Studio 28

Campus Follies

Tanzil Shafique

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

Studio Description

20 December, 2025.

The University of Melbourne Council has taken note of the recent decline in student presence on campus due to online lecture capture and digital assignment submission. Also, the rate of mental health illnesses reported by students has skyrocketed. The University has decided to revitalize the campus to engage the students. It has allocated each of the ten faculties a sum of 1 million dollars to construct ‘follies’ on campus to develop a place where students can claim a sense of ownership. The University Council, to be inclusive in the design process of these ‘follies’, have awarded the design contract to this M.Arch CDE studio.

So, your task is to design a ‘folly’ on campus for each of the faculties. The program, site and other aspects will need to be developed as part of the design challenge.

Each of you in the studio will be assigned a faculty or an institution within the UOM and the proposed folly will be in response to that faculty’s needs and challenges. The studio will move through site selection, program development, conceptual designs, design development and design resolution, in that order. Since it is a summer term with a tightened time-frame, the studio will move fast without sacirficing the integrity of any of the stages.

Design Restrictions

  • The design has to respond the existing architecture of the campus, especially the ones next to the site. It also has to help establish an identity for that faculty.
  • The minimum program must host at least 30 students at a time, and provide facilities to ensure interaction between students.
  • The design must address the social, environmental and economic sustainability issues, and in particular address issues on campus.
  • The design may be absurd (in the social or political sense), but needs to be buildable

Studio Outcome

  • Gain an understanding of the social and political role of design, architecture and urbanism.
  • Value social resilience and develop a holistic notion of sustainability.
  • Practice collaborative problem-solving through design moving beyond disciplinary silos.
  • Question the prevalent practices of architecture and urbanism that are unaware of social consequences.
  • Experiment with forms of drawing social interactions in built environment.

Studio Design Scope: The studio outcome can range from designing follies that use architecture and landscape. Proposals may propose attachments, modifications or appropriations of existing Parkville campus buildings. The design outcomes can be of varying sizes based on the design brief developed.

Studio Leader

Tanzil Shafique, M.Arch, Assoc AIA, currently a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne, where he also directs masters design studios. Previously he was the Design Research Specialist at the Office of the Dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design at University of Arkansas, where he also worked as a Project Designer at the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and was a faculty for the Urban Design Studio, leading the Urbanism Seminar. He graduated at the top of his M.Arch in Ecological Urbanism class from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York in 2014. He was practicing architecture in NYC before moving to Arkansas. As part of the UACDC, his work has been awarded numerous AIA awards.

Readings & References

Reading list:

  • Tschumi, B., & Young, R. (1994). The Manhattan Transcripts.
  • Harries, K. (1998). The ethical function of architecture. MIT press.
  • Hardingham, S., & Rattenbury, K. (2012). Bernard Tschumi: Parc de la Villette: Supercrit# 4.
  • Archer, B. J., & Vidler, A. (Eds.). (1983). Follies: architecture for the late-twentieth-century landscape. Rizzoli.
  • Veness, B. (2016). The wicked problem of university student mental health. Sydney, NSW, Australia: Monash University Churchill Fellowship.
  • Huskinson, L. (2018). Architecture and the Mimetic Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of How Buildings Make and Break Our Lives. Routledge.

Websites:

Watch:

Schedule Mondays and Thursdays 12:15-18:15 in MSD Room 244

Contact Handbook Key Dates

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