Studio 14


Pre-Slime Sublime

Jane  Caught

This studio is available to students enrolled in ABPL90142 Studio C, ABPL90143 Studio D, and ABPL90115 Studio E.

Studio Description

Awe:    Something you feel when confronted with forces beyond your control: nature, the cosmos, chaos, human error, artificial intelligence, hallucinations.

Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery.’

Theodor Adorno

As global disruptions result in an increasingly post-global world, we turn our focus closer to home. But how do we understand a place that finds itself in radical flux?

This studio employs realtime assessment of local resources, systems and cultures through intensive investigation and application of opensource data mapping platforms.

The proposed site for a built outcome is the Royal Park Native Grassland Circle (Quor-nong). Students will propose an alternative site/solution for grassland reparation required due to building disruption.

Studio Outcomes

Students will construct and critique mapped temporal data sets across southeast Australia, interrogating what is left off current digital twin platforms; the intangible, the contested, the complex.

Simultaneous field explorations provide qualitative, sensorial perspectives; listening and consultative practices will provide complex layering of information.

Students will synthesise their findings into buildings responsive to future environments; providing civic, participatory infrastructure that enables communities to make sense of the complexity of their geographic region; to assist in forecasting change over time; and to collectively respond. The building will in turn act to shelter an aspect of potential future loss.

Tectonic investigations include temporary structures for material reuse / re-skinning / modular systems / biotechnologies / the edifice / extra-terrestrial technologies.

Studio Leaders

Having commenced her architectural studies at University of Melbourne and completing her degree at RMIT as part of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL), Jane co-founded the collaborative practice Sibling with a group of seven other multidisciplinary design practitioners in 2007, self-initiating alternative architectural outcomes within gallery and published contexts. In 2012 the group formalised to become a registered architectural entity whilst maintaining a strong culture of collaboration, research and alternative/self initiated practice, working across a wide range of scales.

Jane is now developing her independent, regenerative practice – Heliotope Studio – which pursues architectural and spatial outcomes that operate within the finite resources of planetary boundaries; and a renewed interest in the specificities of place. Her research, collaborations and tectonic studies contribute to the development of low carbon, climate-adaptive projects; with a focus on construction industry waste streams and local production economies and ecosystems.

Readings & References

  • Morton, Timothy; Ecology without Nature - Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Harvard University Press, 2007
  • N’arweet Caroline Briggs & Sarah Lynn Ryan; Gathering Space: Ngargee Djeembana Interim Research Document, ACCA 2021
  • Laily, Sean (guest editor); Energies – New Material Boundaries, Architectural Design (AD) May/June, Wiley 2009
  • Stoekl, Allan; Bataille’s Peak – Energy Religion and Postsustainability, University of Minnesota Press, 2007
  • Rose, Deborah Bird; Shimmer – When All You Love is Being Trashed, from: Tsing, A. et Al (ed.s); Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet – Ghosts of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2017
  • Varda, Agnes; The Gleaners & I, documentary film, 2000
  • Boned, Sara & Hirsenfelder, Ida (ed.s); Degrowth and Progress, L’Internationale, University of Gothenburg, 2021
  • Wolf, Matt; Spaceship Earth, documentary film, 2020
  • Werkmeister, Sarah (guest ed.); Ecologising Museums, L’Internationale, KASK / School of Arts of University College Ghent, 2016

Schedule Mondays and Thursdays 12:00-15:00
Off-campus Activities Week 3, $15

Contact Handbook

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