Campus Commoning:
A Hauntology of Jacksons Hill

Alessandro Zambelli

Studio Description

“Haunting […] happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time.” (Fisher, 2012)

‘Hauntology’ argues that people and places never really disappear, that they can, from time-to-time, return. In parallel with Naomi Barun’s Masters Landscape studio, we will work, architecturally, with these temporal ‘stains’ and ‘breakages’. We will also engage with ideas of ‘Commons’ and ‘Commoning’; these are generally understood as a set of practices designed to broaden the stakeholdership of place; especially to those who belong to that place and who have been displaced or disenfranchised from it.

Our site is on Jacksons Hill near Sunbury. Once the home of the “Marin balug clan of the Woi wurrung” (Chamberlain, 2015) it became home to a series of educational buildings, until becoming largely abandoned in 2009.

Studio Outcomes

Upon this palimpsest of pre- and post-colonial inhabitation, therefore, your proposals will reinforce the recurring educational character which still haunts the site by proposing:

• Specialist Trade/Craft School or related programme.

Designed to protect and encourage the reuse of architectures which live on at this site, your proposals will also acknowledge those others which have long gone, simultaneously preparing for the architectures to come. You will design places to learn to repair and work with the buildings which already exist on site and beyond, but which will include R&D materials facilities in order to prepare for the future.

Your buildings will help do two things really well; teach how to repair the old, while researching the new.

Studio Leaders

My name is Dr Alessandro (Alex) Zambelli. I am an architect who ran a small practice in London between 2000 and 2013, and an academic whose funded and published research into both the commons (this recent essay should give you a flavour: ‘Period Property in Sought-after Area’: 2,500 Years of Digging and Building at St George’s Hill in The Journal of Architecture) and architectural interdisciplinarity (try my little book from a few years back: Scandalous Space: Between Architecture and Archaeology) directly informs some of the studio themes. I was also co-convener of the very recent AHRA 2023 Conference, ‘Situated Ecologies of Care’.

Readings & References

Fisher, Mark. "What Is Hauntology?". Film Quarterly 66, Fall, no. 1 (2012): 16-24.

Klippmark, Pauline. "Haunted Colonialism: Space, Place and Colonialism in the Babadook." In Law, Lawyers and Justice: Through Australian Lenses, edited by Kim D. Weinert, Karen Crawley and Kieran Tranter, 129-43. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.

Davis, Colin. "Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms." French Studies 59, no. 3 (2005): 373-79

Bollier, David. "Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm." In The Next System Project [Blog], edited by David Bollier. Washington D.C.: The Democracy Collaborative, 2016.

Delsante, Ioanni, and Alessandro Zambelli. "Architectural Agency and the Commons." The Journal of Architecture 28, no. 1 (2023): 1-6

Anything from: Thomas, Katie Lloyd, ed. Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice. London: Routledge, 2007.

Memmott, Paul. Gunyah Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia. Updated ed., 2022

Page, Alison, and Paul Memmott. Design: Building on Country. First Knowledges. Edited by Margo Neale. Port Melbourne, Vic.: Thames & Hudson Australia/National Museum Australia, 2021.

Cumpston, Zena, Michael-Shawn Fletcher, and Lesley Head. Plants : Past, Present and Future. First Knowledges. Edited by Margo Neale. Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2022.

Schedule:
Monday 12pm-3pm & Tuesdays 12pm-3pm in MSD 139 

ABPL90437 Design Studio C is an Early start subject. The ballot is held online at the beginning of O-week, opening on Monday 19 February and closing the morning of Tuesday 20 February. There is some preparatory online work to be completed during the week. Teaching begins with an all day, in person, compulsory Symposium on Friday 23 February.

Off-Site Activities:
Jacksons Hill, Sunbury

Contact Handbook