Scabble and Spoila

Andre Bonnice

Studio Description

For the last few years, this studio has focused on material production through a bioregional lens, especially bio-based materials grown, processed, and assembled within agricultural production streams. This semester the studio shifts its attention to investigating materials reconstituted from the technosphere (made, then recovered) alongside bio-based materials.

Melbourne demolishes thousands of tonnes of concrete from buildings, bridges and other infrastructure every year. Almost all of it is crushed, downcycled and returned to the construction industry as low-value aggregate. This studio investigates how the existing built environment can be selectively deconstructed, allowing concrete elements to be recovered, catalogued and reconstituted into new architecture. Existing columns, beams, slabs, retaining walls, bridge girders and precast elements become architectural components capable of being cut, lifted, transported and reassembled.

The semester culminates in the design of two complementary buildings at the Fishermans Bend campus: a medium-scale Workshop and Materials Hub and a small Gardeners Shed.

Studio Outcomes

Students will produce a focused suite of coloured, material-based drawings that make sourcing, extraction, assembly, and reassembly explicit, alongside a small set of carefully composed images.

Students will undertake on-site surveying of existing buildings and infrastructure scheduled for demolition: measuring, photographing, and mapping physical components to assemble an inventory of recoverable elements and plausible extraction sequences. This inventory will form the basis for the architecture, treating spatial configuration and composition as primary design problems, explored through the studio’s specific aesthetic and representational agenda.

In place of conventional architectural scale models, students will fabricate material ‘chunks’: small assemblies and fragments that test real material behaviours, joints, tolerances, fixing logics and disassembly sequences, at an operative scale.

Studio Leader

Andre Bonnice is an architect, director of Simulaa, and Lecturer Creative Practitioner at the Melbourne School of Design.

Readings & References

• To be supplied in class

Off Campus Activities
TBC

Schedule:
Monday 3pm - 6pm
Thursday 9am - 12pm

Contact Handbook