Coordinator: Leire Asensio Villoria & David Syn Chee Mah
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Senior Tutor: Kate Corke
Tutors: Victor Alegria, Montgomery Balding, Stephany Beaver, Daniel Biseto, Phil Burns, Alice Choi, Alex Choi, Phoebe Clarke, Luke Kim, Matthew Law, Ziyi Liu, Alexander MacKenzie, Matko Matkovic, Madeleine Thorpe, Robert Ventresca, Victor Wong, Yichen Yang, Jessica Zhang
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The overall aim of the undergraduate Beta/Earth studios is to provide students with the opportunity to extend their knowledge and skills in engaging with complex and multi-dimensional design problems.
Students in the undergraduate Beta/Earth studios are tasked with developing a contemporary version of the pleasure garden. Their proposals for a contemporary pleasure garden should be one that is focused on the communal activities and public life of the twenty first century and speculates on what the future of social life may be.
The updated pleasure garden also needs to establish balance between landscape and architecture. This studio encourages students to define a communal space that is hosted by and lived in interior as well as exterior spaces.
To create a compelling and thriving environment, the interaction between buildings and landscapes is critical. Focusing on how environments can be designed to support human activities and provide immersive and pleasurable experiences will be as important in this studio as devising how it supports the cultivation of a vibrant landscape environment.
The studio project is divided into three assignments which address different concerns, allowing the students to extend and iterate their design explorations through an engagement with
- The development of figure ground drawings that establish the overall field arrangement or group form of the project. Together with an exercise in developing solar envelopes, this establishes a framework for planning their site intervention.
- The focused development of the landscape. This involves the cultivation of the ground, landforming, planting, hydrological and material approach for the project. The students are expected to articulate how their designs help to support different activities, microclimates as well as micro-ecologies on site.
- The focused development of the communal pavilions. This involves the development of an architectural definition of the pavilions, paying close attention to the ways in which these structures may support a range of community programs and activities.