Studio C/12

Beneath the Clouds

Peter Stasios and William Grosby

Studio Description

The LaTrobe Valley's recent history can not be separated from the extractive and detrimental impact of the region's fossil fuel industry. The once thriving success of the fossil fuel industry spawned a collection of satellite towns, as well as offering significant housing and financial opportunities for many of its residents.

The demise of the fossil fuel industry in Latrobe Valley has led to massive job losses  and an accelerated decline of the district, placing it in stasis as it searches for a new identity that responds to new financial, ecological and social parameters of our time.

The revival of the State Energy Commision (SEC) by the Victorian State Government promises to bring renewal to the LaTrobe Valley by establishing the new head office in Morwell; Using this as a departure point, Beneath the Clouds is a housing studio interested in defining a new co-housing project and accompanying architecture for a new green energy workforce and community.

Studio Outcomes

Beneath the Clouds strives to reorient the foundations of architectural thought and embed the practice of creating buildings in more meaningful and respectful ways. Using a site situated to the east of Newborough with the soon to be decommissioned Yallourn Power Station ominously situated in the background, the studio is interested in asking students to foster new forms of design practice and formulate a new attitude to state-led housing for the community.

Students will be tasked with exploring the complicated history of the site and region, as well as evaluating architectures' complicated relationship with colonisation and industrialisation. Working across the site's history, theory and architectural precedents, students will be asked to develop a sensibility and future focused critical intelligence that allows them to formulate a new attitude to state-led co-housing and an architecture that can positively engage with Country.

The culmination of this research will be outcomes that are cleverly composed, straight-forward and unsophisticated, and anchored in its context with regional character.

Studio Leaders

Peter Stasios is an architect that works across architectural practice and research. Having gained experience working on a variety of typologies, as well as leading masters design studios at the Melbourne School of Design since 2017, Peter’s work is interested in using architecture as a vehicle to investigate accepted norms that reside in the field and present alternative outcomes.

William has 5 years professional experience working for various architecture offices. Currently he is working at Rob Kennon Architects (RKA) which is a small, design focused office in Melbourne. He has taught architecture at the Bachelor and Masters level at RMIT. William is interested in the architectural artefact and its capacity to define a social, economic, or cultural sensibility.

Readings & References

Schedule
Mondays and Thursdays 18:15-21:15 in MSD Room 141

Off-campus Activities
Week 2 / LaTrobe Valley / costing approx. $35 - $50

Contact Handbook