Unbounding Ground

Lucinda McLean

Studio Description

This is an immersive studio where you will work directly with your own fieldtrip experience of learning, camping, gathering, listening. Listening to the space of the dawn chorus and the acoustic horizon, waiting and listening to nature as it starts to trust you. Walking. You will be inspired by the bush + beach kinder program where children spend one day a week outside, interacting with the ground, the weather, in unstructured play.

This studio will consider the coastal edge environment threshold; the fringe dwellers of Wurnmarrinh, the thresholds of learning as young children take their first steps into the world beyond home, spatial thresholds, thresholds of sound. What do we walk upon, what do we walk with? How can children touch the ground and how can structures touch the ground? You will be curating / regenerating /growing / designing /maintaining / detailing a community + education space, with the site.

Studio Outcomes

Through this studio you will gain personal lived experience and understanding of First Nations Peoples’ aspirations to care for Country. We begin with a field trip, a Welcome to Country, an immersive experience of place. You will learn to think/design/curate across multiple temporal and spatial scales, from tides, to seasons, to generations. You will be encouraged to explore and experiment with means of communication, across a breadth of sensory mediums, undertaking design led explorations and refining skills in iterative observation and attending.

Deliverables will be prepared through both group work and individual work. You will experience and document place as a group and as an individual, in diverse ways. Students will individually develop their design responses, conscious of each step that they take, understanding architecture as a process and that ‘the making of the project is the project’.

Studio Leader/s

Lucinda McLean is a founding director of N M B W Architecture Studio, established in Melbourne in 1997. The practice design methodology is place-based with a strong focus on materiality and cultural experience. The focus on the relationships between things allows us to strategically link large and small actions in each environment, focus on both buildings and landscapes and create holistic, inclusive and culturally deep design responses.

Design teaching and research with an ongoing focus on the Mornington Peninsula and Westernport is entwined with practice work, engaging students directly with firsthand research, the community, stakeholders and contemporary issues.

Readings & References

Briggs, Carolyn. The Journey Cycles of the Boonwurrung.

Presland, Garry. The Place for a Village: How Nature has Shaped the City of Melbourne.

Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

Ingold, Tim. The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations.

Carson, Rachel. The Sense Of Wonder

Schedule:
Monday 12pm-6pm

Off-site Activities:
Mornington Peninsula

Contact Handbook