Material Metaphors: Curated Feast

Eve Li & Tim Jones

Studio Description

What if architecture could be touched, smelled, tasted, and shared?

Curated Feast invites students to explore architecture as a sensory and material metaphor, where food becomes a lens for imagining new ways of living together. Set within the heritage buildings at 255–259 Albert Street, Brunswick, the studio reimagines the site as a co-living organism shaped by craft, ritual, memory, and exchange.

Students will begin with a chosen edible product and translate its making, storing, tasting, sharing, and cultural meaning into architecture. Through adaptive reuse, material experimentation, and carbon-responsive sustainability, the studio asks: how can compact living feel generous? How can shared spaces become meaningful, playful, and deliciously social?

Like ingredients in a recipe, materials, textures, sequences, and atmospheres will be carefully composed into a new architectural feast, plating up new ways of living together — one spatial

Studio Outcomes

The studio is crafted to cultivate holistic design thinking, encouraging students to express conceptual ideas across macro, meso, and micro scales. MM:CF students will individually delve into the sourcing, making, storing, and sharing of an edible product, and be challenged to design a crafted architectural response that houses these processes within an adaptive reuse and co-living framework.

After successful completion of the studio, students will be able to:

• Critique the meaning of craft in the face of the growing emphasis on ESD in architecture and construction.
• Implement the basic principles of heritage conservation and adaptive reuse, performing a simple energy assessment of their design.
• Develop a cohesive architectural response at macro, meso and micro scales, and craft a series of architectural drawings, details and models to clearly convey their intentions.
• Consider how compact co-living can support private retreat, collective life, shared rituals, and productive spaces, while responding meaningfully to heritage fabric and carbon-responsive sustainability.

Studio Leader

Eve Li

Eve is a registered architect now working in a development role at Journal Student Living, following five years at FK contributing to mixed-use projects from concept to delivery. Her design ethos centres on sustainability and narrative architecture, using storytelling to explore spatial and emotional dimensions. She views architecture as a living narrative shaped by people, place, and time. As a previous recipient of the Unimelb Dean’s Honour Award, Eve brings a thoughtful and empathetic perspective to both practice and teaching, fostering meaningful engagement in every project. Her favourite food is - hotpot, hotpot, hotpot.

Tim Jones

Tim is Director of SMFA in Victoria and a registered architect, bringing 14 years of experience across residential, commercial, civic, education, aged care, and heritage projects. His practice spans both small and large-scale work, with particular expertise as a heritage architect and advisor. Tim is passionate about architectural education and collaborative design, supporting students and emerging practitioners to actively contribute to the design process. Drawing on extensive leadership and mentoring experience, he brings a generous, practical, and deeply engaged approach to teaching.

Together, Tim and Eve offer a strong mix of development insight, active practice, heritage expertise, and empathetic studio guidance.

Readings & References

• Burra Charter https://australia.icomos.org/publications/burra-charter-practice-notes/
• Deliciously Designed : How design theory is applied to food production https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321906078_Deliciously_Designed_How_design_theory_is_applied_to_food_production
• MVRDV, Co-living Design Study — useful for rethinking sharing, flexibility, community, affordability, and climate response in co-living https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/1013/co-living-design-study
• Never Too Small — excellent precedent source for compact living, small-space intelligence, and making “small” feel generous: https://www.nevertoosmall.com/
• Thumbnail picture from: Erased Studio (2025) Designer Showcase, Instagram.

Schedule:
Monday 3pm - 6pm
(30 minute break)
Monday 6.30pm - 9.30pm

Contact Handbook