Keeping Place

Virginia Mannering

Studio Description

This studio is set in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, with Lake Boort at the centre of our investigations. Students will be asked to propose a “Keeping Place” -- an alternative to the cultural centre typology -- for the community here. This studio and the projects emerging from it will be informed by the local landscape, its climate and ecologies, and as such we will visit Lake Boort as a studio (a Saturday/Sunday trip, funding provided), and share some collaborative studio sessions with Landscape Architecture Thesis students. This studio would suit students who are interested in the following thematics:

●       Architecture informed by landscape and ecologies;

●       Designing with and for Country;

●       Radical, novel and place-specific materials;

●       Regional architecture;

●       Revitalisation strategies;

●       Critique of cultural centres, museums etc

Studio Outcomes

Projects completed in this studio should be highly place-responsive, in touch with climate, the temporal aspects of site, the desires of the community, and the artefacts your Keeping Place will hold. You may wish to develop a scheme that explicitly contributes to the local economy, or one which shifts and changes with time, seasons and/or weather conditions. Projects might investigate a critique of the cultural centre typology. Projects can vary in scale, for example they might be scattered across multiple sites, maintain a fixed and bold position in the town, or navigate a path across the landscape. We will develop projects through our site visits, mapping techniques, physical modelling and scalar investigations of place.

Studio Leader/s

Virginia Mannering is an Education Fellow in Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines the way the construction of the settler-colonial city has reshaped landscapes, the built environment and its relationships with the Anthropocene, and the flows of construction materials across time and space. Bio and projects can be found here: https://www.virginiamannering.com/

Readings & References

To be discussed in studio.

Schedule:
Wednesday 9am-1pm in MSD 140
Thursday 2pm-4pm in MSD 140 

Off-site Activities:
TBA

Contact Handbook