Infrastructural Urbanism.
Towards a Net-Zero Architecture & Cities

Leire Asensio Villoria

This is a joint Studio with Master of Urban Design Studio C students

Studio Description

The Victorian Government has some of the most ambitious emissions reduction targets in the world. These targets have the capacity to bring real advantages: improved health and environmental, economic, social, and cultural benefits. The move towards net-zero can also be seen as an architectural and urban design opportunity to reconsider and speculate on what an optimistic and regenerative vision for our cities can be.  Rather than working from a position of austerity or scarcity, the studio propose that a climate-ambitious future architecture and city be defined through a more speculative, experimental and abundant vision.

To address the challenges of climate change and work towards net zero, we will need to integrate new systems in the city which help mitigate the impact that contemporary urbanization has on the environment.

Like the integration of internet networks over existing telecommunications infrastructural patterns, these new systems will need to be integrated into our existing city fabrics and urban practices, rather than replace them.  This will require us to consider how these new energy, transport, and technological systems will be connected into the wider urban ecosystem of urban flows and processes.  It will require us to think about what new architectural, urban, social, and environmental infrastructures, amenities, spaces, and networks will be needed to facilitate and benefit from these new systems.

How will these new systems transform our architecture, urban spaces, experiences, and our life practices?  How will these new systems augment our buildings, urbanism and what opportunities do they offer for cultivating more sustainable or even: regenerative urban and architectural practices.  This studio will engage with a simultaneously grounded pragmatism as well as a boldly speculative vision.

Studio Outcomes

Students will learn to formulate analytical, speculative, and critical approaches towards designing architecture for the contemporary and emerging city.

Students will learn to situate their designs within contemporary and emerging urban and infrastructural considerations.

Students will develop capacities to extrapolate and speculate on the impact of emerging technologies and infrastructure on buildings and cities in the near future.

Students will move between an analytical and projective position: developing urban and infrastructural architecture based on a consideration of current and emerging trends and themes.

Students will also learn to work in collaboration with their peers and as independent designers.

Students will also have the opportunity to work with new media technologies – supported by the MSD NextLab.

Studio Leaders

Dr Leire Asensio Villoria is a senior lecturer in architecture and urban design at the MSD.  She is co-director of the MSD Advanced Digital Design Research Hub and the AA Visiting School Melbourne.

She taught design, urbanism, and technology at Harvard, where she was co-design research lead for the Health and Places Initiative and the Waste to Energy Design Lab. She has also taught at the Architectural Association Graduate Design School and at Cornell.

Leire is co-author of the book: The Climate Imaginary (2025, Actar), Systems Upgrade (2022, Actar), Architecture and Waste (2017, Actar) as well as Lifestyled (2016, Jovis).

Readings & References

To be provided in class.

Schedule:
Tuesday 10am - 1pm
Thursday 10am - 1pm

Off-Campus Activities:
TBC

Contact Handbook