.

WHO
From survival pods for a climate-stressed Australia of the near future, to buildings sculpted in response to the environment that surrounds them, the work of Paul Morgan Architects is a highly unconventional blend of science fiction, sustainability, and speculation.

Paul Morgan has been in private practice since 1997, completing university, TAFE and residential projects over that period. The practice has won the Robin Boyd Award for Residential Buildings as well as awards from the European Centre for Architecture Art and Urban Design and Chicago Athenaeum. A monograph on the practice was published in 2013. Paul is formerly editor of Transition magazine, and has taught architectural design over the last 27 years.

www.paulmorganarchitects.com
Practice-Based Studio: Paul Morgan Architects

Digitally Diverse Structure

Gesamtkunstwerk

Gesamtkunstwerk is the ‘total work of art’. In an architectural context, it refers to the designing of all facets of a building, from the furnishings and fixtures to the building envelope and landscape.

In contemporary architectural practice, the selection and specification of ready-made building components for incorporation into a design is a convenient and commercial reality. This studio will aim to position these architectural ‘fragments’ as a driver of process and rather than an afterthought. Students will make careful consideration of not only the position and placement of these fragments, their purpose and relationship to each other, but also how they may come to inform the architecture at large. Students will be asked to design at a range of scales, in isolation and in dialogue with an overall site and building schematic.

While the semester will limit the extent that can be designed, students will design a selection of building fragments of various scales using architectural themes as a guide or brief — e.g. Approach, Street, Entrance, Circulation, etc. which may result in designs of openings, stairs, floor, lettering and signage, systems, door handles, furniture, lighting fixtures, façade, roof etc. — before a building is addressed more holistically. With each new implementation, accumulated designs will require iteration and integration. This nuanced approach will guide students as they interpret a functional brief and work towards a finalised architectural outcome.

With an intimate understanding of the physical site, its inhabitation, ephemera and phenomenology, students will be encouraged to develop an architectural language, conceptual and/or narrative link between these building fragments and the city, while creating methods of representation (and narrative) to demonstrate the item in context. This “seat to city” (J.B. Bakema, Antwerp, 1964) approach will require students to design the part, with the whole in mind.

Free Site Study:
Unstructured or ‘free’ site documenting: This studio will aim to challenge the often-linear architectural practice of documenting and representing site and existing conditions. Students will be invited to undertake a rigorous non-empirical study of a given site. In documenting this process, students will be invited to recall the site imaginatively but critically, and may yield responses that are ‘psychogeographical’, poetic, intellectual, impressionistic, playful, historical research/narrative based or otherwise. In terms of architectural representation, this approach will pose interesting tensions between the abstract and the figurative, the codified and the representational.

Collections
Students will be asked to create their own inventories of site ‘collectables’ as a means of recalling and consolidating significant site themes. Collections may include various minutiae of thematic relevance to the Gesamtkunstwerk tasks — Approach, Street, Entrance, Circulation, etc. For example, a record of the existing openings (doors / windows etc.) present in the site surroundings or a more broad-based, exploratory collection with which to navigate the range of site characteristics.

This inventory may take the form of a photographic survey, architectural drawings or otherwise. These collections should serve as a method for understanding the role and importance of precedent in architecture.

Scales & Fabrication
In the Gesamtkunstwerk studio, there will be a focus on large scale model-making to develop architectural outcomes. Investigations into fabrication, craft, manufacturing techniques and other design fields — furniture, product, textile design etc. — will be encouraged.

Expected Outcomes:
Fortnightly & weekly small-scale assignments refined over the course of the semester.

James Jamison The Building Office thebuildingoffice.com james@thebuildingoffice.com M+Th 6-9pm

Gottfried Bohm, Basalt door, ‘Madonna in the ruins chapel’, Cologne, 1950.

Memory Factory

Archival Practice As Architectural Strategy

This studio focuses on archiving as design methodology and seeks to investigate the potentials of design through making.

The semester comprises two parts, one will investigate the application of archival practice across disciplines, visiting archives, interviewing industry professionals etc. The second focuses on memory, its remembrance and manufacture, preserving and documenting the ephemeral and intangible. Students will collect information, objects, artefacts, and stories to shape their own architectural propositions.

Archiving as a methodology is a creative practice applicable to the process of architectural design, it is used in the work of theorists such as Michael Foucault, artists such as Christian Boltanski, Gerard Richter, and Cornelia Parker. The architect utilises this strategy to design through collecting, sorting, ordering, and assembling – it is a way to engage with site, memory, and cultural and social identities. Students will be able to undertake several strands of research, “archival” practices of the Wunderkammer/Cabinet of Curiosity, reliquaries, and personal ephemera, sift out strong concepts and form interdisciplinary schemes.

