2018

Currently most creative industries operate on a global scale. In the last decades there has been an enormous output of work exposed through a virtual platform accessible to everybody.

Our combined and shared outputs have led to a marginalisation of individual strengths. Architecture seem to have lost its ability to proactively engage with its audience. Or did it ever? Buildings designed in Australia differ no more that those designed on other continents. There seems to be an acceptance of global trends represented in glossy renders as if we are reading a fashion magazine. When we look at advertising the same people in the same environments appear to sell us the same culture we want to subscribe to. However it seems we can’t recollect the actual product or its need for us to have it. Something strange seems to be happening...

A cinematic approach to rediscover architecture?

This studies unit will search for a reading of the ‘origin’ image of current architectural and urban design practice with cinema as a comprehensible example. In cinema the story or its meaning seem to have become second to the form in which it is delivered. The visual language of the film often overrules the character building and its special effects are a substitute for the tension or complexity of the narrative.

The same structures seem to be used and re-used to control an optimised version of itself for an audience that is pre-decided, prescribed, tested and eventually economised to sustain a maximum pro t. But which  lm did we actually see?

In 2018 all films are the same. In 2018 all architecture is the same.

The transformation of creative cultural industries has not happened suddenly. This studies unit will investigate the slow change into this hypernormalised state using cinema, architecture and urban design, (others?) to not only challenge the perceived blandness but search for possibilities to exploit it through drawing, filming, analysing, curating and editing.

Rutger Pasman - Fri 9.30-12.30
2018/S2 _This studies unit will be delivered in combination with the The Road Warrior studio.

Design-Make studies unit in collaboration with Strawberry Fields Festival and Tocumwal Town Hall

Paper is a universally found, easily available material of natural origin. It is cheap in production, eco-friendly and easy to recycle and re-use.

Mass-produced paper products such as corrugated cardboard, paperboard, honeycomb panels, tubes are suitable for use as a building material in design and architecture.

Temporary events such as festivals, exhibitions or sporting events like the Olympics require structures that only need to last for a limited period of time. When they are demolished after a few days or months, their leftovers can have a significant impact on the local environment.

This studio will be the study of suitable way to use paper in architecture. This theme will be approached initially through series of precedent studies and experiments with the material itself.

With the collaboration of Strawberry Fields Festival and Tocumwal Town hall the students will get the opportunity to build an exhibition space to display Strawberry Fields 10th year anniversary retrospective exhibition inside the Town hall.

The students will design and build physical 1 :1 cardboard structures which will offer a range of activities such as :

• Display walls
• Audio Coccon
• Amphitheatre area for videos
• Expression / feedbacks area
• Potentially a temporary bus station at the front of the Town Hall

Students will have to design innovative systems for their structures to be easy to construct and demount for transport. These fit-out elements, between architecture and furniture, will be pre-fabricated at Monash then transported to Tocumwal town and eventually re-used at Strawberry Fields Festival.

Notes :

• This studio involves 2 trips on site in Tocumwal (NSW) which is 280km from Melbourne. This includes one site visit the weekend of the 4th of August and one week on-site intensive construction from the 24th to the 31st of October. Participation in these events is a compulsory part of the curriculum.
• Students will be camping in Tocumwal. Students need to be self-su cient and come with their own cars.
• Budget for building materials to be expected (approx. $100 per students)

Tutor : Marie le Touze, Architect
Teaching Time : Friday 9:30am to 12:30pm

“During the last decade, there has been a growing interest in the architectural debate on the possibility of a political re-engagement of the discipline. Following the rise of neo-liberalism since the 1980’s, architectural discourse had severed itself from the political arena indulging in what has now been labeled as the post-political. Following the events from the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, 15-M and other manifestations of public discontent against globalization and other side effects of neo-liberalism, a generation of architects has been seeking to re-engage with political action...” – Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Well into the 21st Century: The Architecture of Postcapitalism?

Contemporary Political Architecture Productions will explore the work of several contemporary emergent and critical architecture practices around the world. Through the production of an archive, several catalogues and maps, the Unit will develop a critical understanding of the most relevant critical and political contemporary production in the discipline.

Who are they? How are they organized? Who, or what, are they responding to? Which is their history? What do they do? What
do they produce? What architecture are they proposing? Which are their politics?

