Studio 21
Waterscraper
Toby Reed & Anna Nervegna
This studio is available to students enrolled in ABPL90142 Studio C, ABPL90143 Studio D, and ABPL90115 Studio E.
Studio Description
The concept behind this studio is to design a water-scraper, a building on the bay. The buildings of the studio will form a micro-city / cultural hub.
It is not a skyscraper.
If our planet is becoming a ‘drowned world’, as in J.G. Ballard’s novel, then we might as well practice designing buildings on the water. This studio will explore the possibilities of providing new areas for urban growth by constructing buildings in Port Phillip Bay. Rapid urban growth around the planet is forcing us to reconsider architecture and urbanism and devise new fluid strategies for intervening in the ever-expanding modern city.
This project allows for a level of propositional experimentation, depending on each student’s inclinations. Students can decide their own brief but most likely brief combinations will include one of the following: apartments, hotel, art gallery, restaurants, entertainment facilities, floating beach, etc...
This is not an urban design project. Every building is an idea about the city. Students will be designing a building in the bay with indoor and outdoor space and connection to the land. So the project will be architectural with urban implications.
The Luigi Moretti Project:
Each student will design a building for a floating cultural centre in Port Philip Bay. The studio will focus on experimental modes of form and space making, using the 1952 form/space studies by Luigi Moretti in the magazine Spazio as a starting point for form and space generation. The experiments of Moretti used interiors of traditional architecture as a spatial mould for the generation of new form.
Studio Leaders
Toby Reed and Anna Nervegna are directors of Nervegna Reed Architecture. Recent projects include The Melbourne Quakers Centre and large-scale urban design for a city in Sichuan province. NR’s work such as the Whitehouse Prahran, The Arrow Studio and the Precinct Energy Project Dandenong (PEP) have been widely published around the world. The precinct Energy Project in Dandenong lead the way in Australian architecture for green power solutions, being the first precinct in Australia to be powered by co-generation. NR also make architectural videos and design documentaries which they will be screening in the 2021 MPavilion season.
Readings & References
- Luigi Moretti – Spazio
- Rem Koolhaas – Whatever Happened to Urbanism / Junkspace
- Rem Koolhaas + Hans Ulrich Obrist - Project Japan Metabolism Talks...
- Peter Davidson and Donald L Bates – Architecture After Geometry
- Alejandro Zaera-Polo – The Politics of the Envelope
- J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World (1962)
Schedule Tuesdays & Thursdays | 10AM-5PM
Face-to-face components to run in MSD Room 448