One can collect to make connections, to link the strands between dislocated fragments, to form new interpretations of the past from the standpoint of the present, to derive new meanings by rearranging findings. Artefacts and memories can be transformed to uncover hidden worlds, to give presence to the invisible and intangible. Architecture has the ability to “consciously contribute to a cultural archive in the making”.

The act of collecting implies future proofing, the desire to safeguard ourselves against time and the destruction of memory and objects that it entails. The archive thus ferries between the past, present and future. Preservation suggests an understanding of the past and predicting what will be valuable for the future, this strategy of archiving is an expansion on the role of the architect, facilitating
multiple, if not simultaneously conflicting, interests while speculating on future scenarios of the built and natural environments.

Design by making as a process generates a vast spectrum of (often unexpected) outcomes. These manifestations and visual communications of ideas are conducive to the development of independent critical thinking and self- directed process of design through explorative means of production e.g.model making, casting, video, installation, photography etc.

Specifically, inherent in the practice of casting are themes of disappearance, traces, “lostness” and archiving, integral to this studio. Giving formal expression to the most malleable of ideas, casting draws on memory and trust, culminating in the theatricality of the unveiling moment.

The process of making initiates a dialogue strong in material presence, engaging the tangible and tactile to interrogate the occupation of space and the paradoxes between haptic thresholds.

The semester will include drawing and model making workshops that focus on visual and material expression and investigation. There will be a series of discussions and lectures on the various strands of archival practice evident in the arts, living technologies, ecological systems and forensic science. Thus exploring a cross-disciplinary design attitude in this studio.

One site will be chosen from a selection of “unlikely” or “impossible” spaces in the city. We will focus on the transformation of space and architecture as an alchemical application to site.

The programme is for a Memory Factory. This factory is an elusive and sometimes unreliable archive. Students may choose if this takes the form of one built form or several.

HOLLY XIE
MONASH UNIVERSITY SEMESTER ONE 2017

CORNELIA PARKER, The Maybe, 1995.

Piped

Renaissance Centre

Subjects And Sequences

The Garden Of Earthly Delights

A social condenser of contemporary pleasures

The studio seeks to propose images, fantasies, visions and architectural alternatives to the current society and urban environment bringing back the positive spirit of transformation, dominant in the architectural scene of the 60s and 70s.

The conceptual scenery is the famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Like the painting, the studio is placed in an intermediate zone between fantasy and reality, the critical and the imaginative, the real and the invented.

Students will create a series of intrusions of the fantastic world into the real world designing a garden of earthly dreams for the 21st century. Students will produce two specific site installations of pleasure: an apparatus at the scale of the body involving at least two people, and a structure at the scale of the city.

The fictitious program of this social condenser of delights and pleasures will transform a real space in Melbourne, Flagstaff Gardens.

The studio will follow a specific design methodology breaking down complex tasks into fundamental components to assist the students in developing and articulating their own architectural positions.

The studio will re-examine a set of precedents, attitudes, positions, strategies, projects, ideas, particular processes, actions, etc. providing a larger spectrum of possible suggestions and solutions.

Special emphasis will be placed on the exploration of alternatives ways of defining and communicating the proposals.

Students will be urged to be open to alternate ways of approaching and thinking architecture engaging connections with other disciplines.

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Lewis Carrol

María Fullaondo + Joe Gauci-Seddon ARC2001 Design Studio | Semester 1- 2017 Monday-Thursday [2pm-5pm]

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1480-1505,. Grisaille, Oil on oak panel, 220 x 390 cm (Prado Museum, Madrid)

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Chopshop

City Peril

Never Been Modern

Occupy Reveal Dispute Subvert

OCCUPY: In the last 40 years, the economic logic over which the social development takes place, has changed. We now live in a world of concentration of wealth and power, increase of state violence through police control, exclusion of more and more sectors of society and architecture for the wealthy. Since the 90’s, this logic started to change from a repressive and violent behaviour, to a seductive performance, in which those who are not excluded, are now enchanted through spectacle and consumption, with ARCHITECTURE AS AN ACCOMPLICE.

