Small Society

Virginia Mannering

Studio Outline:

This studio asks students to question artefacts of identity, power and belonging through an underexamined building type; the “club”, or variations of it (trade union, the guild, cultural associations etc). Here, clubs are imagined as active “nerve centres” and architectural billboards for people and issues currently under or un-represented. As such, this studio asks students to imagine and design a space for groups that may not (yet) have recognisable permanent or physical presences. Each student will focus on an individual research issue - situating these within ideas of global/local politics (work and labour politics, nationality and statelessness, linguistic communities, counter politics, feminist urbanism, queer space, natural systems).

Studio Leaders

VIRGINIA MANNERING is a designer, writer, and researcher. She has a long-standing interest in issues of human experience, historical, social and political issues, which she explores through design and the production of related texts and publications.

Learning Outcomes:

Students will then partake in a series of design esquisses, comprising a close study of the Club typology broken down into components (e.g. the entrance, the ‘forum’, the archive). This allows students to thoroughly examine and understand each of the program elements and design in an ambitious but “low risk” test environment. After mid-semester students will hone their theoretical position and and scale up their elements into their “Club”. It is also important that in this studio, students understand that the visualisation and communication of their projects is also a political act. With the aim of creating a truly collaborative studio environment, students will be asked to participate in rigorous class discussions and ideas generation. Individual projects will be presented as a class “set” of models, mimicking collective nature of the club typology. An experimental group site model and individual publications will also be produced.

Reading and Reference:

The studio takes inspiration from local and international texts and artists:

• DADA collages,
• the photographic work of Sophie Calle,
• John Bracks painting of Melbourne,
• the maps of Jerry Gretzinger,
• Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’,
• Phillipe Soupault ‘Last Nights of Paris’,
• Lauren Elkin ‘Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London’,
• Robert Henderson Croll, ‘The Open Road in Victoria’.
• Jerry Gretzinger’s Map
• Nadia Rook - 'Marginality' in the Hoddle Grid and the Colour of Public Memory
• Graeme Davison - The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne
• RaumLabor

ST1/14 Monday 11:00am - 3:00pm, MSD Room 125
ST2/14 Thursday 10:00am - 12:00pm, MSD Room 139

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