Studio C/04

The Exquisite Corpse

Virginia Mannering

Studio Description

The broad area of study in this studio is the Murray River, running across three states from the Australian Alps, New South Wales, through regional centres such as Albury Wodonga, Swan Hill and Mildura, to the estuaries of South Australia. Exploring a series of nodes as case studies and then expanding to explore the length of the river, student projects will speculate on the impacts of global concerns such as climate change, population growth and decentralisation that might affect the area and the possible futures and public architectures that could be imagined for them.

The studio brief will be to design a “parliament” building for their town, situated in the Murray River zone. Students will be encouraged to consider regional needs and to think of ‘civic’ and ‘public’ architecture in a multitude of ways: temporal qualities, archaeological, ecological, material culture, community safety and inclusion, and critical broader topics such as decolonising the regional-urban space, more-than-human subjects, climate change and the Anthropocene.

Studio Outcomes

The studio uses the Surrealists' artists experimental assemblages of images/words [the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis] as a driver for site exploration, program, and design (more on that in class, of course!) Idiosyncratic projects developed via careful readings of ‘site’ and imaginative proposals engaging with and questioning the nature of public and civic architecture will be the fundamental outcomes of the studio. Deliverables will include the translation of research into spatial diagramming, mapping, models and evidence of an interactive process.

All projects are individual, but using the exquisite corpse as our driver, we will see each project as part of a collaborative whole, one architectural proposal located at each town along the river.

Studio Leader

Virginia Mannering is a designer and award winning researcher-writer. She teaches design studio, and art/architectural history and is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. www.virginiamannering.com

Readings & References

Architectural References:

• Asymptote, Steel Cloud
• Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas, Hotel Sphinx Planetarium with Swimming Pool
• Candilis-Josic-Woods' Free University Building, Berlin
• Cristiano Toraldo, Maquina de vacaciones
• Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt

Readings:

• 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
• Lawrence, Susan & Davies, Peter, (author.) (2019). Sludge : disaster on Victoria's goldfields. La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc, Carlton, Vic
• O'Gorman, Emily & CSIRO (2012). Flood country : an environmental history of the Murray-Darling basin. CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria
• Pascoe, Bruce (2014). Dark emu. Broome, W.A. Magabala Books
• Walliss, Jillian (2018). ‘The Antipodean Limits of a Manifesto: OMA and the Australian Countryside’, Fabrications, 28:1, 110-112, DOI: 10.1080/10331867.2018.1410921
• Weller, Richard & Bolleter, Julian, (author.) (2013). Made in Australia : the future of Australian cities. UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia

Schedule
Mondays 15:15-19:15 in MSD Room 117 and Fridays 15:15-17:15 in MSD Room 142

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