Studio A

STUDIO A

Leire Asensio Villoria

Dan Hill

Onur Tumturk

Studio Description

The studio will help students develop foundational skills in urban design: focusing on block and fabric morphology, civic space design as well as sustainable urban strategies amongst others.  This semester, Urban Design Studio A will engage with the City of Melbourne as a site of study and speculation.

As patterns of work, living, public life and demographics change, the role of central business districts are moving away from being predominantly sites of work and production.  In recent decades, Melbourne’s CBD has undergone several shifts.  Residences have become a crucial part of the city and the changes in its populations brought about by education, tourism, and downsizers amongst others have also been equally transformative.  The changes in work patterns now prompt another reconsideration of the role of the CBD for the wider city.

Students will engage with the city to offer tangible design proposals that adopt a projective attitude towards addressing the opportunities offered by the CBD’s current and anticipated transformations.  This will be done through thoughtful deliberations on how the city may be transformed through the relationships to its streets.

Streets are the basic unit of cities. They are where cities happen. They are our largest, most distributed and certainly most active and contested shared and public spaces in the city. As a result, they embody what we stand for as a city, what we’re about. Yet it has been the mistake of our last half-century to govern that complex brief with the narrow idea that streets are just about traffic. This simplistic efficiency-led thinking has led to streets becoming political battlefields, pitting individual freedoms against collective and environmental shared outcomes, commerce against culture, privilege against inclusion.

Studio Outcomes

This studio will reframe this global debate around more meaningful, inclusive approaches to the future of streets, and locate the work alongside the City of Melbourne’s new Future Streets policy process. Strong links between MSD and the City of Melbourne City Design Team mean that students can explore the practices of professional urban design, and public design, in detail. Working at the interplay of streets, blocks, grids, and flows, the studio will involve field research across the city’s ‘Hoddle Grid’, developing ethnographic and design research before moving onto design interventions, describing a detailed set of possible futures for Melbourne’s central streets, projecting forward from the City’s Future Streets policy. Students will also explore how to work with the ‘dark matter’ of policy, code, and organisation, detailing how to redesign the conditions that produce the street, as well as the street itself. This in-depth super-local exploration will be counterpointed by a rich library of international best practice, case studies both real and fictional, curated videos and readings, and guest lectures.

Studio Leader/s

Leire Asensio Villoria
Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design

Prof Dan Hill

Director, Melbourne School of Design

Professor Dan Hill is a designer, urbanist, educator and experienced leader at the intersection of design, technology and cities. Dan held the position of Director of Strategic Design for the Swedish Government’s innovation and research agency, Vinnova from 2019 to 2022.

His previous leadership positions have produced innovative, influential teams and projects, ranging across built environment and architecture (two stints at Arup, Future Cities Catapult), education and research (Fabrica, AHO, UCL), government and social innovation (SITRA, Vinnova), and media (BBC, Domus, Monocle). He was one of the Mayor of London’s inaugural Design Advocates, and a Trustee of Participatory City Foundation, and is a founding member of the UN HABITAT Council for Urban Initiatives. Dan’s projects take a holistic approach to multidisciplinary research and design combined with an acute reading of everyday technologies and social infrastructures.

Dan has lived and worked in UK, Australia, Finland, Italy, and Sweden, and developed and delivered city strategy and urban development projects for city governments in Amsterdam, Melbourne, Stockholm, Manchester, Sydney and London, as well as for Alphabet and Lendlease. He has devised and delivered place-based approaches to Swedish and Finnish national innovation strategies. Dan has particular expertise in designing social and cultural infrastructures, in urban contexts such as Melbourne Innovation District, Manchester’s Northern Quarter, Google’s global campuses, and the University of Melbourne campus, and on buildings such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Library, UAE Museum of the Future, State Library of Queensland, ACMI, Collingwood Yards, and central library strategies for Melbourne and Sheffield.

Dan has held roles as Professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Visiting Professor of Practice at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Visiting Professor at Design Academy Eindhoven, and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. He has taught studios and courses at other colleges all over the world. Amidst much published work, in academic journals, books and media, Dan authored the influential book “Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary” for Strelka Press in 2012 and has been writing about design, technology, cities and cultureLinks to an external site. for over 20 years.

Onur Tumturk

Urban Design Instructor

Doctor of Philosophy candidate

Onur is an urban designer and researcher focusing on the adaptive capacity and resilience of urban form and space through morphological investigations. His further research interests include contemporary urban design theory, urban morphology, complexity theories and socio-ecological thinking in urbanism.

He is a casual design studio tutor at MSD and teaching urban and architectural design. Having received his Bachelor’s degree on urbanism and M.Sc. degree on urban design at METU, he worked as a teaching assistant and participated urban planning and design studios at the same university.

Readings & References

Cerda, 1996, Cerda, urbs i territory: planning beyond the urban, Electa publishers, Madrid

The Endless City (eds.Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic), Phaidon, 2007

Busquets J., Yang D., Keller M., 2019, Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design, Oro Editions

Mah, D. and Asensio Villoria, L 2016. Life-Styled: Health and Places, 1st edn, Jovis.

P.V. Aureli, 2007, Cities from Zero: City’s Degree Zero: Polis vs Planning, or City-making in the West and East pp25, Architectural Association, London

M. Gausa, 2002, Housing and Singular Housing,  Birkhäuser, Publishers, Basel, Boston

Vittorio Aureli Pier, Toward The Archipelago in Log no.11 (Winter 2008), Anyone, New York, pp91-119

Pope Albert, 1996, Ladders, Princeton University Press, New York

O.M Ungers, 1976, The Urban Block and the Gotham city: metaphors & metamorphosis: two concurrent projects, Ithaca, NY

C. Waldheim, 2004, Hilbersaimer / Mies Van Der Rohe. Lafayette Park Detroit. Prestel Verlag, Munich, Berlin, London, New York.

Whatever happened to urbanism - OMA, (with Bruce Mau), 1995, S,M,L,XL,The Monicelli Press, New York, pp. 959/971

D. Aubert, L. Cavar & N. Chandani, thanks for the view, mr. mies: Lafayette park, Detroit, Metropolis Books.

A. Fernandez Per, J. Mozas, J.Arpa, 2009, Density Housing Construction & Costs, a+t ediciones, Spain

A. Fernandez Per, J. Mozas, J.Arpa, 2007, a+t Density Series. DBook. Density, Data, Diagrams, Dwellings, Spain

Schedule

Monday 10 am - 1pm in MSD 448 and Wednesday 8:30 am - 11:30 am in MSD 236

Contact Handbook