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 bustling warehouses, clouds of smoke coming out of workers’ cottages, and 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 is a 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.
This studio will be centred around the architectural discourses on heritage, conservation, and contemporary readaptation. Students will be asked to carefully inspect and research an industrial precinct near the Melbourne CBD, at the cusp of change, producing a series of studies to build on their chosen site and program within the precinct.
How would you 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 Outcomes
The studio will be inviting the students to critically assess the existing fabrics of inner north Melbourne suburb, and explore contemporary methods of architectural intervention to negotiate with the heritage elements.
Throughout the studio, the student will engage in a 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.
The site analysis and research will be completed in groups, with the final design outcome being individually selected site and design proposal.
Studio Leaders
Gumji is a Melbourne based architect at Snøhetta and has taught several 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, and the universities of Alicante and TU Delft and has practised in Spain, Australia and The Netherlands. He tries to explore contemporary architecture that collaborates with its context in its broadest term (physical, historical, political…).
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 17:30-20:30, Thursdays 15:00-18:00