TILTED

Rennie Liffen & Marijke Davey

Studio Outline:

You stereotyped me. I stereotyped myself. A large box, always looking out. What is this type? Type, type. I type. This typology. Constrained by definitions of time, of place, of purpose, by preconceived ideas. ‘I understand what you mean,’ he said to me, an accepted dismissal of all possible outcomes, an assumption of knowledge. Everything can be related to, you see your loss as the same as mine, my child, your favourite jacket. I look in the mirror, my type looks back. What I am learning? Who can explain? Are we not all still In Construction? In Construction, the stage of architecture that exists with such hope and beauty.

This studio is about un-learning; the questioning of existing ideas of type, typology, and stereotypes.

Maintaining the studio rhetoric, TILTED continues to explore an interest in the empowerment of those on the margins of mainstream society. How can un-learning, the letting go of stereotype, in architecture, in humans, aid and construct, a brief, a brief we write together - for place within a society, within a moment - a place that harnesses acceptance, empathy, trust? And what if this collection of moments turn into hours, to days? What if it became a year, could this affect all of us?

Studio Leaders

RENNIE LIFFEN is a British Architect from London who has practiced in Europe and Australia. Rennie was involved in design studio teaching for twenty years in the UK and has been living, working and teaching in Melbourne since 2005. This will be Rennie’s ninth Masters CDE studio and his second in collaboration with Marijke Davey.

MARIJKE DAVEY is a graduate architect from RMIT. Marijke is interested in the social contexts within which architecture is created and experienced and understanding that architecture is something that cannot be created alone or in isolation from everything else. There is always a conversation to be had.

Learning Outcomes:

We will develop intimate and idiosyncratic works of architecture that truly explore and reveal the human dimensions of contemporary life. We will engage with the experiential and phenomenological implications of an architecture of both ‘individual’ and ‘community’ and will take inspiration from the work of selected musicians, artists and architects. Narratives detailing our ‘context’ and ‘communities’ will be developed in conjunction with our writer-collaborator to form the functional and emotional brief for the architecture of a small building for ‘un-learning’, set within the charged context of an imaginary abandoned (haikyo) Japanese urban school. Students will explore a truly iterative design process in conjunction with studio leaders and studio collaborators, where orthographic drawing, descriptive writing and physical model-making are the central activities. A disciplined and methodical approach which uses drawing, writing and model-making incrementally and values and exhibits every ‘trace’ of the process as the ‘archaeology of the mind’. This will include the rigorous exploration of a single architectural composition including spatial experiences, environment, landscape, technology and materiality. Final outcomes will be restricted to specific and consistent communication tools exploring digital techniques of drawing + making with a focus on the representation of ‘construction’. Students will be expected to produce significant and sophisticated drawings and models throughout the semester, communicating their intentions with clarity and passion. Students will make self-directed visits to films and exhibitions in Melbourne.

Reading and Reference:

• HÉLOÏSE LETISSIER (aka Christine and the Queens) – Music, Video, Dance
• OKO EBOMBO – Music, Video, Dance
• KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI – Art
• AKIO MAKIGAWA - Sculpture
• JOJI MATSUOKA – TV – Midnight Diner : Tokyo Stories (Netflix)
• PETER ZUMTHOR – Architecture and Theory
• JUHANI PALLASMAA – Writing and Theory
• TADAO ANDO – Architecture and Process
• TOYO ITO – Architecture
• SOU FUJIMOTO – Architecture
• ATELIER BOW-BOW – Architecture + Graphics
• LAB-LAB FOR ARCHITECTURE – Theory + Graphics

Field Trip

None

ST1/02 Monday 3:15pm - 6:15pm, MSD Room 241
ST2/02 Thursday 6:15pm - 9:15pm, MSD Room 241

Contact Handbook Key Dates