C/11

Precariat

Mitchell Walker and Tom Proctor

Ballot Video

Studio Description

The ‘precariat’ is a neologism coined by economist Guy Standing to describe a new social class in the making, defined by its unstable job conditions, isolation, and tenuous connection to place. Many who occupy the ‘precariat’ are new migrants and young people forced to eke out an existence negotiating these multiple insecurities.

How can we make a difference through architecture? In this studio we will design a hub for food delivery riders in the Melbourne CBD – some of the most mobile, and elusive of actors in our city. The hub will anchor, make visible, and provide a sense of place for the riders – an antidote to precarity. But the notion of anchoring and gaining purchase on a land also has multiple and charged implications in a settler-colonial context where sovereignty has never been ceded by its First Nations People. How might we negotiate this architecturally while interrogating issues of precarity and belonging?

Studio Outcomes

Students will be introduced to creative ethnographic methods underpinned by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmnanalysis through which they will document and critically reflect on the interrelationship between time, people, and place. This includes noting the sensory registers of the city, observations across time that capture its multiple temporalities, and interpretation through drawing and models.

Brief: Hub: showers/bathrooms, lockers, bike storage and charging stations, kitchenette, and enriching commons to connect with and form solidarity with others in the city. In addition to this basic brief, students are expected to include programmatic additions/variations as appropriate to their unique conceptual approach to the project.

Site: We will identify a transect or city block in the Melbourne CBD within which students will locate their design intervention after exploring tactical opportunities the cityscape offers through its infrastructure, multiple publics, commerce, and hidden histories.

Studio Leader

Mitchell Walker is a design lead at Wardle working in the public, residential, commercial and healthcare sectors. Mitchell has experience working in intense urban environments with varied cultural conditions with projects in Melbourne, China and the United Kingdom. He is keenly interested in the complex, diverse and layered character of our urban environments and the nature of public space within it.

Tom Proctor works for Wardle as a design lead on projects ranging from residential, educational and commercial development to large scale master planning proposals. His design approach seeks to advance architecture’s enduring qualities of space, form, material, and light, in close conversation with the emerging social, ecological, and economic conditions that shape our contemporary experience. Underpinning this approach is a desire to express architecture’s capacity for public discourse, disciplinary experimentation, and dialogue with history - values he considers inseparable from the production of meaningful architecture.

Readings & References

The Precariat by Guy Standing (2014).

The urban staffroom: imagining infrastructure of care and solidarity in Melbourne by Andrew Copolov (2023)

Common space creation: can architecture help? (Towards a provisional manifesto) by Stavros Stavrides, The Journal of Architecture (2023).

Improvising Rhythms: Re-reading Urban Time and Space through Everyday Practices of Cycling by Justin Spinney in Geographies of Rhythm (2010).

The Aesthetics of Place-temporality in Everyday Urban Space: The Case Study of Fitzroy Square by Filipa Matos Wunderlich in Geographies of Rhythm (2010).

Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte (1990).

City of Melbourne: Aboriginal Melbourne - https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/aboutmelbourne/ melbourne-profile/aboriginal-culture/

ABPL90437 Design Studio C is an Early start subject. The Studio Ballot will be held online at the beginning of O-week, opening at 9am on Monday 15th July and closing at 9am on Tuesday 16th July. The outcome of Studio Allocation will be announced on Canvas before the end of Thursday 18th July. There will be preparatory online learning work to be completed during this period. Teaching begins with an all day, in person, compulsory Symposium Day in Laby Theatre (L108), David Caro Building at 9am on Friday 19th July.

Schedule:
Monday 6:15pm-9:15pm in MSD 238
&
Thursday 6:15pm-9:15pm in MSD 238

Contact Handbook