Studio 41
Create | Curate: Sensory (Re)Treat
Yui Uchimura
Studio Description
Can architecture create spaces that intimately attune our senses and selves to both creativity and craft?
A culture of design and making is richly ingrained into the psyche of Melbourne. Yet often, friction exists between creativity and craft; historical context and modern process; technical and conceptual; material and abstract; seclusion and interaction; and, the architectural product that is finished and complete, versus a speculative framework which allows for idiosyncratic contributions.
The studio will explore the spatial qualities and atmospheres conducive for collaborations between craft and creativity. Furthermore, the studio will enquire how these discourses are bridged between the workshop and dwelling, stimulated both by serendipitous social collision, and inspired by nature.
Architecture’s role as an existential art will be investigated, with an inquiry into how embodied memories work with design affordances to create possibilities for action, creation and creativity.
Studio Outcomes
The studio will begin with investigations into the technical, material, historical, geographical, and abstract facets of creation, by focusing on a range of approaches within a particular craft. Students will research historical relationships between craft processes and their ecological environments, considering how crafts can tap into and enhance our understanding of local ecological contexts.
These findings will inform the brief for the main project, which will explore the socioeconomics of shared resources through a community of residences and shared studio facilities, negotiating the dynamics between a sense of community and desire for personal creative space.
A focus on enactive design methods and sensory experimentation will encourage students to critically examine their own creative processes. Concepts will be articulated in three-dimensional forms that pay homage to the researched craft and sensory artistry. Students will explore design and detailing that is intimately informed by craft, culminating in highly tactile, sensory architectural spaces that tell a rich story of its inhabitants and community.
Studio Leader
YUI UCHIMURA is a Melbourne based architect with experience across the disciplines of architecture, graphics and fabrication in both Australia and Japan. She completed her Master of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, focusing her independent research on how architectural frameworks can facilitate dynamic, evolving spaces open to creative appropriation. Upon graduation, she continued to work in practices with a focus on creative collaboration with local craftspeople, such as Six Degrees & Projects of Imagination. Having also spent time in Japan studying timber fabrication and other traditional crafts such as washi paper-making and kintsugi, her primary interest is how a dialogue between design and tangible craft processes can facilitate a more enduring architecture grounded in the local people and environments.
Readings & References
- Holl, Steven et al, ‘Questions of perception: Phenomenology of Architecture’
- Noë, Alvar; ‘Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature’
- Pallasmaa, Juhani; ‘The Eyes of the Skin’
- Pallasmaa, Juhani; ‘The Thinking Hand’
- Rasmussen, Steen Eiler; ‘Experiencing Architecture’
- Sennett, Richard; ‘The Craftsman’
- Soetsu, Yanagi; ‘The Unknown Craftsman’
- Various; ‘Landscape as Protagonist’
- Zumthor, Peter; ‘Atmospheres’
- Zumthor, Peter; ‘Thinking Architecture’
Schedule Tuesdays 15:15-18:15 and Thursdays 18:15-21:15