Beyond Performance

There is no doubt that the continued demolition of our existing built infrastructure is no longer viable. We must advocate for our existing built environment and work to re-purpose within the framework of growing cities and changing civic needs. Performing arts venues, often assigned to grand new ‘city-shaping’ buildings and ‘iconic’ locations are in fact, well suited to adaptive re-use and the provisional ‘bump-in, bump-out’ nature of stage sets might lend some clues to this provocation.

Beyond Performance is premised on a belief that architecture, as a spatial artform, should transport us, inspire, challenge, and excite us to contribute to an evolving cultural and aesthetic discourse as well as respond to environmental imperatives. Through detailed analysis of the existing found condition, precedent studies, and investigations into works by a select group of artists, the studio looked for ways to harness new aesthetic compositions that respond to both climate realities and societal cultural need; ultimately asking students to design a Community Opera House at the site of an under-utilised industrial building complex, in CBD Melbourne’s fringe suburb, Clifton Hill.

Working collaboratively, students’ projects grapple with trying to reconcile a ‘grand’ opera tradition with a humbler community-placed model that responds to current global issues and specific cultural nuance. Simultaneously working towards a poetic response that places conceptual narrative alongside pragmatic technicality.

Work presented will capture conceptual narratives in large and colourful overture drawings, and technical reconciliation is explored through a series of 1:20 models, and 1:5 sectional details.

Studio Leaders: Danielle Peck

Image: Dancers perform Pina Bausch’s choreography from “The Rite of Spring” interpreted from the Igor Stravinsky work. Photograph by Stephanie Berger courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music.