Studio 01

(DIS)GUISE

Anoma Pieris and Athanasios Tsakonas

Studio Description

When creating safe community spaces within dominant, sometimes hostile, societies, migrants or minorities often assume strategies of “camouflage” and “disguise” . The ‘Vienna Room’, a material reconstruction of the Duldig family’s pre-war migration life in Austria, is nested within a California bungalow in suburban Melbourne: the Duldig Studio, pottery kiln and exhibition space. The Blue House in Wan Chai, a four-storey balcony-type tenement block that housed a martial arts school and clinic, now includes the Hong Kong House of Stories, a museum of the city’s society and culture. Chicago artist Theaster Gates revitalised an abandoned bank building as a gallery, media archive, library and community centre for an underserved African American community. Platoon Kunstalle reinvigorated the counterculture of East Berlin that was lost due to gentrification after reunification of the city.

Students are asked to explore migrant-minority/host relations, spatial nesting, architectures of disguise, the tectonics of layering, and practices of camouflage.

Studio Outcomes

This studio asks you to develop a design strategy and material and spatial vocabulary for exploring the theme (Dis)Guise interpreted in the many ways illustrated above. You are encouraged to seek inspiration from the physical, environmental, material and social histories and characteristics of your locality. Our preference is for a design brief modelled after but not limited to the above approaches to public interest/socially-engaged design creation that is sensitised to local concerns. You may select a site of your choice within an established residential (urban or suburban) neighbourhood in Australia or overseas. Students who would prefer a more structured approach will be guided to develop a medium scale public facility inspired by an aspect of the history and identity of the Port Melbourne Foreshore within the three breakwaters west of Princes Pier.

Studio Leaders

Anoma Pieris is a professor at the Melbourne School of Design. She has a MArch and SMArchS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MPhil in geography from the University of Melbourne. She has published extensively on Asian architecture, Indigenous cultural centres, The Pacific War, border politics and migration and is the author with Lynne Horiuchi of The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (2022). Anoma is guest curator for the 2022 exhibition on South Asia’s post Independence architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Athanasios Tsakonas is a practicing architect, builder and writer with over 30 years of experience in both Australia and overseas. He is a partner in Singapore based firm Tan + Tsakonas Architects, and also runs a studio in Melbourne undertaking design & build projects. He holds BArch Studies and BArch degrees from the University of Adelaide, and MA (Urban Design) from the National University of Singapore. He is author of In Honour of War Heroes: Colin St Clair Oakes and the Design of Kranji War Memorial (2021).

Readings & References

• Becker, Carol. 2015. Theaster Gates, Phaidon, UK.
• de Jong Duldig, Eva. 2017. Driftwood: Escape and Survival Through Art, Australian Scholarly Pub. Melbourne.
• Dewolf. Christopher. March 2018. “How the Blue House is Keeping Hong Kong Heritage Alive”, https://zolimacitymag.com/how-the-blue-house-is-keeping-hong-kongs-heritage-alive/
• Doyle, Helen. 2017. Life on the Bend: A Social History of Fishermans Bend, Melbourne. Available at https://hdp-au-prod-app-pp-haveyoursay-files.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/6915/4709/3453/Social-History-FishermansBend.pdf
• Elias, Ann, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas. 2015. Camouflage cultures : beyond the art of disappearance, Sydney University Press, Sydney, N.S.W.
• Guntram, Henrik Herb and David H. Kaplan eds.1999. Nested identities; Nationalism, Territory and Scale, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, New York.
• Leach, Neil. 2006. Camouflage, MIT Press, Cambridge, MAss.
• Ng. Mee Kam. 2018.“Sustainable community building in the face of state-led gentrification: the story of the Blue House cluster in Hong Kong”, Town Planning Review. Sept-Oct, 2018, Vol. 89 Issue 5, 495-512. [MU -library-online]
• U’Ren, Nancy and Noel Turnbull. 1983. A History of Port Melbourne, Oxford University Press.

Schedule Mondays and Tuesdays 12:00-15:00

Contact Handbook