Leandro Cappetto - Monday 9:30 to 12:30
Paired with ‘the Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal City’, Friday 10 to 5

Exploring the legacy of the Small Homes Service

GRAND PLANS is a research-led studies unit, culiminating in material that will contribute to a commemorative exhibition focussed on Robin Boyd and the Small Homes Service in 2019.

Tuesdays 3-6pm
with:
Charlotte Day (Director, MUMA)
Naomi Stead
Virginia Mannering

A dialog between Melbourne and Barcelona

Part I – The Grid and The City

Is it possible to reread Melbourne from the way we understand Barcelona? How can we stablish parallels between both cities?

Barcelona is considered one of the densest cities in the world, with almost 58.000 habitants per square kilometre in the downtown. A single block on its grid contains, in some cases, more than 500 people. Every day 150.000 vehicles pass through the Eixample district more than they do through Manhattan. Its regular and homogenous grid configures a regular and isotopic block of 113x113m that distributes its architecture and variety of uses evenly, without relegating them to distinct areas. On the other hand, Melbourne has growth exponentially in the last years due to an extensive grid, becoming a very low-density city. However, we can draw an interesting reading of the later development of the Melbourne block from how Robert Hoddle initially had understood. From Melbourne town until Brunswick, the block has been transformed in many different ways. So, can Melbourne’ and Barcelona’s grid be mutually beneficed?

To answer these questions, this studio will study the structure, the form and the shape of the city. Recognizing through the streets, plots and buildings the different forms of urban growth. We will work on the large scale to find out the reasons why Ildefons Cerdà (in 1860) and Robert Hoddle (in 1837) and its subsequent development. We will deal with issues related to mobility, infrastructure, topography and the territory.

Part II – The Grid and The Street

The city is not a blank canvas. This studio views the city as a continuous project, such as a series of layers that are settled over time and which are the evidence of the history and culture of the place. That is why at this stage we will work within the midscale, where we will study the features of both cities' streets. Understanding the street as the urban element that better represents the city, and employing the tools of morphological analysis, we will find out the various features that make the city works: the layout of the street, its longitudinal and cross section, the front (façade) and the back (patio), the ground floors, and the rooftops.

To better concentrate the effort of the class, we will work around two axes, respectively. In the case of Melbourne: Russell St. - Lygon St., which born along the Yarra river, in the initial Hoddle grid, and continues north through several city suburbs becoming one of the most important commercial strips in Melbourne. On the other hand, in Barcelona we will study Urgell St. - ParaHel Av. A vertical street that links the old district of Sarria - St. Gervasi with the sea, passing near by the historical quarter of Barcelona

This stage will be a seminar course. The students will work collectively as a research team using drawings and models for describing and proposing, but they will also study "on site" by: interviewing residents, elaborating photographic reports, videos, surveying ... This all will conform an inventory of opportunities. By groups, students will give a critical view and elaborate a real proposal in response to the topics, providing a strategic and systematic solution to both cases of study.

Part III – The Grid: Block by Block.

By observing and interrogating what is going on each individual block we will test five ways for rethinking Melbourne’s grid by: inserting, dismantling, adding on, pasting and replacing.

In this stage, each student will have to materialize the urban strategy worked collectively to respond by means of architecture and urban design to the problems of the site. Improving the living conditions of its inhabitants and providing a current way of understanding Melbourne through Barcelona.

ARC 2018: STUDIES UNIT
Mondays from 4.30 to 7.30
Professor: Eduard Fernàndez

Digital fabrication in the popular culture of architectural theory and practice promises to return the designer to the traditional role of builder. As a result, architects have postulated a digital form of building-craft. Unfortunately, the promise of computation in architecture is based on a misrepresentation of history. Architects do not craft buildings. Architects make drawings and models. Architectural craft, whether digital or analog, exists in the embodied relationship between the architect and the tool she employs. Despite appearances, computational techniques maintain the traditional separation between architect and building.

Through the digital design and fabrication of monstrous, robotic drawing equipment, the Medieval MonsterslRobots Studies Unit will critique the place of digital design and fabrication within the history and theory of architectural practice. Over the course of the Unit, students will examine and analyze the rhetoric of monstrosity in architectural theory, reevaluate the role of computational practices within architecture, and demonstrate corollary digital architecture theories.

