Living Island

Ben Waters

Studio Description

A future event. Structures for togetherness. Stages, shelters, infrastructure. Temporary community and cultural spaces. Contextual design through looking and making. Technical and resilient. Counter-cultural self-building. Simple, open and covered structures. Material culture and networks. Conservation and reuse.

Studio Outcomes

This semester’s iteration of the studio focuses on the design of structures that support cultural events, hosted within the volcanic crater island at Tower Hill – Koroitch. This is a landscape charged with layered histories - abundance, culture, human and ecological violence, and more recently, regeneration.

A small gem of a building sits at the centre of the island: a Robin Boyd–designed, tent-like structure with a roof sprinkled in scoria stones. Originally conceived as a museum space, the building feels almost portable - as if it could be packed up and moved - yet at the same time it is deeply grounded in its geological context.

Through this studio, you will consider architecture’s relationship to time: fast and slow, deep and shallow, here and now. The work will centre on three parallel design projects:

1. An Event Program
2. A New Event Structure
3. Conservation and Reuse of the Boyd Building

First nations seasonal calendars are understood as event cycles rather than fixed points in time. The migration of eels, a prevailing wind, the emergence of insects - these are signals that the environment is shifting into a new cycle. Your projects will acknowledge and express these temporal layers and engage with community groups, ecological systems, contemporary cultural authors, and Indigenous perspectives to inform your proposal.

Through workshops, we will work collectively on a studio research project, building models of proto–event structures. Close study of historical and counter-cultural references - through drawing and physical model-making - will be foundational to your design work later in the semester.

Your final projects will be developed individually, but we operate as a studio collective. Through a field trip to Tower Hill to meet with Traditional Owners, visits to Robin Boyd’s Walsh Street House, and lectures from visiting architects and historians, we will develop a shared understanding of the cultural and architectural context of the studio.

Past and on-going studio partners and collaborators include Worn Gundidj Aboriginal Co-Operative, Robin Boyd Foundation, Prof. Philip Goad, Lovell Chen, and many other special guests.

Studio Leader/s

Ben Waters is an architect and founder of Waters Architects, a regional based architecture practice working on community, housing and cultural projects. Ben also leads S-I Projects – a design agency working at the intersection of technology, ecology and cultural heritage. Ben is a Creative Practitioner – Educational Fellow at MSD.

Readings & References

• Plants: Past, Present and Future - Zena Cumpston, Michael-Shawn Fletcher, Lesley Head
• Kevin Lynch – What Time is this Place?
• Shelter Cookbook - Leopold Banchini and Lukas Feireiss
• New Directions in Japanese Architecture - Robin Boyd
• Gunyah Goonie + Wurley – The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia – Paul Memmott
• In Time with Water – Nigel Bertram and Catherine Murphy

Media and Medium (learning workshops provided in-studio)

• LiDAR Scanning
• Photography
• Model Making
• GIS Mapping
• Rhino + Vray

Schedule:
Thursday  3pm-9pm

Off-site Activities:
Tower Hill

Contact Handbook