Studio 02

TOKYO

Rennie Liffen and Oskar Kazmanli-Liffen | SENSES + PROCESS

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

Studio Description

Some call it midnight blue but it’s later than that.
It just looks black to me.
Black. blue. red. red. yellow. red. green. blue. blue. blue.
The door closes itself and It ends just like that.
I watch his white gloves on the wheel. Blue neon lights ripple over the windshield. I gaze out at my insecure self overlaid on the city as it rushes by while I stay still.
What a difference distance makes. I’m sitting in a different window now and I can only see the golden sun coming up through the grey towers.

I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be.
Whenever I feel alone I watch that crazy live television your generation loved, something about it being okay for you, makes it okay for me.
They say that here, if you do anything with honour and tradition you’ll be alright. I don’t think I understand that either. Sometimes I long for a place of our own – for us to be together - amongst the million faces - but maybe we’ll always be just
alone in Tokyo.

This semester Studio 2 moves to the virtual realm of TOKYO. The studio continues to explore the architectural project as a source of empowerment. With the design project as the vehicle, students will develop an empathetic understanding of the social and spatial experience of those who exist away from their home context. We will question how much we can ask of our built environment, our society, the places in which we live and the places that remain forever in our memory.

Studio Outcome

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 writers. Narratives detailing our imaginary ‘context’ and ‘communities’ will be developed in conjunction with our collaborators. Each student will form the functional and emotional brief for the architecture of a small building of unique typology addressing a contemporary socio-political or socio-romantic issue within the context of an imagined urban Tokyo location.

Students will explore a truly iterative design process in conjunction with studio leaders and studio collaborators, where abstract (orthographic) drawing, descriptive writing and digital 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 experience, 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 both ‘atmosphere’ and ‘construction’. Students will be expected to produce significant and sophisticated drawings and models throughout the semester, communicating their intentions with clarity and passion.

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 many years in the UK and has been living, working and teaching in Melbourne since 2005. This will be his fifteenth Masters CDE studio and his fourth in collaboration with Oskar Kazmanli-Liffen.

OSKAR KAZMANLI-LIFFEN is a graduate of architecture from RMIT University. Originally from London, Oskar has co-led studios across the masters and undergraduate degrees at RMIT. Through teaching and practice his interests lie in architecture with transformative social and experiential consequence.

Readings & References

• SOFIA COPPOLA - Film - Lost in Translation
• OKO EBOMBO - Music, Video, Dance
• JEAN-BENOIT DUNCKEL + NICOLAS GODIN (AIR) – Music
• JOJI MATSUOKA - TV - Midnight Diner :Tokyo Stories
• RYUCHI SAKAMOTO - Experimental Music, Writing
• SOU FUJIMOTO - Architecture
• PETER ZUMTHOR – Architecture and Theory
• JUHANI PALLASMAA – Writing and Theory
• TADAO ANDO – Architecture and Design Process
• ATELIER BOW-BOW – Architecture and Graphics
• LAB-LAB FOR ARCHITECTURE – Theory and Graphics

Schedule 15:15-18:15 Mondays, 18:15-21:15 Thursdays

Contact Handbook Key Dates