THE/01
OPEN STUDIO:
RESEARCH & PRACTICE CO-HABITING ON TECHNICAL LANDS
Opera Aperta + BKK (An Open Work Studio)
Alan Pert, Deb Adams and Jonathan Mills
Studio Description
Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress – a vision à la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe. (Pure War, 46)
This semester Opera Aperta will revisit the theme of Technical Lands and the reuse of Industrial Form in partnership with BKK Architects. Using the post-industrial context of Fishermans Bend with its fragile ecologies, flooding, contamination, adjacency to the river, industrial heritage and pre-colonial histories, students will be asked to respond to ideas of ‘accidents’ (environmental, material, social or spatial) - the studio will as such explore the debri of manufacturing and transform this into a landscape of reconfigured parts. The Studio will be presented in three parts: Part Accident | Part Architecture | Parts Unknown
Open Work Studio allows students to pursue independent design thesis projects on common ground (at Fishermans Bend) and through shared interests in defining the concept of ‘performance’ (atmospheric / environmental / material / social / spatial) in relation to the discipline of architecture. Students are invited to explore themes around: industrial form, landscape futures, contamination, restoration, repair, automation, assemblage, habitation, hybrids, incompleteness, architecture as event, preservation versus progress, archaeology, open form, open aesthetics, and the open city amongst other relevant challenges. The “dust” and “debri” of production in car manufacturing around the world today offers an original viewpoint from which to explore a new relationship between production, architecture, landscape and the city. Students become collaborators in the rehearsal and reimagining of the ruins of an industrial past – constructing and reconstructing the parts Known and unKnown.
The studio poses two questions:
- How will professions premised on carbon-hungry growth and consumption adapt to an overburdened world in which the maintenance of existing structures and landscapes will be more valuable, environmentally, and socially, than the creation of new ones – The moratorium on Demolition?
- How might the design professions respond to the paradigm shift from building the world to repairing the world?
Studio Outcomes
Studio Leaders
Alan Pert was appointed Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning in 2021. He previously served the Faculty as Director of Melbourne School of Design from October 2012. Alan is the Faculty lead for the University's new campus at Fishermans Bend, due to open in 2025. His appointments at the University of Melbourne followed 6 years as Professor of Architecture and Director of Research at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.
Alan is currently the Chair of the Affordable Housing Hallmark Initiative and Lens Leader, Design Innovation.
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Alan is also an acclaimed architect. As Director of NORD (Northern Office for Research by Design) Alan aims to carry out practice-based research, analysing and forging propositions across writing, discourse, exhibitions, education and building. NORD was established to allow the practice of architecture and research to coexist. It is through the practice of architecture and design that NORD undertakes its research, often by using competitions and live projects as vehicles to develop and test ideas.
Deb Adams is a practicing Architect based in Melbourne with BKK Architects. She has worked for award winning practices in both the UK and Australia and has almost 20 years experience in residential, educational and cultural projects. Her main areas of interest lie in sustainability, adaptive reuse and new material technologies.
She regularly enjoys collaborating with other creative disciplines on BKK's projects and values how these different perspectives can expand how we think about architecture and the spaces between.
She has also previously been a guest critic at Monash, Melbourne and RMIT universities in Australia as well as the University of Kent in the UK.
Readings & References
Technical Lands: A Critical Primer by Charles Waldheim and Jeffrey S. Nesbit
ARCH+ The Great Repair, Vol 2: A Catalog of Practices - Florian Hertweck, Christian Hiller, Felix Hoffmann, Markus Krieger, Marija Marić, Alex Nehmer, Anh-Linh Ngo, Milica Topalović, Nazlı Tümerdem
Donna Haraway, "Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene", e-flux Journal, Issue 75, September 2016. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/
Paul Virilo, "The Museum of Accidents. Public (2). 1989. https://public.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/public/article/view/29787
Schedule:
Monday 5:00-8:00pm in MSD 213
Wednesday 4:30pm-7pm at B-K-K Studios
Off-Site Activities: