Mise en scène

Henry Williams & Gumji Kang

Studio Description

Similarities between the typologies of dramatic and political theatres are not coincidental. In this studio we examine the theatre as a political space — a locus of speculation and discourse on the ideal city and its relation to the physical conditions of urban life.

Scenographic devices allow actors and audiences to extend their phenomenal experience beyond the familiar, material city, and thus to collectively contemplate alternative ‘truths’, but these same instruments have the capacity to obscure and deceive.

In this studio students will speculate on the existing conditions and histories of a real Melbourne theatre, and will individually develop designs for its physical adaptation, as well as the augmentation of its material conditions with an ‘ideal’ condition that can be apprehended despite its immateriality.

Studio Outcomes

Students will initially work together to comprehensively analyse and document the project site’s physical conditions and histories through closely observed drawing and modelling, photographic cataloguing, and archival research. Students will individually critique the existing building in light of critical readings, and contemporary and historical precedent, then speculate on its ideal condition.

The second stage will see students working on their individual design projects, integrating the ‘ideal’ theatre into the physical conditions of the real site, and developing strategies that allow the ‘ideal’ to be schematically realised where it exceeds the site’s spatial and material potentials or conflicts with practical and regulatory limits. Students will test techniques of representation that support their conceptual and methodological aims and develop these in the presentation of their concept designs.

In the final stage of the project students will design key architectural conditions within their projects in fine detail, examining the interaction between physical and ideal architectures, and the capacity of materials and their arrangements to signify meaning. Students will examine material selection and tectonic assemblies as instruments of political and cultural signification, and explore the relation between physical truth and appearance.

The studio aims to extend students’ awareness of the syncretic nature of the city, as consisting of both physical and rhetorical conditions, and to develop critical and design tools for more precise articulation and finer control of the potentials of each, and of their interaction.

Studio Leader/s

Gumji Kang is an architect based in Melbourne and has taught a number of architectural design studios at the University of Melbourne. Her interest lies in the architectural design strategies and interventions in the public space, and public architecture with a strong focus on research-driven practice.

Henry Williams is a multi-disciplinary designer working across architecture, exhibition, and object design and has taught at several schools of architecture in Australia and the United Kingdom. He is currently a PhD candidate examining Pre-Modern metaphysics of architecture.

Readings & References

Arup for Creative Victoria. Creative Spaces Design Guide. Part 3H. Technical Appendix: Small Multi-Use Theatre

Barthes, Roland. ‘3. Semiology and the Urban’. In The City and the Sign, edited by M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, 87–98. Columbia University Press, 1986.

Charitonidou, Marianna. ‘Different Ways of Relating Fiction to Reality and Architectural Drawings’. In Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices: Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century, 1st ed., 39–49. London: Routledge, 2023.

Landrum, Lisa, and Sam Ridgway, eds. Theatres of Architectural Imagination. Routledge, 2023.

Miller, Sonia Melani. ‘Aldo Rossi’s World Theatre: A Reinterpretation of the Political Space in Early Postmodern Architecture’. Edinburgh, UK, 2021.

Rufford, Juliet. ‘Theatre and Architecture: A Place Between’. Revista Do Departamento de Teatro e Cinema Da ESAP - PERSONA: Periodicidade Anual #4 Spaces of Drama (2018 2017): 55–65.

Spada, Marco. ‘A Tale of Three Domes: The Un-Realized Cupola of St Ignatius of Loyola in Roma’. Arts 11, no. 51 (2022).

Schedule:
MSD 118
Monday & Thursday from 1pm to 7pm

Contact Handbook