A museum for living

This studio will explore the phenomena of synesthesia, a condition in which one sensory experience involuntarily stimulates another sense. Someone with synesthesia might be able to taste different words or smell a song. We will simulate this ‘cross pollination’ of senses by using art, music, film and literature to generate architectural concepts and forms.

“The design process is based on a constant interplay of feeling and reason” - Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, 2010 p21

We will design by making, yielding unexpected outcomes which we will then critically analyse, revise and edit until we are happy with the result.

We will begin by alternating in class workshops building up a ‘toolbox’ of techniques, and exercises applying and testing these techniques on a series of interior spaces.

We will explore the ‘house museum’, a hybrid program combining dwelling and the display of artwork, blurring the lines of public and private. Melbourne has several examples of this already - Heide II, the Lyon Housemuseum and the Justin Art Museum. We will visit some of these during the semester.

The first exercises will focus on designing a single room within the house museum. After midsemester we will shift our focus to context and form, working through processes of generating and extracting knowledge of site, and experimenting with methods of form generation.

The semester will culminate with combining the sequence of interior spaces within a form designed for a site, however - “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey”.