Caring Culture

There is no denying that visiting a cultural destination, or experiencing and participating in cultural activities, be that a visit to an art gallery, quiet time reading in the library, attending a theatre production or a music concert among other things, has a positive effect on our well- being. Research also suggests that when art and culture is brought into a healthcare environment, there is a measurable positive effect on patients mental health, reducing stress, depression and pain. So if the arts are so good for us, shouldn’t they be viewed as essential?

‘Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life’ Pablo Picasso.

Caring Culture will explore how the architecture of cultural, public buildings can take on attributes of healthcare, and how spaces for care can fuse as places for culture.

Empathy, understanding and care are vital ingredients of a functioning society. By explicitly or perhaps even subtly fusing the highly public and celebrated spaces of achievement, grandeur and wonderment with the more traditionally private realms of struggle, sickness and less-fortune, we hope to advocate for greater social cohesion and enduring health benefits for all.

The semester 2, 2022 studio will adopt a mixed-use, community precinct in an inner-city Melbourne suburb as their testing ground. Students will be asked to study and understand the operational and aspirational agenda of an existing well-established Australian not-for- profit entity who is currently investigating how their built assets can better serve their community, on this site. Students will be required to create a collective return-brief in the early stages of the semester.

Alongside the key aspirations of this ‘client’, you will be asked to re- imagine the large scale urban site through the lens of 5 key principles: the Arts, Nature, Justice, Community and Religion. Projects will consider preservation, renovation and adaptation along-side radical re-invention and creation.

Working collaboratively will be a component of the semester and as a class you will be asked to deliver a coordinated precinct-scale response. This process demands dialogue, understanding and negotiating different points of view to ultimately present a co-authored project. There will be smaller group projects within the larger precinct, as well as opportunities for some to work individually on components of the site.

At Architecture Associates we take a special interest in critical representation and story-telling. As such, the studio will take on the challenge to ‘tell a community’s story’ through engaging techniques. There will be 4 key deliverables through which groups will work together to present and emphasise ideas: Narrative, Story-boarding, physical Model-making and short Films. Your designs will be scripts for voices
to be heard, and your architecture will be the set they are played out on. A diverse array of ‘actors’ will populate your projects, and through their eyes, your designs will be revealed and experienced.

Students can expect in this studio to develop skills in research, critical positioning and return brief execution. Students will be challenged with a complex array of both urban and socio-political contextual analysis, city-scale thinking and in juxtaposition, will learn how to scale these ideas into architecture from the ground up. The studio will introduce students to story-telling as an evocative communication tool, and together we will learn how to use basic filming equipment, lighting and editing software to deliver your final projects.