Studio 04
Inland - Housing
Ursula Chandler
Studio Description
The studio is located on the Murray River from the source at Kosciuszko National Park through to Mildura in Victoria’s west, engaging with its geography, environment, culture and economy.
The management and mis-management of the Murray River is symbolic of our inherent colonial attitude towards our environment. It highlights the need for greater understanding and insight of how we live with finite resources like water, in a drying and shifting climate.
Projects in this studio will look at housing in this fragile and contested landscape, as traditional relationships of population settlement, agricultural development, climate and housing affordability change drastically across the globe.
Housing proposal(s) will be required to be aligned to one of two broad categories;
- emergency (covid, climate change or weather extremity)
- transient (relocation, local workers, holiday, ageing)
The studio will focus on staged strategies, construction innovation and large-scale infrastructure planning and master-planning, considering the broader implication of architecture beyond an aesthetic exercise to an act shaped by the environment, economics, politics, society and geography it sits within.
Studio Outcomes
Identifying a specific study area for intervention, we will propose new housing typologies which carefully critique and contribute to their context, and the nuance conditions of a particular site – both physical and metaphysical. Projects will be informed by comprehensive research, illustrative analysis, and experimentation, creating innovative proposals underpinned by a clear theoretical position.
We will look to create a series of interrelated inventions on multiple sites, finding relationships and idiosyncrasies between multiple landscapes and habitation methods.
In addition, our Murray River site is shared with the “Inland-Public” studio and collaborative workshops and social studios are planned, with the aim of giving students a range of studio experiences and learning opportunities.
Studio Leader
Ursula has worked on projects across Australia, the United Kingdom and Africa. She currently runs her own practice [ursulachandler.com] having been employed as a Project Lead at Adjaye Associates [London] and at Robert Simeoni Architects and Bates Smart in Melbourne. The practice works on a range of projects types and scales and in 2019 was short-listed for the annual NGV Architecture Commission Competition. Ursula has led studios in Design Thesis on and off since 2012, has previously taught architectural history and construction technology and is an examiner for the ARB registration exam. She graduated from the University of Melbourne and received the RAIA Bates Smart Graduate Prize, Robert Barber Award in Landscape Architecture and a Dean’s Honours Award.
Readings & References
- Adjaye, D., Allison P. (editor) (2016). Constructed Narratives. Lars Müller Publishing
- Gammage, Bill (2011). The biggest estate on earth : how Aborigines made Australia. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, N.S.W
- Davies, P., & Lawrence, S. (2019). Engineered landscapes of the southern Murray–Darling Basin: Anthropocene archaeology in Australia. The Anthropocene Review, 6(3), 179–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019619872826
- O'Gorman, Emily & CSIRO (2012). Flood country : an environmental history of the Murray-Darling basin. CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria
- Rossi, A. (1984). The Architecture of The City. MIT Press
- Weller, Richard & Bolleter, Julian, (author.) (2013). Made in Australia : the future of Australian cities. UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia
Schedule Mondays 09:00-12:00, Thursdays 17:00-20:00