Open Studio: Wasteworlds

Hélène Frichot

Studio Description

This is an open studio in which participants will be encouraged to engage in speculative fabulation and environmental storying through design experimentation.

The invitation is to raise your material consciousness and imagine how we might best make do amidst capitalist ruins and feral ecologies. How do we remix the matter and meaning of our wasteworlds? How do we cope with the byproducts of our furious cycles of production and consumption, digging and dumping? What happens when we propose to operate in the vanishingly small space between a moratorium on construction and a moratorium on demolition? Can waste become material resource? Can we become ethically resourceful as designers by following materials? Can we practice the arts of maintenance?

This is an open studio, and so these questions are provocations. Participants will be asked to follow their own speculative design journeys by responsibly situating their practices and by remaining open to collaboration and co-learning, caring and composting.

Studio Outcomes

You will be encouraged to develop a material consciousness, and collaboration will be fostered through the sharing of resources, knowledge practices, theories and creative precedents.

Design propositions will be developed by attending to specific sites and their associated problematics, and by paying attention to material flows: You must deliberate on what matters to you most in your local environment-world and commence from there.

Introductory warm-up exercises will get us going, including dirty site mapping and modelling, irrational longitudinal section cuts, speculative image making, conceptual diagramming, and environmental storying. Your design outcome will depend on the direction your experimentation takes. This studio supports non-normative approaches to representational practices and an ethics of resourcefulness.

Studio Leader

Careful critic, process philosopher, and creative practitioner, Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture & Philosophy in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning in collaboration with CRAM (Critical Research Association Melbourne) and colleagues at VCA, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She is an Honorary Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK. Hélène was Professor of Critical Studies in Architecture at KTH Stockholm, leading the Critical Studies teaching and research division (2012-2019), and before that, a tenured academic at RMIT Architecture (2004-2011).

As a Guest Professor she has led seminars and supported design studios at Staedelschule Frankfurt (2018-2019). Her research has informed design studio experimentation internationally, from ETH Zurich to Columbia University US, to Paris Malaquais, France and beyond.

Her books Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (2019/2025) and Creative Ecologies (2018) are broadly read, and she has co-edited peer reviewed journals and edited books that experimentally engage the entanglement between theories and practices in art, architecture, and design.

Hélène has delivered design studios and theory seminars for over thirty years across Australia, Sweden, and Germany.

Readings & References

• Dzierzawska, Zosia and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (2021) “Architecture without Extraction,” Architectural Review.
• Easterling, Keller (2021) Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, Verso.
• Feral Ecologies https://feralatlas.org
• Frichot, Hélène (2019) Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture, AADR.
• Frichot, Hélène (2023) “Dirty Materialism: What Jennifer Knew” Hélène Frichot & Emma Cheatle, Jennifer Bloomer: A Revisitation, special issue, Journal of Architecture, Volume 28, Issue 6, 2023, 996-1021.
• Frichot, Hélène, Adrià Carbonell, Hannes Frykholm, Sepideh Karami eds. (2022) Infrastructural Love: Caring for our Architectural Support Systems, Birkhauser.
• Frichot, Hélène (2021) “Wastocene: The Dirty Architecture of Progress,” The Architectural Review. https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/keynote/wasteocene-the-dirty-architecture-of-progress
• Ghosn, Rania and El Hadi Jazairy (Design Earth) (2018/2022) Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment, Actar Publishers.
• Ghosn, Rania and El Hadi Jazairy (Design Earth) (2023) Climate Inheritance, Actar Publishers.
• Haraway, Donna (2016) “The Camille Stories: Children of the Compost,” Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press.
• Hromek, Daniéle. “Indigenizing practice: What can non-Indigenous designers do?” Architecture Australia, 2023.
• Hutton, Jane (2020) Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Materials Movements, Routledge.
• Le Guin, Ursula (2022) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, with a foreword by Donna Haraway, Ignota Books.
• Liboiron, Max (2021) Pollution is Colonialism, Duke University Press.
• Liboiron, Max and Josh Lepawsky (2022) Discard Studies, Wasting Systems and Power, MIT Press.
• Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte (2025) A Moratorium on New Construction, Sternberg Press.
• Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte and Dubravka Sekulić (2023) “Frameworks for Curriculum Repair,” The Great Repair: Politics for the Repair Society, ARCH+ Journal for Architecture and Urbanism, 182-188.
• Pignarre, Philippe and Stengers, Isabelle (2011) Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, Palgrave Macmillan.
• Stengers, Isabelle (2015). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press and Meson Press.
• von Schantz, Miriam and Hélène Frichot (2020) “On the Irrational Section Cut,” in Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm, eds, After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research, Actar, 2020.
• Tsing, Anna Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou (2024) Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene, Stanford University Press.
• Tsing, Anna Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press.
• Tynan, Lauren (2021) “What is relationality? Indigenous knowledges, practices and responsibilities with kin,” Cultural Geographies, vol. 28, 597-610.

Schedule:
Thursday 9am -12pm
(1 hour break)
Thursday 1-4pm

Contact Handbook