Rear Window

Rear Window Studio operates in the urban centres where contemporary global phenomena such as globalisation or touristification are challenging and transforming the image, life, and interaction with our cities.

The word “manifesto” comes from the Latin manifestus which means: ‘detected in the act’, ‘evident’, make visible’. Just as an architectural manifesto the studio will question the conventions of urban space found in contemporary ‘everyday’ life. Students will generate and imagine a miniature city that makes visible an alternative reality within the city by experimenting, inventing, questioning, and establishing new urban conditions.

The studio recovers Koolhaas’s concept of ‘culture of congestion’ aiming to break the homogenous pattern of the current urban fabric, interrogating and challenging some of the existing social and cultural habits and proposing new ones.

Rear Window proposes to collaboratively complete the design of a contemporary urban SCENE (s) in Melbourne CBD. The studio will be divided into three different phases, three interlinked and progressive projects, each of them with its own objectives, processes, and outcomes:

Project A | Proverb Transcripts: the invention and transcription of a collection of contemporary urban situations and conditions (social events) which generate city and construct society expressed as visual proverbs.

• Final Submission: Week 4/12
• Design Strategy: Collage and Rhetorical Devices
• Primarily Mode of Notation: Hybrid Drawing + Model (Collages and Diagrams)

Project B | City- Rooms (City- Bangs): three social interactive machines or micro theatres infiltrated in the existing fabric of the city.

• Final Submission: Week 8/12
• Design Strategy: Windows without glass +Cross-Programming + Neoplasticism
• Primarily Mode of Notation: Hybrid Drawing +Model (Vertical and Oblique Projections)

Project C | Urban Choreography: a street scene orchestrating the situation(s), conditions, rooms, etc. and its layers not simply as an architectural design but mostly as an architectural score.

• Final Submission: Week 12
• Design Strategy: Thinking in Images (O. M.Ungers) + Layering and Strips (Koolhaas) + Music Scores
• Primarily Mode of Notation: Hybrid Drawing +Model (Horizontal and Oblique Projections)

There are several main conceptual/theoretical references that students have to engage with to complete this studio. A number of readings and other resources such as films, videos and artwork will be provided during the semester.

The studio will encourage the exploration of an expanded conceptual, programmatic and visual approach to architecture not necessarily aligned with disciplinary definitions, standard roles and ordinary outputs bringing together different disciplines such as art, theatre, cinemas, music and dance.

The studio will be run alongside with Rear Window Advanced Architecture Studies Unit in which students will test how to articulate, document, and communicate processes, findings, and implications of the Rear Window studio.