Reconfiguring the norm

• Course

  • • Bachelor of Architectural Design
    Semester 2, 2020

• Studio leaders

  • Adrian Fernandez
  • Marcella Palma |

‘reconfiguring the norm’ is an architectural/infrastructural investigation into different forms of storage, and its various material, sociopolitical and ecological dimensions. How does something as mundane as storage organise information, the city and contemporary life? Who is allowed access and who isn’t? What typological and programmatic frictions occur, and what falls in the gap between designed institutions and their hidden, undesigned counterparts?

Instead of entering through the front door of classical institutions such as the library or museum, students will rethink contemporary publics from the city’s back of house, designing projects that seek to open new spaces of appearance and collectivity and redesign conditions for connection in this increasingly default, closed world.

Students, in pairs, will begin the studio by expanding their definition of storage, looking critically beyond the digital into the storage of various elements such as plants, dead bodies, mail, high art, incarceration systems, museum specimens etc, developing spatial and analytical thinking at various scales for these types of storages - from the individual artifact, to the furnitures and structures they are housed in to the wider infrastructures these elements operate within. Students will then work individually on a series of small-scale public interventions to test their developed thinking, culminating in a final proposition on a chosen site within the wider extents of the Melbourne CBD that asks what it means to ‘turn a normative condition inside out.’

The studio will be structured in three segments:

Site and Systems: Developing spatial and analytical thinking on different types of storage across four scales: artifacts, furniture, structure and infrastructure. This thinking will be developed using a range of representation techniques, including orthographic drawings, mapping, model making and collaging.

Strategies and Tactics: Utilising the thinking developed on a range of small-scale public interventions to begin to understand and develop design strategies and concepts that are drawn from the initial thinking.

Proposal: A final proposition on a site chosen through developed analysis that aims to provide a position on the effects of turning normative storage conditions inside out, at the scales utilised in Sites and Systems.