Work in the Studies Unit will be carried out through weekly reading discussions, digital design and fabrication tutorials, and the manufacture of a monstrous, robotic drawing tool. Reading discussions and digital tutorials will develop analytical and technical skills. Creation of the robotic device will provide experience in critical use of manufacturing technologies for invention. On completion of the unit students will be able to interpret the role of monstrosity as a cultural tool, elaborate on the relevance of monstrosity to contemporary architectural discourse, ingeniously employ manufacturing workflows, and reinvent the relationship between equipment, drawing, and building.

Tuesdays, 2:00 to 5:00pm
The Medieval Monsters|Robots Studies Unit is offered by Dr. Jason R Crow.

In this unit, the students will learn the fundamental tools of Revit architecture; How to do an integrated project working with Building Information Modelling (BIM), understanding the BIM Workflow as a standard in the local and international industry; learn how to represent each phase of a project with Revit architecture.

Location | Thursday PM 6:00-9:00
Studio Tutor | Vicente Osorio

Being, in part, a research seminar examining the links between story, space, and architectural image. Examining tools, techniques and precedents, and producing written, scripted, and imaged narratives that interface with a latent and slumbering architectural truth.

System Shock (Sem_01/2016) examined cliches, formal pitfalls and flawed transcription of meaning within generative image-making. System Stories expands this remit to explore problems and underlying inconsistencies in the first and strongest simulative tool; the story.

Students will be guided through selected readings and concept-worlds to unpick latent ideas and assertions in the stories and tall tales spun and woven around the city.

Thursday 4-7
Dr Tom Morgan

The Context:

Heron Island.
460km north of Brisbane. 3.6m above sea level. 300m long.
800m wide.
12ha in area.

Heron Island is located on the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef: the largest living structure on the planet. Since the 1950s it has been the site of scientific research and home to Heron Island Research Station: an internationally renowned coral research facility that is the oldest and most significant of its kind in the region. The island is particularly important as it is located on a coral cay containing over 70% of the total biodiversity of the Reef.

Two devastating coral bleaching events during 2016 and 2017 have had a profound impact on the Great Barrier Reef. Nature Magazine published a paper in April this year indicating that about one third of the 2,300 kilometres of the reef surveyed had died or been significantly transformed by this bleaching. These events have refocused the debate in Australia as to how to respond to the threat of climate change and exposed the ongoing tension between competing national and global economic, environmental and political interests. The history of Heron Island reflects this conflict. It housed a turtle cannery and fisheries in the early 20th century and now provides eco-tourism, education and research services.

While architectural practice often relegates sustainable design to a pragmatic search for material and energy efficiency, this studio seeks to interrogate and pursue environmental design as a political and cultural act. It will build upon a previous studio run by Monash Architecture in 2016. Heron Island is perhaps a metaphor for our planet – a place of increasingly limited resources and ecological sensitivity that demands we carefully consider our context and poses the challenge: where to from here?

The Brief:

Working in groups of 3 or 4, students will conduct a site visit and analysis in week one with the view to create a new master plan for the island. We will be discussing with the Research Station managers their plans for self- sustainability via solar power, replacement of existing building stock and the development of a new Interpretive Centre (the program for this is yet to be determined but will form part of the project)

For the remainder of semester students will pursue individual architecture projects coordinated in relation to their group’s master plan, which will include key facilities and accommodation requirements laid out in the program.

Students will be able to engage in a range of thematic, conceptual, technical and programmatic topics as they see fit. Key questions of the studio could be: What are the technological issues on an off-the-grid site with no access to gas, sewerage or waste disposal? How can we design in a way that is both ecologically sensitive and culturally robust? What are the political and social dimensions of an architectural practice dedicated to sustainable design? How does the threat of climate change impact our approach as architects?

The Travel:

This is a travelling studio, with a visit to Heron Island planned for the end of week one (shouldn’t all architectural design studios begin with a stay on a remote tropical island!). This will allow students to thoroughly document the site(s), interrogate the various ideas behind the studio and experience firsthand the facilities and natural environment of the reef.

The trip will run for 5 nights / 6 days from Friday 27th July to Wednesday 1st August. Students will be housed within the Research Station and have access to their facilities, including computer room, library and seminar rooms. Bookings have already been made for studio group, with plane tickets, boat travel to and from the island, accommodation and meals provided. The total cost inclusive of everything is expected to be around $1600 (a small subsidy to help reduce this expense is being explored and interest free loans are also available through the university: www.monash.edu/financial-assistance/student-loans)

The Program:

The adjacent list details the existing program, which has the potential to be altered or re-imagined in relation to the group’s conceptual or programmatic design objectives. Further information will be gathered during the site visit in week one, including current floor areas, potential gaps in the program and existing conditions of facilities.

