Semester 1 2017 Studio 1

a house for unrequited love

Rebecca McLaughlan & Stephanie Liddicoat

Sleeping is like Death (Chiharu Shiota, 2016)

Is there any hardship more keenly felt, yet so flippantly regarded by the world around us, than that of unrequited love? Lisa Phillips suggests love unreciprocated “forces us to reckon with ourselves,” while Sarah Dessen views this predicament as one with endless potential: “an unrequited love is so much better than a real one … it’s perfect … As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending.” Carol Brunt writes of it as kind of indulgence ... Goethe, Yeats, Austin and Dante, similarly, channelled their unrequited affections onto the page, each producing a literary masterpiece, while Augusten Burroughs writes of a compulsive love of antique jewellery – of long strands of pearls and flawless emeralds – that very nearly bankrupted him.

This studio asks you to design a house for unrequited love - and we do not judge toward whom (or what) that unrequited love may be directed. Imagine, perhaps, that all the contrived, incidental meetings, the effort-filled-nonchalant phone calls, the carefully concocted social engagements could somehow be condensed into a domestic setting. A setting that could offer the height of convenience, allowing the occupier to live in constant, close proximity to their crush while, at once, rendering their obsession inescapable. How does one design for an existence where there will be “no embraces”, as Miguel de Cervantes has written, “because where there is great love there is often little display of it.”

Studio Outline:

The studio will interrogate wearable architecture, exhibition design and the residential dwelling; unrequited love will provide the lens through which we explore design across these three scales. Fiction will be the starting point for this studio and each student is asked to bring a piece of literature that deals with unrequited love. The characters within it (be they people or otherwise) will be your clients for the duration of the semester (this will be required at the first session). Within this studio we are interested in how architecture can alter proxemics and the gaze, how it can respond to gender and to the complex emotional states of its inhabitants.

Studio Leaders

REBECCA MCLAUGHLAN is a New Zealand registered architect and completed her doctoral research on New Zealand’s history of mental hospital architecture. She is plagued by the ongoing suspicion that the built environment impacts us most greatly during moments of intense vulnerability. Her research takes place at the intersection of architecture, medicine and psychology where her current obsessions include oncology and palliative care settings. This studio was inspired by a man she once knew who wanted to be an astronaut…

STEPHANIE LIDDICOAT graduated with a Master of Architecture, with her final thesis examining the design of environments for mental health. Stephanie has several years’ experience working in architectural practice in Melbourne, at a firm specialising in large scale commercial, Government and healthcare projects. Stephanie has experience in engagement with creative disciplines through several research projects for conferences and journals, many of which examined the intersection of architecture with art, interior design, cinematography and atmosphere.

Learning Outcomes:

This studio has been structured to introduce you to the process of "research through design" in preparation for your final thesis studio; the focus will be on experimentation across mediums, and generating work quickly and critically. Studio specific learning objectives are:

to rethink housing design in non-conventional ways (this studio is designed to break you out of convention).
to critically approach the question of how design (both at the object and building scale) has the potential to influence human behaviour.
to use fiction as a tool for the generation of architecture.
to employ a range of mediums in generating and presenting design work.
to design, produce and curate a small exhibition installation (as part of MSDx).
to employ reflective practice in refining a design response, through iterative experimentation and peer engagement, to produce a theoretically coherent body of work.

Reading and Reference:

Beatriz Colomina, "The split wall: Domestic voyeurism" Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Orion Press, 1964).
The work of Rebecca Horn & Sophie Calle:
Sophie Calle - Take Care of Yourself
Rebecca Horn - A Stimulating Body of Works

ST1/01 Monday 3:15pm - 6:15pm, MSD Room 139
ST2/01 Thursday 1pm - 4pm, MSD Room 140