Studio E/08

Performance Criteria

Lauren Crockett, Nicholas Braun, and Tope Adesina, with support from the Sibling Architecture team

Studio Description

Performance Criteria is concerned with the possibilities of material in the conception of non-extractive futures. We will consider “performance” as both the program, and the measurement of the desired technical and sensorial qualities of architecture.

The studio takes the position that spaces for cultural expression retain integral value in contemporary life, but their use of resources needs to be radically reconsidered to maintain validity as spaces of progression. We will work between the macro-movements impacting the practice of architecture and the resultant micro-details that affect the inhabitants; whether human or non-human.

The project site; a rural plot in Bathurst near the site of Australia’s first gold discovery in 1851; will host a facility comprising a place for production, a place for rest, and a place for performance. We are interested in propositional architecture that is grounded by a foundation of research into the tactile, temporal, environmental, structural, sensorial and spatial possibilities of materials.

Studio Outcomes

The studio will build comprehension of the way material selection, its inherent formal properties, detailing and composition contribute to the experience of both the occupant and the audience.

We will look to the wider forces shaping emergent ways of practicing architecture and working with materials to inform the propositions.

Precedent will be heavily utilised to understand the typological necessities of performance spaces and their associated structural and environmental requirements.

Students will be given the opportunity to challenge the temporality and scale of the functional brief, as well as the mode of performance and associated occupants and audience they are designing for.

The studio will encourage formal experimentation, and students will ultimately develop a rich archive of design approaches bound to real-world conditions.

Each student will work towards a highly resolved, medium-scale performance facility that is specific to the type of performance they are accommodating.

Studio Leaders

Lauren Crockett is an Associate architect at Sibling Architecture. She has a background in design, publishing and education. She believes that diverse new formal outcomes can be generated when designers look to other cultures, to other ways of living, gathering and working, to other disciplines, and to other abilities.
She co-founded independent architectural publication Caliper Journal in 2017 and continues to write, teach and practice within the architecture and design field. She has previously taught design studios at RMIT, Monash and Studio Delta at MSD, as well as an ongoing architectural media elective at RMIT.

Tope Adesina is a graduate of architecture, artist and photographer with experience ranging in scale, typology and temporality.
Tope has collaborated with artists on spatial installations, sculpture and pavilions; on another scale he has also worked on large infrastructure and health projects. He currently works across a range of public projects in his role at Sibling Architecture.
Tope is active in engaging the public realm across mediums beyond design and architecture, exploring photography and other artforms to influence our perception of public. He is currently the curator for a monthly speaker series PROCESS and has been a sessional design tutor in studio Beta as well as a technical tutor at the Melbourne School of Design..

As a founding director of Sibling, Nicholas  Braun’s expertise is with community, culture and education. This expertise spans across the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture, which gives him a deep understanding of how to integrate biological and social systems within the production of architecture.
Having worked across both disciplines in Melbourne and Sydney his projects bring a strong sense of this integration, often looking to dissolve the boundaries of the local context and the private internal spaces to create new and dynamic social landscapes for people to enjoy.
Nicholas is also a registered Landscape Architect and leads the landscape arm of Sibling.

Readings & References

• Luke Jones, Materiality After Extraction
• Eleanor Peres, Periodic Table of Matter
• Charlotte Malterre, The Devil is in the Details, in Non-Extractive Vol.1
• Manual of House Sections: Materials and Carbon
• Neyran Turan, Architecture As Measure
• Anuradha Kapur, Actors, pilgrims, kings, and gods: the Ramlila at Ramnagar
• Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, Avery Review
• Bruno Latour, Down To Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime
• Sense of the City: An Alternative Approach to Urbanism
• Sweating Assets: On Climate Conditioning and Ecology, Bahrain Pavilion 2023

Schedule Mondays 15:15-18:15 and Thursdays 09:00-12:00 in MSD Room 238

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