The Schedule:

Classes will run from 11am-5.30pm on Wednesdays.
The group master plan submission will be due in week 3. By mid-semester students should have a preliminary architecture scheme that plugs into the broader master plan with a fully resolved architectural design project by semesters end.

The Studio Leader:

Andrew Simpson / www.asimpson.com.au

Currently very little is understood about the causes of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME/Chronic fatigue Syndrome (CFS). The physical manifestations of this illness however are incredibly visual and severe. People living with ME/CFS need to be in complete control of their energy expenditure. Their bodies no longer hold the ability to conserve and regain energy completely changing the way people with ME/CFS navigate and utilize both the macro and micro scaled built environment.

This is a real project. A 32 year old woman has been living in an old persons home (dementia ward) on the Gold Coast for the past 5 years. This womans mother is looking to design accommodation for her daughter, a carer, and several other individuals with similar conditions. This studio will explore designing for people with issues relating to sensory and spacial perceptions from the larger urban scale, through traffic networks and public spaces, through to a multi-unit residential facility.  is studio will take an experimental approach, and look to challenge the current social and political standpoint of ME/CFS.

As part of this studio a series of talks will be put together from sufferers and advocates of ME/CFS, along with environmental researchers, anthropologists and psycologists.

Wednesdays 10:30am - 4:30pm
BLOXAS: A practice for empathic and experimental architecture

With the rapid growth of population combined with the market demand for high density cities the current trend of living typologies have evolved into high density vertical communities. With these building typologies becoming more and more common and essential to the urban fabric of the city, we begin questionin1g what the architectural impact and significance these buildings have on our society and as architects what are our responsibilities in producin1g a better response.

The definition of the tower typology has varied throughout history with the earliest conceptions of “towers” in the forms of monumental gestures suggesting immortality with the likes of the Pyramids, however throughout history it is evident that the progression of these iconic structures have begun taking up new identities and symbolisms of power, technology, religion or more recent economic and financial success.

With the current ongoing internationally hyped tower competition, by "Beulah" we see this as a great opportunity to question what the current tower typology identity is/should be. As a very major live development project to the city of Melbourne, this brief creates an interesting 1proposition that questions the mindset of major developments with what a "responsible" architectural solution should be for such an iconic building in the Melbourne City's Skyline and identity. Using the competition brief as a reference point, the key focus will be on the outlined so called program "X". Outside of clear guidelines for a development component, hotel component and some communal programs the brief also provides the freedom for the participants to nominate/suggest an additional program that they feel would benefit the precinct, project and general public. The studio intends on exploring all the essential components to the tower before experimenting with "Program X" and questioning the potential these components could have in disrupting/challenging the conventional perceptions of the model and in defining the new Tower identity.

Michael Mei
Frank Chao, Benjamin Chi

“The metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. The Mettropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is no escape, unless it offers that, too...” – Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas, 1978.

“Architecture has always been subservient to the ruling authorities, (...) to the power system in force. Architects whose principles oppose these priorities can only postulate, by means of projects, conjec- tures anticipating an alternative regime. Often they are the harbingers of the future.” – Brussels -a Manifesto-, Pier Vittorio Aureli, 2007

Intervening the Melbourne CBD, the Studio will develop a critical and questioning agency against the neoliberal consensus that regulates our city. The historic agreement between architecture, capitalism and the city will be hardly attacked.

The ultimate goal of this Studio is to produce a project, in the form of an architecture manifesto, within and against the contemporary neoliberal city.

An architecture project is a theory. Is a theory about the society in which we live, its history and its future. As a new theory, it challenges existent theories, to propose a new way to understand the present, and visualize a future. A manifesto is a provocation. It has no intention of becoming real, but of proposing a new problem to be discussed. An architecture-manifesto is a provocation in a disciplinary language.

The architecture that a manifesto presents usually is monumental, theatrical, and utopian, but at the same time ridiculous, impossible and incorrect.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal City will study the Melbourne CBD as the territorial manifestation of the neoliberal model. As manifestation, the city, and its architecure, registers and transmits the political, economical and social forces that relate within it; and makes them strong and durable.

But, what is the neoliberal city? To describe it, we need to critically understand the relations of power of the neoliberal condition under which we live. The studio will carefully look at several readings linking the city and neoliberalism, to produce a precise architectural description of the neoliberal city, and critically act within it.

