Studio 03
Eternal Holiday
Peter Stasios
Studio Description
Once upon a time the majority of us would form a family through a hetrosexual marriage, from which we would hopefully raise two beautiful and intelligent children; our career path was something we would start after finishing our degree and we would most likely keep for our entire working life; the income earned through working would allow us to buy our own home and provide comfortably for our family; eventually we would retire, enjoying some years of respite before disappearing into the ground.
The homogenous post war understanding of the world and the accompanying parallels in an architecture guided by a consistent set of values no longer apply. It’s for this reason we are at the beginning of something, in that our previous definitions of work, domestic space and the city have been rendered obsolete and are in need of new definitions. Architecture needs to catch up with life
This studio attempts to diagnose something and propose something in response.
Eternal Holiday is interested in diagnosing the physical, social and cultural components essential to re-defining a new version of work and a city block. Having established a new set of values the studio will seek to arrange and give form to these emerging values, norms and rituals that have become synonymous with the contemporary condition.
Studio Outcomes
The first six weeks of the semester are informed by the idea that architecture should absorb into its “body the intelligence of the world” beyond it, and that architecture is defined by different kinds of knowledge. Through a series of weekly exercises we will look together at history and theory to understand how we have arrived at this point in time and collectively develop a critique. That stream will be accompanied with the research, modeling and drawing of specific precedents in order to generate understanding and begin speculating on architectural outcomes. Critically interrogating and diagramming precedents students will focus on exploring new programmatic configurations, structural arrangements and formal possibilities.
Through this curated supply of resources and exercises a conceptual position will begin to take shape as we begin to define the semester's specific project brief, a multistory work-space in the city. This body of research will form your mid-semester presentation as well as your examination of the site and its context.
The last half of the semester is dedicated to your personal projects, where there is an expectation for students to produce a considered architectural form and an ability to locate their projects within the emerging patterns of new social relations. Students will attempt to answer how their project responds to these changes and how it contributes to them.
Studio Leader
Peter Stasios is an architect that works across architectural practice and research. Having gained experience working on a variety of typologies as well as leading masters design studios at the Melbourne School of Design since 2017. Peter’s work is interested in using architecture as a vehicle to investigate accepted norms and orthodoxies that reside in the field and present alternative outcomes.
Readings & References
- Henri Lefebvre - Critique of Everyday Life
- David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs
- Looking Together – Michael Meredith
- Ludwig Hilberseimer - Metropolisarchitecture
- 51N4E – Double or Nothing
- Pier Vittorio Aureli – Recontextualizing Tafuri’s Critique of Ideology
- Arno Brandlhuber + Christopher Roth - Legislating Architecture
- Benjamin Bratton – The Revenge of the Real
Schedule Mondays and Thursdays 18:15-21:15