Studio 07

NoVacancy

Gumji Kang and Javier López-Menchero

This studio is available to students enrolled in ABPL90142 Studio C, ABPL90143 Studio D, and ABPL90115 Studio E.

Studio Description

Cities continue to grow and their inhabitants flow in to fill the gaps of the city. With their vivid memories of gold rush, faint 80s tunes, dust settling on the decades of stories buried behind cold plaster walls, buildings carry on. But do buildings grow with the cities?

With the explosive growth of population and expansion of the cities, there's continual need to reimagine and redesign the existing city fabrics. The current building can be understood as a set of layers (or layered elements) that attribute information - not only about how a city is operating currently, but about how it was lived in the past. This studio will cover negotiating and adding to these layers rather than replacing them.

How do we preserve, reimagine and design the buildings to grow with the city?

This will be one journey intensely urban, intensely dense, and intensely interventionist.

This is NoVacancy.

Studio Outcome

The studio will be inviting the students to critically assess the existing city fabrics of Melbourne CBD, and explore contemporary methods of architectural intervention to negotiate with the heritage elements.

Throughout the studio, the student will engage in research driven and iterative design process, inviting the students to develop critical research and design development skills, to discover, direct and curate their research materials.

The studio will be split into three phases, each phase framing and documenting the process of understanding the site’s stories, physical heritage, self motivation, debates and discussion on methods of study, and visual representation.

Motivation.

Speculation.

Representation.

Studio Leaders

Gumji Kang is a practising architect and has taught a number of architectural design studios at the University of Melbourne. Her interest lies in the architectural design strategies and interventions on the public space, and public architecture with a strong focus on research-driven practice.

Javier is a Spanish architect, co-founder of Maze Studio and currently working as an architect for KTA. He comes with a wealth of knowledge from Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, the universities of Alicante and TU Delft. Javier has practised in Spain, Australia and The Netherlands, where most of his professional experience has taken place while he worked for MVRDV.

Readings & References

• Ecological Urbanism, Mostafavi, M.
• Benidorm, user’s manual, Iribas, J.M.
• KM3, MVRDV.
• 49 cities, WORKac.
• Drawing the motive force of architecture, P. Cook

Schedule Mondays 15:15-18:15 in MSD Room 240 and Thursdays 18:15-21:15 in MSD Room 125

Travel Inner Melbourne - site visits | Week 9 | $25

Contact Handbook Key Dates