Unliveable Berlin

Catherine Duggan & Michael Roper

This studio has it's own subject code. Students who ballot for, and undertake this subject will be withdrawn from Architecture Studio C, D or E and enrolled in ABPL90297 Unliveable Berlin. This studio will be considered equivalent to your core Architecture Studio for the purposes of prerequisites for Architecture Studio D or E or Design Thesis.

Studio Outline:

Unliveable Berlin is a University of Melbourne design studio, organised and run by Melbourne-based architects, Michael Roper (Director Architecture Architecture) & Catherine Duggan (Senior Associate, Peter Elliott Architects). This studio will take a group of architecture, landscape and urban design students to the ANCB Metropolitan Laboratory in Berlin where they will investigate and respond to a range of architectural and urban conditions.

Studio Leaders

CATHERINE DUGGAN is currently a Senior Associate with Peter Elliott Architecture + Urban design, a highly-awarded Melbourne practice which engages meaningfully with both architecture and urban fabric. She has previously practiced architecture in Tokyo, exhibition design at the NGV in Melbourne; and has both taught & been an invited examiner for architecture & interior architecture programs at MSD, UTAS , RMIT & MADA.

MICHAEL ROPER is a director of Melbourne-based practice Architecture Architecture. As an active participant in the broader design culture, Michael engages in research, media, education, exhibition and publication. Michael has taught extensively both in Melbourne and abroad and was the founding Program Manager of the ANCB campus in Berlin where he maintains an active role.

Learning Outcomes:

The travelling studio encourages students to explore urban opportunities with fresh eyes. Stripped of well‐worn reference points, the foreign city is laid bare. They come to sense the city’s unconscious - its undercurrents - developing instincts for the manifold cultural forces that drive a place. Through the travelling studio we aim to foster broad, global thinking-problem solvers. At the conclusion of the semester, we expect our students to be versed and agile in the physical mechanisms (infrastructural, geographical) and cultural forces (political and social) that underpin urban life.

Reading and Reference:

• Markus Miessen; Spaces of Uncertainty
• Anna Funder; Stasiland / Kristien Ring; Self-Made City
• Niklas Maak; Living Complex, From Zombie City to the New Communal
• Winnie Chan; The Phenomenon of Building Group (Baugruppe) in Berlin (online)
• Timothy Moore; Reinventing Density (online)
• Andy Fergus & Katherine Sundermann; Learning from Berlin (online)

Field Trip

DATE: Week 3
COST: $3000

ST1/12 Monday 6:15pm - 9:15pm, MSD Room 118
ST2/12 Thursday (Wk 1 - 3 only) 6:15pm - 9:15pm, MSD Room 236

Contact Handbook