REVEAL: This double behaviour of destruction and seduction, allows the development at extraordinary rates of the wealthiest people, but at the same time the displacement and poverty of a huge percentage of the global population. Melbourne is one of the most seductive cities in the world, and the CROWN COMPLEX – millionaire gambling, 5 stars hotel, de luxe residences, exquisite cuisine and exclusive entertainment – its most radical expression. Soon, the construction of the tallest tower in Melbourne - ONE QUEENSBRIDGE - will culminate this complex, a symbol of wealth concentration, masculine virility, corporate power and social exclusiveness.

DISPUTE: The Studio will study the role of architecture in this conflictive scenario, and which opportunities we have, as architects, to get involved in the dispute against the structural social injustice. We will look for architectural mechanisms that this building develops to generate exclusion and seduction. Through readings, writings, visits, models, walks, videos, diagrams, conversations, and the study of international cases, the Studio will build a battery of critical reflections of this radical architecture of the current
times. So, we will propose different actions and projects to make visible what this architecture hides.

SUBVERT:
¿Can we think architecture as a tool to dispute the current distribution of power?
¿How can we reveal the violence of the attractive model of the neoliberal city and its buildings?
¿Has architecture the capacity to build social resistance and inclusive social relations?
¿How would be the buildings and the city if architects work to destabilise current conditions?
¿What would happen if architecture engage in the conflict and dispute against power?
This Studio will develop subversive projects, and speculate about possible alternatives.

ARCHITECTURE FOR CONFLICT IN A NEOLIBERAL WORLD: Lectures on Neoliberalism and Urban Development, Architecture and Seduction, Critical Alternatives and Dispute, will stimulate a critical construction of discourses, actions and architectural propositions. The Studio will produce models, videos, diagrams, catalogues and 1:1 installations during its process, to allow a collective reflection among students, teachers, collaborators and guests.

The most luxurious complex
The most liveable city
The tallest building in Melbourne
A unique addition to the city skyline

Requiem

Testing Grounds

STUDIO
This studio aims to develop a methodology of understanding for the interpretation of uncertain landscape conditions. From flora and fauna, to ground and atmospheres, and historical processes, the site portrait generated through the studio will be a multilayered operational tool. While the final architectural proposition manifests as a site device in the form of an interpretive centre, it's purpose is to test hypotheses and manifest the overall method of interpretation.

METHODOLOGY
Testing Grounds will require students to engage in multiple, rigorous, on-site explorations and testings. Current methods of understanding site (site analysis) are often over simplified, undervalued (Corner, 1999) and used as a way of justifying a predetermined perception. Testing Grounds will investigate the hypothesis that by employing rigorous and specific techniques it is possible not to be restricted by preconceptions, instead revealing readings of the site that would otherwise remain hidden.

Through understandings of site developed through intuitive investigations, students will create instruments for testing and interpreting site conditions. Throughout the semester, these instruments will be developed and scaled up ultimately manifesting in the final studio proposition, an interpretive center. While this is the final propositional component, the primary aim is to develop a new methodology for reading and interpreting site. Findings from each stage of the semester will help to establish a feedback loop enabling a dynamic and active process.

SITE
The site is an accessible inner-urban green corridor located along the Merri Creek. It is home to the contrasting ecologies of opportunistic weed communities and a highly regulated revegetation program. Importantly the site is a place of significance for the Wurundjeri people. Since colonisation, the site has had a complex history as a quarry, a landfill site and subsequently an urban park.

OUTCOMES
1. A Series of Observational Instruments and Operational Devices
Bridging the empirical, phenomenological and subjective, these instruments will reveal, amplify and examine the existing site conditions. Furthermore, devices will alter, adapt and manipulate these conditions.

2. Proposition for Centre for Interpretation
A constructed environment for the observation, examination and interpretation of specific site conditions.

3. Exhibition of Critical Observation
A culmination of different techniques and lenses for examining site. A variety of observational and representational tools will be presented in a class exhibition.

monday 1330 // thursday 1800
ELLA GAUCI-SEDDON and JOSEPH GAUCI-SEDDON

True Crimes

Universals

Westside Story

WESTSIDE STORY interrogates the value we place onto identity, and the relationship between changing demographics and the built environment. Looking at the suburb of Footscray, the studio will examine its social context, its cultural narrative, the recent rapid development and its shifting demographics. Concurrently it will critique the process of urban sanitisation and investigate patterns around gentrification and adaptation. The studio is interested in how ‘identity’ manifests in informal, temporary, and interstitial spaces. Students will observe street life and the public sphere and investigate the way shifts in local populations over the past few decades have altered the urban fabric of Footscray.

