Studio C/08

Beyond Friction

Athanasios Tsakonas

Studio Description

Human conflicts inflict untold damage on the built and natural environment in ways that continually compromise our peaceful planetary co-existence with other humans, animals, and natural eco-systems, which we continue to exploit. Human conflicts produce social problems like dispossession, displacement, cultural disconnection and untold trauma. How can placemaking engender processes of recovery by educating the public on the consequences of conflict?

Taking the relationship between humans and the environment as the two main thematic foci, this studio asks you to explore environmental regeneration as a strategy for peace building. While the environment can be interpreted as the physical, social and material life-worlds in which architecture intervenes or shapes, we ask you to explore a broader interpretation of our profession as caring for places that conflicts destroy.

This studio responds directly to the Australian War Memorial’s recent decision to address and chronicle the colonial frontier wars. This decision produces creative friction between the idea of Australians as invasive colonial settlers and global defenders of peace and human rights. Using the southern gardens of Victoria’s Shrine of Remembrance around the new ANZAC railway station as the prospective site, it asks you to design a dedicated Centre for Environmental and Cultural Regeneration after a specific conflict that has involved Australians.

The conflict you focus on must be based on one commemorated within the Shrine’s grounds, or current challenges. Your approach must link your narrative to the studio site by acknowledging its contested spatial and social history.

Studio Outcomes

This studio asks you to develop a design strategy and material and spatial vocabulary for exploring the theme ‘Beyond Friction’ 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 and its origins, including its connections to country and its first peoples.

The Centre for Environmental and Cultural Regeneration is envisioned as a modest-sized civic facility connecting the ANZAC station to the Shrine that will offer a new interpretation of Australia’s conflict narratives. While the design brief is modelled after the above approaches to public interest and socially-engaged design creation, it is by no means limited and you may propose a version further sensitised to local concerns. You will also be required to workshop schemes for either a memorial located at or near Tynong Quarry, historical source of the Shrine’s stone, or a memorial to the Frontier Wars within the boundaries of the main project site.

In proposing this facility, you are asked to design sympathetically so as to respect the visual authority of the Shrine and its surrounding heritage protected landscape. The expectation is that you will enhance the urban connection to Shrine through its south-eastern Terrace Courtyard whose landscape design aims to evoke the Pacific and South-East Asian theatres of Australia’s military and peacekeeping service history.

This studio will include a full day field trip to the Tynong Quarry and Koo Wee Rup in eastern Victoria on Tuesday 28 February, as part of the background historical, cultural  and social context of this project.  Another field trip to the Botanic Gardens and Shrine of Remembrance will be held on Tuesday morning 7 March 2023 subject to confirmation.

Studio Leader

Athanasios Tsakonas is a practising architect, builder and writer with an extensive professional career spanning Australasia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He is a partner in the Singapore based consultancy Tan + Tsakonas Architects, and also runs a small design & build studio in Melbourne. He holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Adelaide (majoring in Architectural History & Theory), along with a Master of Arts (Urban Design) from the National University of Singapore.

Athanasios’s research interests include investigating the spatial impact war cemeteries and memorials have upon commemoration and remembrance; and the architects of conflict. His book In Honour of War Heroes: Colin St Clair Oakes and the Design of Kranji War Memorial was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2020. https://aabookshop.net/?wpsc-product=in-honour-of-war-heroes-colin-st-clair-oakes-and-the-design-of-kranji-war-memorial-pre-order

He has also taught Master of Architecture Design Thesis studio the past three years at the Melbourne School of Design. A student from his 2022 studio was nominated for the Bates Smart Award

Schedule
Tuesdays 09:00-15:00 in MSD Room 238

Off-campus Activities
Week 1, Week 2 / Tynong, Botanic Gardens, Shrine of Remembrance

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