Studio 03

The Urban Straitjacket

Raymond Mah, Jessie Linardi & Koos de Keijzer

Studio Description

“The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, as we speak to our city.”

If you believe Roland Bathes, the conversation we share with our city has been hijacked, after all statistics speak and they will speak for you. We currently reside during the high-water mark of technical proficiency & rational science to inform pieces of architecture and the formation of our cities. The prescriptive and rhetorical power of science has reduced cities to an empirical object of study, rather than representation of our collective DNA.

The Urban Straitjacket will challenge the philosophical positivism that informs current architectural production and urban design.

Urban design has gone from being once radical to conformist: a profession largely held ransom to data, best practice and the expert management of a resource from the top down. This studio seeks to challenge this model of urban design & architectural production, and perform a Harry Houdini, escaping this ideological straitjacket to speculate on something new in way of city-making.

The Urban Straitjacket will to seek prioritize the potentials of theoretical speculation and architectural imagination

Studio Outcome

The Urban Straitjacket's main objective is to challenge the assumptions and shortcomings of the established model for architecture and city making. It’s a call to arms to dissolve & dismantle the presiding way and establish new methods of design that put architecture at the core of urban change.

The studio will depart from the line of argument that urban design & architecture ought to absorb into its body the intelligence of the world beyond itself. Liberation from the standardized & technocratic approach to city making will be undertaken by excavating and legitimizing old narratives and movements, dissenting voices and canonical projects, both inside and outside of architecture.

Using Melbourne’s old heaven of hedonism, the Palace Theatre, as the testing ground the studio will pair the above provocations with the distinctly architectural problems of legislation and code, established types and program, preservation and renewal, identity and monumentality etc. The culmination of these social and spatial frictions will be the creation of a new manifesto that will become your personal legislation & resource for the design of an iconic city site.

Studio Leaders

The Urban Straitjacket is a DKO practice lead studio headed by Peter Stasios who graduated from RMIT Architecture in 2016. The office of DKO has taught a studio at MSD since 2017, using it as a platform to challenge prevailing challenge the misconceptions, accepted norms and orthodoxies that reside in architecture & urban place-making.

Readings & References

• CURTAIN CALL: Marika Neustupny & RMIT Architecture, 2006
• A WALK (film): Jonas Mekas, 1990
• LAST BLACKMAN IN SAN FRANSICO (film): Joe Talbot, 2019
• ON THE DIFFICULTY OF IMAGINING AN IDEAL CITY: Georges Perec, 1982
• CENTRAL MELBOURNE DESIGN GUIDE: City of Melbourne, 2018
• URBAN SPACE: Rob Krier, 1979
• Una lezione d’urbanistica [A LESSON IN URBANISM] (film): Giancarlo De Carlo, 1954
• CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFE: Henri Lefebvre, 1947
• LEGISLATING ARCHITECTURE (film): Arno Brandlhuber & Christopher Roth
• SEMIOLOGY & URBANISM: Roland Barthes, 1967
• THE CULTURE OF CITIES: Lewis Mumford, 1966

Schedule Thursdays 12:00-18:15 in Room 142

Contact Handbook Key Dates