The agenda is to create innovative public spaces which draw upon social, cultural, and economic landscapes. The semester’s body of work will include observing, documenting, and categorising street life. These will inform an series of site-specific interventions. Initial projects will be small scale esquisses on sidewalks, this being the interface between public, private, and commercial zones. Students will then respond with a larger architectural proposition in Maddern Square, a spatial by-product of retail backdoors, car parking, pigeons, and an unsuccessful urban renewal. This is the only open space in central Footscray and projects will reactivate it for community use.

Exercises will include movement mapping, atmospheric studies, textural studies and detail drawing, all derived from an acute observation of the site and its conditions. Students are also expected to use writing as a reflective design tool and will participate in a walking tour through Footscray led by the City of Maribyrnong.

WESTSIDE STORY will investigate the city, people, how spaces adapt, and how we relate and react to social and physical environments. The studio views the city not a blank canvas, rather a collection of experiences where historical narratives, changing social attitudes, and fluid demographics influence the built environment.

Yvonne Meng / Naomi Stead

Castaway

Government House Garden

Nineteen Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA) students, along with lecturers Alysia Bennett and Wil Goodsir (Goodsir Architecture) have collaborated to create concepts for a suite of architectural elements to be considered for installation at Government House’s ‘Peace and Prosperity’ kitchen garden.

Revealed to The Governor, the Hon. Linda Dessau AC on 14 June 2017, the project has enabled MADA students to experience design outside the classroom by interacting with the kitchen garden participants and responding to a real brief from a real client. If their designs are ultimately selected, they’ll gain the unique experience to participate in the realisation of their creations on-site.

The design brief from the Governor encouraged students to submit a variety of ideas, in order that some or all of them may be drawn from to determine the final design. MADA students responded with two independently conceived suites, “Jenina Al Mahaba Wal Salam" (an Arabic translation meaning “The Garden of Love and Peace”) and “The Arbor”.

To learn more about the project, click here.

WIN! ideas competition

House Of Stoush

Mind The Gap

Rethinking Urban Space in Northcote

I
The exponential growth that is currently undergoing in almost all of Australia's major cities has brought as a consequence significant changes in specific urban programs and activities. Many of these changes have been poorly resolved from an urban, architectural, and landscape design perspective. This studio looks at this phenomenon, and presents students with the opportunity to re-program and re-design an existing site in one of the most interesting inner suburbs of Melbourne.

II
To do so, the studio asks students to implement a specific design strategy, based on challenging the disciplinary boundaries that exist between architecture and landscape architecture. With this, students will discover (and will work with) the untapped relationships that exist between these two apparently different disciplines. The intention is to offer students the opportunity to create the singular experiences and perceptions of urban space that can be produced by the ambiguous spatiality that emerges from their combination.

III
The project's site is located in the northern inner-suburb of Northcote, where an uncommon, vacant urban space still remains. The lot is adjacent to the Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Church, located at the corner of High and Bayview streets. This site, surrounded by mix-use and different density buildings, is characterized by a four-meter level difference between the street level and church's ground level, a topographic gap that presents a unique opportunity to explore the correlations between architecture and landscape architecture

IV
To address this level difference, or gap, it is necessary to produce a significant topographic transformation. This means that students will learn how to design with topography, and thus create a hybrid architecture/landscape architecture public space that can resolve the present topographic accident.

V
Students will also have the opportunity to formulate their own conceptualization of what a contemporary urban space might be, in particular one determined by new programs that can challenge the boundaries between interior and exterior space. With this, the studio aims at maintaining the existing open area as an exterior space, and simultaneously at re-programming the site with an internal "public" space articulated by the four-meter level difference.

VI
In this studio, third year students will be presented with the challenge of exploring the potential relationships that might exist between architecture and landscape architecture, and reflect on a site-oriented project that acknowledges the importance of the redefinition of existing programs through a strategy that seeks to emphasize the importance of public open spaces in the urban fabric.

ARC 2003
Mondays and Thursdays from 1.30 to 4.30 pm
Studio leader: Isabel Lasala

Pull Over

.....an ARC3001 Design Studio with Ross Brewin

OVERVIEW - A ‘LIVE’ PROJECT
The design studio will broadly investigate the potential for architecture to elevate the accessibility and value of regional areas and places. The studio, sponsored by the Glamorgan Spring Bay Council in Tasmania will consider the potential to seed the economic growth of the East Coast region of Tasmania through careful and strategic tourism– focused development at locations along the ‘Great Eastern Drive’ touring route.

