A Marverlous Order

Through an accumulative series of generative processes and severe consideration, editing and curation, students will work towards developing a sports and leisure centre at the nexus of transport, public and private programs at Mayor’s Park in Clifton Hill.

This will go somewhat in the way of the avant garde creations of Mr Squiggle (for anyone that may remember) or the Surrealist exercise of the ‘Exquisite Corpse’. The ‘Exquisite Corpse’ or ‘Cadavre Exquis’ is an exercise that came out of the Surrealist movement - artists collaborated blindly to piece together illustration of figurative body, unaware of the nature of the adjacent parts their collaborators had drawn.

In the studio , we will undertake the development of a similar strategy for developing design esquisses in the first half of the semester - using site research, site analysis and precedent studies. These esquisses will fuel abstract processes of artistic drawing and making, architectural model making, architectural drawing, and 3D modeling; producing a series of site charrettes Students will participate in an immersive site observation - observing, drawing, and cataloging site components. Research collected by students will form a collaborative publication.

Students will be given a series of explicitly chosen precedents, both local and international, with varying aspects of successful public/ civic activation. This will involve research, analysis and investigation of precedents and their Architects. The precedent plans, sections and 3D representations will meet with the site as a basis for stimulating proposals Further analysis will be required in order to identify successful aspects of these otherwise complex, challenging or nonsensical outcomes.

Design is a journey - and as such, students will be challenged to keep the outcomes of each and every design esquise. In essence, we begin the true design after mid-semester, having already accumulated much architectural flotsam and jetsam on site, alongside existing conditions and the immediate context. From this point on, the design process is one of critical editing and curating, towards developing a cohesive final product.