Spencer 2 Spring: AWOL

Spencer2Spring (S2S) is a bachelor's of architecture design studio interested in understanding and archiving Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid, and in translating the collected information into architectural intent by applying a particular design methodology that requires students to look at the city as a design precedent.

The methodology requires students to document existing building elements and extract systems that describe their relationship to the city’s public realm. These systems are later utilised as driving concepts for a final project which brief and site change every semester.

Since its inception in 2018, the studio has compiled student findings in what we refer to as the Hoddle Grid Catalog, an online repository of Melbourne’s CBD which currently holds over 160 individual entries. S2S' approach to architectural program is to explore and utilise building elements to mediate spatial conditions generated by seemingly incompatible programs.

AWOL2
This semester's iteration, AWOL2, is focused on the adaptive reuse of the existing Telstra Lonsdale Exchange building, located close to the intersection of Queen and Lonsdale streets. Each student was assigned one level of the existing structure to repurpose into a vertical architecture school including a city archive and dwellings in addition to teaching and learning spaces.