The studio will specifically identify, investigate, and design projects at a number of locations along the touring route. These sites will be chosen for the potential as traveller pull over spots (due to the surrounding spectacular landscape or significant historical setting) but are currently problematic in terms accessibility, safety and available amenity. Ideas generated in the studio will contribute towards a body of design research to be delivered to the council for purposes of pursuing funding to develop and implement actual projects in these locations.

SEMESTER THEME - MATERIALISING
The focus for the semester will be on the material resolution of design ideas. Students will be designing programmatically simple buildings and structures, freeing them up to explore design projects in greater material, structural and tectonic depth.

OTHER INTERESTS + AGENDAS
> How architecture in regional places, whilst addressing practical issues can evoke, reveal and mark the unseen (eg history, ecological forces, celestial event),
> How contemporary architecture can embody and reinterpret the built vernacular of a place.

REALITY CHECK
Students will be challenged to understand and incorporate relevant building codes and standards into their designs to start to understand the process of ensuring projects are accessible, safe and comfortable, whilst being conceptually and experientially rich.

WHAT TIME IS IT?
The studio will run on Monday and Thursday afternoons_ 2 to 5pm .

ROAD TRIP !
The studio will involve a trip to the east coast of Tasmania to undertake project site observation and analysis and visit a series of existing pull-over projects. This trip will likely occur around Week 3 or 4 and we will be away for up to 2 nights. Exact times etc will be confirmed shortly.

Remnants

How does one deal with an architecturally significant building in the city? What does one do when the building is derelict shopfront?

This studio will explore the way we approach expired architectural remnants. It is about the city, people, how spaces adapt, and how we relate and react to social and physical environments. The studio views the city not a blank canvas, rather a collection of layer upon layer of things, with cultural narratives, changing social attitudes, and fluid demographics influencing the built environment. Through this lens, we will interrogates the value we put onto heritage and the relationship between architectural merit, programme, and the public realm. Specifically we are looking at Crossley’s building, aka the Job Warehouse on Bourke Street, recognised as being among the oldest surviving buildings in Melbourne. We will examine the force of the architectural relic, and question its relevancy in present-day social and urban contexts.

The studio asks the following questions:
What is the value of retaining urban fabric? When does it become limiting? Who determines architectural significance? .... does it even matter?

We will look at the cause-effect nature of architecture and human behavior.
We will investigate modes of occupation, the human experience and issues around preservation.
We will study architecture’s influence on the site and city, and its role as an operator in the urban realm.

REMNANTS is an exploration of dealing with heritage and urban shells. We will interrogate the role of concept, position, and approach in the design process. Classes will be structured around the translation of the written word into 2D expressions, further into 3D abstractions, and ultimately into architectural space and form. We are interested in the ‘in between’ stages of the design process where the concept begins to take a physical shape. We will be operating at the scale of both the civic and the tectonic, investigating the relationship and junctions between old and new.

The renewed programme will be a studio, office and retail space, drawing upon the history of the building and site. Schemes are expected to acknowledge the civic needs of the site and engage with the social and cultural context in which the project is placed. Students are to demonstrate an understanding of wider urban issues and demonstrate an understanding of the implications that design gestures has on users.

The culminating body of work include a series of incremental exercises which translate a concept into a tangible space,. These will continuously feed into the final architectural outcome. Writing will form a part of the design process, with reflective critical texts accompanying the process regularly.

The scale of the architectural project is medium.

with Yvonne Meng and Phil Burns

St Kilda Triangle ACCA

Linescapes

Messh Up!

Post Coal

Sam

SAM - Shepparton Art Museum - Lake Victoria, Shepparton.

“SAM will be a museum with the artist at its centre, a meeting place for the region’s people, providing captivating art experiences and connection to Aboriginality and multicultural origins of the region’s heritage.” - SAM Business Case

This studio calls for the design of a new gallery in the regional city of Shepparton (Shepparton Art Museum) displaying both the new and the existing SAM collection while celebrating the art/artist in each new proposal. Successful project outcomes will engage with both the immediate lakeside landscape and the greater Shepparton context while also bringing new visitors to the region. Existing context and rural regeneration will be key research topics explored within the studio. A series of design processes will be considered throughout the semester.

Studio Agenda
Using generative processes and techniques, students will undertake a series of weekly tasks exploring these methods as a design driver for each brief. Students will initially follow set processes (the recipe), often while selecting their own input (the ingredients). Ingredients will include site specific or cultural references, artistic practices or techniques, existing architectural styles or ornamentation methods. Outcomes will constantly be evaluated (conditions, arrangements and effects) and feedback loops will be used in subsequent iterations. Students will be required to critically analyse and discuss both their process of design and the final design outcome.

