Quilt

Michelle Gan and Riley Sherman

Studio Description

Public space is increasingly public in name but private in operation. Commercialisation, control and consumption shape everyday life, while civic institutions inherit histories of authority and exclusion. At the same time, emerging technologies promise optimisation, speed and frictionless efficiency. Together, these forces risk flattening the environments we inhabit, reducing public life to management, participation to transaction and architecture to image.

What do we lose when we push the human out? Personality. Agency. Encounter. Care.

Quilt asks what architecture can recover through the touch of the hand, the intelligence of making and the agency of collective authorship. Rather than pursuing singular visions or iconic gestures, the studio proposes civic architecture as a quilt of many conversations: between designers, makers, industries, communities, materials and place.

Located in Collingwood, the studio engages a suburb shaped by production, exchange and creative life, but increasingly pressured by commercialisation, rising land values and the aestheticisation of culture. Quilt asks how architecture might strengthen cultural capacity through spaces where making, learning, exchange and public life occur together.

The outcome is a civic architecture that is materially grounded, publicly engaged and collectively authored.

A quilt, not an icon.

This studio emerges from Wardle’s ongoing engagement with public architecture and the craft of making. Positioned between the Melbourne School of Design and Wardle’s Melbourne studio, it operates as a shared space of inquiry where academic and practice-based modes of thinking inform one another.

Studio Outcomes

The semester unfolds through four connected phases: Inquiry, Material Encounter, Assembly and Confluence. Students move from research to proposition through observation, experimentation, testing, prototyping and aggregation.

Inquiry begins with place. Students investigate Collingwood as a dense ecology of production, exchange and culture, identifying gaps, relationships and opportunities to support public life.

Material Encounter begins with brick systems: not simply as products, but as material lineages shaped by clay, extraction, firing, labour, industry and civic memory. Students encounter these systems through making, visiting sites of production, meeting makers, and tracing the processes that shape how masonry is formed, used and valued. From this base, they examine Collingwood’s material histories before introducing a second local material, craft or industry as the voice of a new generation. Through casting, cutting, firing, fixing, stitching, joining, stacking, cladding and binding, students develop experiments that rethink brick beyond the standard unit, exploring shingles, screens, surfaces, assemblies and other systems of material invention.

Assembly translates material invention into architectural fragment. Material becomes unit, unit becomes system, and system becomes social apparatus. Through 1:5 and 1:1 prototyping, students develop small civic structures that support gathering, exchange and community.

Confluence shifts from fragment to collective ground. Located adjacent to Collingwood Yards, students design a campus for cultural production that extends the precinct’s productive ecology. The focus is on relationships between interventions: proximity, porosity, threshold, ground and exchange.

The final proposition is an architecture of collective authorship, demonstrating how civic architecture can emerge through relationships between architect and craftsperson, material and hand, industry and culture, fragment and whole.

Studio Leaders

Michelle Gan

Michelle Gan is a Design Lead and Architect at Wardle, working across architectural practice, academic research and art. Her work is grounded in narrative, socio-cultural thinking and material research, exploring the relationship between people, place and environment through human-scale intervention. Her professional experience spans residential, educational, public and civic projects. Since graduating from the RMIT School of Architecture, Michelle has continued to teach across the RMIT and the Melbourne University, alongside an international art and installation practice, including contributing to Tripa de Gallina: Guts of Estuary for the Biennale Architettura.

Riley Sherman

Riley Sherman is a Design Lead at Wardle Studio, a registered architect in Victoria, and a lecturer and academic at RMIT School of Architecture. His practice experience spans complex civic, institutional, educational and residential projects across Australia and Asia.

Riley is interested in how architects exert agency through drawing, and how these decisions hold materials in relation: shaping the way buildings are assembled, occupied, maintained and transformed over time. Rather than treating the detail as technical resolution alone, he approaches it as the point where material behaviour, construction logic and architectural possibility begin to meet.

Readings & References

• Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures — Marion Weiss & Michael Manfredi
• Assemble: Building Collective — Aaron Betsky (on the work of Assemble)
• The Politics of Public Space — Edited by Setha Low & Neil Smith
• Natural Building Materials S, M, L — Edited by Sandra Hofmeister
• Heterogeneous Constructions: Studies in Mixed Material Architecture — Aaron Forrest, Yasmin Vobis & Brett Schneider
• The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses — Juhani Pallasmaa

Schedule:
Monday 9am - 12pm
(30 minute break) 
Monday 12.30pm - 3.30-pm

Contact Handbook