Anti-Wall

Oliver Arbes du Puy and James Park

Studio Outline:

‘Anti-Wall’ focuses on the architecture of territory, as a site for spatial invention. Students will be asked to critically analyse specific territories (including the Gaza Strip; US-Mexico Border; Marais, Paris; Kowloon; Hong Kong; Lower Manhattan, New York) and speculate scenarios that subvert the processes and repercussions of ‘the wall’ – social bubbles, ideology, geography, output, division of labour, inequality etc.

These scenarios of transformation will be addressed from those simple moments of our existence - circulating, producing, dwelling and communicating. We will question the role of architecture at different scales - from the street to the block to the bedroom - where ‘walls,’ invisible or otherwise, become a most powerful and intransigent construct of the modern political economy.  Students will be challenged to propose nuanced architectures in a post-wall territory - hybridisations that augment and enable new modes of dwelling and commerce.

Studio Leaders

OLIVER ARBES DU PUY grew up living between Melbourne and Paris, and attended Architecture school at the University of Melbourne and the Architectural Association in London. He also wrote a dissertation on Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture at Cambridge. Prior to founding his own office in 2016, Oliver trained with Foster + Partners in London, Kengo Kuma and Junya Ishigami in Tokyo, and Allan Powell in Melbourne. http://oliverdupuy.com/

JAMES PARK initially studied Economics at Melbourne University, before completing his Bachelor of Architecture at Sydney University in 2009. He worked with COX Architecture from 2010-12, before embarking on his Master of Architecture at Studio Hadid in Vienna, where he worked as the Grasshopper (algorithmic modelling software) tutor for the studio. In 2015, James completed his Master thesis titled ‘Extended Thresholds’ with Bart Chömpff. James currently teaches design and digital fabrication at the Melbourne School of Design, and works with COX Architecture.

Learning Outcomes:

Our studio will develop both analogue and digital skills, with basic Rhino and Grasshopper tutorials offered to students. The final projects will be process driven and presented as a possible combination of drawings, visual imagery, analogue and digital models, short films, and written manifesto.

Reading and Reference:

Films:

• Lost in Translation, S. Coppola
• Babel, Iñárritu
• Blade Runner, R.Scott
• High-Rise, B.Wheatley

Reading:

• The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato
• A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
• Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs
• Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida
• An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns, Bruno Latour

ST1/24 Monday 6:15pm - 9:15pm, MSD Room 237
ST2/24 Thursday 3:15pm - 6:15pm, MSD Room 141