The Studio will explore several prjetc-manifestos, looking for a critical language within the discipline that can question both architecture and the neoliberal city.

Students will explore a critical project within and against the neoliberal city, under the idea of A CITY WITHIN THE CITY.

Leandro Cappetto - Friday 10 am to 5 pm
Paired Studies Unit: Contemporary Political Architecture Productions

Metropolitan Melbourne is rapidly changing. This is not a new thing but as urban growth on the edges of the city become slowly occupied the pressures on Melbourne’s existing urban fabric to rebuild itself becomes more visible.

As a result the livability in the world’s most livable city is under threat. Politics is calling for more highways, railways and new airports to accomodate existings and new flows through our urban landscape. Economics argue for relocations and allocations of future development sites. Social scientists are looking for more data and new techniques of engagement. Meanwhile developers are pushing a constricted model for our needs and desires.

What do we as architects have to offer?

This studio looks for new types of living and working in an urban environment that is constantly changing and under pressure by multiple disciplines. We will use design to investigate and propose alternative methods of achieving urban densities required to accommodate Melbourne’s future residents.

You will propose and test strategies that can be both pragmatic and visionairy. This will require teamwork, individual dilligence, analytical and projective abilities.

Site

The site sits between Docklands and Moonee Ponds Creek on the junction of many streams of 20th century mobility in what was formerly the West Melbourne Swamp. The site once used to be a gathering place for large groups of people and animals as space and food was considered abundant. For a short period after Batman’s arrival the site became a place for leisure and natural enjoyment for Melbournians weekend activities. Then came the waste of technological advancement...

You will search for other ways of analysing a site by drawing, diagramming, model making, reading and re-drawing.

Infrastructure

New infrastructure to support the CBD of Melbourne and its surrounding suburbs is planned and under construction in the site. The sprawling of its existing railyards and highway infrastructure make the site feel as an unloved piece of scrap-land that has no value for its direct neighbours.

You will question the ongoing and proposed activities on, and surrounding the site by proposal.

Collective plan

We will aim to design a collective response to the site’s pressures and propose an exhibited outcome that allows for new neighbourhoods to include the historical, natural, economic and social pressures of an ever expanding and changing Melbourne.

You will design across scales between the individual and the city. The designs will be presented in the final year exhibition.

Rutger Pasman - Wed 9.30-16.30
2018/S2 _This studio will be delivered in combination with the Beyond Thunderdome studies unit.

Memorials and monuments across Australia recognise wars that Australians have fought abroad, but there is a lack of acknowledgement of the atrocities that occurred in Australia since European contact, such as the Frontier Wars. The aim of this studio is to develop a new type of twenty-first century civic place in Australia that champions human rights, including the acknowledgement and remembrance of the Frontier Wars in Australia. This civic place may extend beyond the memorialisation and remembrance of events (healing) to introducing more program to a central Melbourne site, such as documentation (evidence and justice) and learning (education) along with other possibilities.

Wednesdays 9.30am-3.30pm
Georgia Nowak (Archier) Georgia.Nowak@monash.edu
Timoth Moore (Sibling Architecture) Timothy.Moore@monash.edu

“In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.” – purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658

In this studio, we will examine the relationships that exist between architectural production and an expanded reading of site. Students will explore one of a set of linked cities, Auckland, Brisbane, Perth or Vancouver. These are cities that might have once been considered the ‘unruly edges’ of the British Empire, but are now regarded as ‘Beta Cities’ in the post-global order.

The studio asks students to challenge established discourses around the generic nature of global cities, but also admits the difficulty of establishing identity in urban territories that have erased or obscured their own histories, and in cultural frames that resist immediate understanding.

Building on the notion of the expanded site, we will be approaching our design work through disciplines adjacent and congruent to architecture such as critical writing, archival studies and archaeology. We will be charting and cutting through geologies in the vein of cartographers, then viewing and considering these unruly edges through the eyes of the landscape artist, the cinematographer and the street photographer.

Students will produce a museum/archive and a method for reading their chosen city through close scalar research methods and investigations. The semester will require both the development and refinement of a new kind of urban museum, as well as ongoing spatial research conducted through mapping, forensic reconstructions, cataloguing and the production of text.

Tutor: Virginia Mannering
Tutorials: Wednesdays 10:30am - 5pm
virginiamannering.com