Studio 06

Desert Futures

Charlotte Algie

This studio is available to students enrolled in ABPL90142 Studio C, ABPL90143 Studio D, and ABPL90115 Studio E.

Studio Description

Desert Futures researches the architectural possibilities derived from the unique conditions of arid zones. Australia is primarily an arid continent - a climate category defined by low humidity, very low annual precipitation, and high diurnal range. Australia’s deserts are not an empty wilderness. Rather, they are a complex and contested space, with ancient history, rich resources, and powerful players of extractive industry. Architecture can be tested and developed under these conditions, with opportunities to engage urgent contemporary questions of material, performance, economy and spatial programme.

In Desert Futures II, the focus of the project will shift to Victoria’s semi-arid zones. Amongst North-Western Victoria’s semi-arid Mallee, Boorong Country, students will site a philanthropic foundation at the edge of Lake Tyrell, a saline lake in a topographical depression famous for turning to a bright pink colour under certain seasonal chemical conditions.

Architectural structure will be central to the design ideas for this project. Desert Futures II will be centred in exploration of the idea of Fragile Structure. We will refer to the tradition of structures in architectural history, for example, Robert Le Ricolais, Jean Prouvé, Frei Otto, Heinz Isler, and consider the perpetual intersections of engineering and architecture. Fragile Structures will focus on design with ideas of structure that is sculptural, poised, precarious, tense, on the edge of falling or failing, collapsing or coming undone.

These ideas will be developed through making, across digital and physical experiments. Digital model making techniques will centre in form of parts, considering seriality, assembly and real-time design as a new topic within digital making. Physical models will use inexpensive multiples to produce simple but inspiring systems and physics studies, focussed on lightweight and precarious form. Throughout, project will also engage contemporary interdisciplinary issues in sculpture, grounded in exploration of practices of artists including Helen Marten, Nancy Holt, Gertrude Goldschmidt, Clement Meadmore, Inge King and others.

The challenge for students will be to articulate the explorations into light, fragile, unbalanced, uneasy or unusual structure, while maintaining an understanding of composition, and responding to a mature architectural brief. This will be a project where structure is expected to be central to the design process itself, rather than merely a decorative or standardised superimposition to other critical interests.

Studio Outcomes

The architectural brief for Desert Futures II Precarious Structures will be medium in scale and will include an exhibition space, an event centre, and visitor accommodation.

Students will develop techniques for vivid representative, territorial backgrounds to design, and will rehearse new workflows that integrate digital territorial geologies and ecologies. Additionally, students will test a range of different ways to simulate and study structures under real world physics: These will include experiments in Grasshopper/ Karamba and Unity.

The studio will begin with a series of prototypes that span digital and physical media to generate a range of formal and compositional ideas. After completing the sequence of formal studies, students will quantify the various scales of the brief. Finally, students will synthesise brief with the ideas developed through their creative design exercises, to produce a conceptually inquisitive, comprehensive design outcome.

The final project will be represented with a focus on orthographic drawings and perspective views. Additionally, students will be encouraged to explore production in durational media, i.e. film or animation, as has featured in previous studio iterations. Introductory tutorials for those without prior experience in film and animation will be provided.

The outcomes of the studio will emphasise a deeper understanding of the role of structure within architectural design, both in terms of history/tradition and contemporary techniques. Students will learn fundamental skills to compute and understand structure, as well as strategies to draw, and devise imaginative schemes that are embedded in creative structural understanding. Students will learn and refine skills in design across a range of two, three, and four dimensional media.

Studio Leader

Charlotte Algie is a director of the office NN specialising in infrastructural, cultural and public architecture. Her completed practice projects include the Reverberation Screen for the Berlin Opera, recognized -among other honours- by the German Engineering Prize 2018, and the BDA State Prize for Berlin, 2018. Her current practice focus is a Victorian State Government creative research project. NN has previously exhibited at ArtOMI Newmark Gallery, dOCUMENTA(13), the Biennale di Venezia, Milan Triennale, the Yale Architecture Gallery, among other public forums.

Charlotte has taught design at a range of different international design schools previously, including Syracuse University School of Architecture, Yale School of Architecture, the UdK Berlin, and RMIT School of Architecture. Her most recent prior academic role was tenure as editor of the Yale Architectural Journal, Perspecta.

Readings & References

• Edward Allen, Wacław Zalewski, Form and Forces, (Hoboken, Wiley, 2010);
• Robert Le Ricolais, Collection (#086) of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania
• Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788–1972 (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1973);
• Samia Henni ed., Deserts Are Not Empty, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022);
• Nicholas Thomas, Landscapes: Possession and Dispossession, in Possessions: Indigenous Art, Colonial Culture, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999);
• Alena Williams, Pamela Lee, Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2015)

Schedule Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays 9am - 1pm.

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