Substance

Michelle Gan

Studio Description

Substance confronts the distance between people and the materials they in habitat with—a fracture that has left the built environment detached from the very matter it is composed of. While architecture has long been in conversation with structure and form, Substance reorients that conversation. Here, material is not backdrop or surface—it is origin. It is actant, agent, and proposition.

The studio positions itself against extractivism and the linear logics of cradle-to-grave construction. These industrial patterns—where material is mined, used, and discarded—are environmentally destructive and culturally bankrupt. In response, Substance calls for cradle-to-cradle thinking: a circular framework where materials participate in cycles of use, transformation, decay, and reconstitution.

We ask: What happens when material is no longer an afterthought but the instigator of architectural thought? When the DNA of a building is authored not by program or brief, but by the chemistry, fibre, geology, or entropy of a single substance? Can a building be co-written with the matter it comprises?

This studio doesn’t engage with material as texture or finish. It engages with its full arc—extraction, impact, crafting, construction, and ecological role. It aims to foster deeper material literacy within architecture, grounded in ethics, performance, history, and care.

This conversation has evolved from Woods Bagot’s broader practice, where material behaviour and lifecycle considerations are beginning to shape the trajectory of some of the studio’s most progressive, research-led projects globally. The Substance invites students to engage with this evolving discourse through a joint learning environment, working from both the Melbourne School of Design and Woods Bagot’s Melbourne studio. Convened twice weekly across these two settings, the studio operates as a shared space of inquiry, where academic and practice-based modes of thinking intersect.

Studio Outcomes

The semester unfolds across Immersion, Prototyping, and Proposition, shifting from research to realisation through cycles of making, observation, and transformation.

In Immersion, each student is assigned a single material to remain with throughout the semester. Through full-cycle research and direct experimentation, soaking, slicing, testing, joining, they produce a material catalogue capturing technical behaviour and cultural meaning. The goal is not mastery, but a responsive dialogue with matter.

In Prototyping, students develop three material fragments exploring architectural potential:
* Structural – How does the material span, carry, or connect?
* Ephemeral – How does it age, weather, absorb, or emit?
* Spatial/Social – What uses or interactions does it afford or disrupt?

These studies are design tools, not building models. Through them, architectural form emerges from the material itself, not imposed, but discovered.

Proposition consolidates this research into a full architectural work, grounded in accumulated material intelligence. Students supportive by the Woods Bagot studio to develop a building where form, structure, and experience evolve from the chosen material’s properties. Time is a design tool: the project must account for repair, reuse, decay, and transformation.

The site, Burnley Circus Park, is a triangulated, uncertain ground where rail, river, road, and remnant green space converge. It resists singular reading—defined by thresholds, flows, and edges. Projects are to treat the site not as backdrop, but collaborator.

Each proposal must be spatially and tectonically resolved, yet conceptually open —an architecture of continuity, not finality. Substance culminates not in completion, but in a carful exploration between material, site, space, and time.

Studio Leader/s

Michelle Gan is a registered architect and designer at Woods Bagot. Across her career, she operates at the intersection of architectural practice, academic research and art. Her process is grounded in narrative and storytelling underpinned by socio-cultural thinking and a focus on human-scale intervention to explore the relationship between person, place, and environment. Michelle's professional local and international experience span diverse typologies, including residential, educational, public, and civic projects. Since graduating from the RMIT School of Architecture, she has remained actively involved in speculative research in academia as a studio leader at the Melbourne School of Design, and through art and installation internationally—most recently contributing to Tripa de Gallina: Guts of Estuary for the Biennale Architettura 2023.

Readings & References

To be provided in class

Schedule:
Monday 6pm-9pm @ Woodsbagot Office, Mezzanine
Thursday 6pm-9pm in MSD 140

Off-site Activities:
TBA

Contact Handbook