willlful

  • Course

  • Studio leaders

      • Christopher Kelly
        • Architecture Workshop
      • Laurence Dragomir
        • Urban Designer + Co Founder of Urban.com.au

adj. c.1200,
“strong-willed,” from will (n.) + -ful. 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.”

The studio will examine how the private development of a city precinct can be optimized to create good public realm. We will interrogate how much ‘willfulness’ is required by engaging with various constraints - regulatory, existing conditions, neighborly demands - to explore a productive balance between the willful 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.

New Urban Professionals (NUPs) will work in pairs (2 or 3 students depending on numbers) to develop an architecture project within a new Master Plan for the old Cartlon United Brewery (CUB) site at the north end of the Swanston Street axis. NUP’s will research relevant history of the city and the site’s heritage fabric and test planning rules. You will understand the reasoning and social evolution behind the planning rules for the site.

Students will be given a developer brief to interrogate and test a range of planning outcomes. 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 physical model of the existing precinct context and working in groups will observe and analyse the existing site context, pedestrian use, street grain, and plot ratio to critique, diagram, propose and agree on a new Master Plan supported by new planning rules and a strong public realm + streetscape.

NUPs will work in groups to curate authentic precedents, speculate on appropriate programme, explain their relevance and provide a resolved design presented in plans, section and physical model. Each building will have to negotiate with their immediate neighbours within the larger whole and present a strong and considered response to the streetscape. NUPs will be graded on their architecture project by a jury of OUPs,as we all are, and the aggregate quality of the whole CUB site.

Deliverables:

  • Combined Group: New Master Plan with articulated ground plan and considered streetwalls + development controls for the whole CUB site at the top end of Swanston Street.
  • Smaller Groups of 3: Diagrams, architectural plans, sections and photomontages showing the organisational elegance, beauty and utility of a piece of the Master Plan.
  • Individual: One page written critique of the Existing Precinct and a set of distilled Master Plan diagrams of the Proposed Precinct.