Design Studio C
Immerse Yourself
Virginia Mannering
| Studio Structure | |
|---|---|
| Is the site determined? | Yes |
| Is the program determined? | Yes |
| Is the user(s) determined? | Yes |
| Is the concept determined? | Yes |
| Is the approach determined? | Yes |
Studio Description
Immerse Yourself is a speculative design studio exploring bathing, wellness and sensory immersion as architectural tools for engaging with Country across various sites including Lake Tyrrell and Lake Boort, Victoria (Dja Dja Wurrung Country). Set within inland salt lake environments shaped by First Nations custodianship, colonial agricultural schemes, and contemporary regional issues, the studio asks how architecture might operate as a medium for immersive environmental encounters on complex and dynamic sites.
Students will design a small wellness retreat that supports slow occupation, contemplation, bathing and rest, while framing the extraordinary atmospheric conditions of the lakes (vast horizons, shifting light, salt flats, vegetation ecologies and night skies). The studio positions architecture as an immersive system that mediates between body and landscape, where section, material and spatial sequence become primary design drivers. After visiting the two sites students will design a project that grapples with the complexities (temporal, climactic, environmental) of the site.
Studio Outcomes
This studio develops students’ ability to design architecture as an experiential and environmental system. Key aims include working with section as a primary generative tool, using changes in level, volume, enclosure and light to construct spatial and sensory sequences. Students will learn to choreograph movement and occupation through dynamic plans that privilege adjacency, compression, expansion and threshold conditions over repetitive room typologies.
Deliverables will include a wellness retreat proposal resolved through mappings, plans, sections, models and experiential drawings that clearly communicate atmosphere, structure and site engagement. Students are expected to demonstrate an integrated approach to site, program and materiality, with particular attention to how architecture frames and intensifies understandings and experiences of, and care for, Country. The studio will culminate in a coherent architectural proposition that operates as both retreat and environmental interface. The project is imagined as an immersive system for inhabiting and encountering a ‘nature experience’.
Please note: an overnight site visit to Boort and Lake Tyrell is planned for the weekend of 8th of August. This is a funded trip with accommodation and travel supported by the school.
Studio Leader
Virginia Mannering is a Lecturer in Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. Her research examines the way the construction of the settler-colonial city has reshaped landscapes, the built environment and its relationships with the Anthropocene, and the flows of construction materials across time and space.
Readings & References
TBC
Schedule:
Thursday 12 - 3pm
(1 hour break)
Thursday 4 - 7pm
Off-campus Activities:
Site visit to Boort and Lake Tyrrell 7-9th of August.
Need enrolment assistance?
Stop 1 provides enrolment and other support to Bachelor of Design, Bachelor of Environments and Melbourne School of Design students.