Designs will be reviewed against demonstration and authorship of the process, inputs and selected steps and overall performance of the final outcome. Students will develop a position on aesthetics as they progress through the semester. Students will be required to have a clear ambition at the outset of each task and both, individually and as groups, critically review the design outcome. Why is the process/end result used or presented worthwhile or have architectural merit?

Architectural representation and exploration
Students will investigate precedent architecture, researching, reviewing, redrawing and remodeling to understand the spatial and physical elements of architecture. Students will also visit prominent Melbourne galleries throughout the semester. Physical models will be required as students will transfer between digital and physical representations of process led investigations.

Semester Breakdown and Brief
Students will spend the first third of the semester engaged in specific research including a field trip to Shepparton, the existing SAM Gallery and local city based galleries. This information will be presented in the form of catalogued plans, diagrams, photographs and models. Students will also undertake three esquisses in the first half of semester;

1. Bird Hide – Lake Victoria (2 weeks)
2. Cafe and Amenities Block – Lake Victoria (2 weeks)
3. SAM Competition Brief, Gallery Design – (3 weeks)

The final brief for the studio will call for the design of a new art gallery, gallery café, and amenities block adjacent Victoria Lake in central Shepparton. The brief will be drawn from the Competition Brief for the SAM - Shepparton Art Museum as released in July 2016. Students will be encouraged to question the brief and explore other opportunities for additional program throughout the semester.

Studio times
Monday 6 - 9pm
Thursday 3 - 6pm

Studio Leader
Hannes McNamara, MUSK Architecture Studio

Notes:
1. Two full day site visits will be held throughout the semester.
2. Two full day workshops will be held throughout the semester.
3. A small number of classes will also be held in our studio in the Docklands

SHEPPARTON ART MUSEUM, SEMESTER 02, 2017 - HANNES McNAMARA

Self-Interested Space Collective

Shopping Your Way Out

SITE: FEDERATION EAST - Bordered by Flinders Street, Russell Court and Princes Walk, off the Yarra

BRIEF: The students will design a mixed use shopping development which also includes office space (and possibly apartment). The students will design the overall urban scheme and then work up one of their buildings in detail. The QV development in Melbourne’s CBD is a similar model in respects to brief. The brief will include investigations into zero carbon energy loop options for powering the project.

CONCEPT: The concept behind this studio is to design a mini section of the city which is both a building (or buildings) and public space with plazas and laneways. Koolhaas has analysed shopping as a predominant social activity in the contemporary world in the Harvard Guide to Shopping, and so we will be looking at this analysis and analysing ways to combat the constant commodification in the city as described in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

ISSUES / LEARNING OUTCOMES:
Students will deal with the following issues and tasks:
The planning of a city block, public spaces, shops and offices.
The morphology of the city edge – designing between the CBD grid, the Yarra and Federation Square.
The organisation and design of social activity.
The aesthetics and critique of shopping as a social activity.
The role of the image in the public building in the 21st century city.
The design of a public building and public spaces.
Study the evolution of design techniques and their relation to architecture.

Reference:
Rem Koolhaas - The Harvard Guide to Shopping
Guy Debord – The Society of the Spectacle
Marshall McLuhan – The Hot and the Cool
Hal Foster – The Art Architecture Complex

Toby Reed and Anna Nervegna are directors of Nervegna Reed Architecture. Toby Reed and Anna Nervegna’s projects include the White House Prahran, the Arrow Studio, the PEP Dandenong (Precinct Energy Project) and large scale urban designs in China. The PEP Dandenong lead the way in Australian architecture for green power solutions on an urban scale, being the first precinct in Australia to be powered by co-generation. NRA also makes architectural videos such as “Dr Caligari Moves to the Suburbs - the Architecture of Edmond and Corrigan” and ‘Future Happiness’ (with MAP).

NERVEGNA REED ARCHITECTURE STUDIO
BY TOBY REED + ANNA NERVEGNA
MONDAYS 1 - 4 / THURSDAYS 4 - 7

www.n-r.com.au

2017

Design research project

Master studios

Bachelor studios: Designing Process

Bachelor studios: Critical Observation and Proposition

Bachelor studios: Materialising Architectural Ideas

Bachelor studios: Architecture and the City

Final year projects