Studio Delta

Coordinator: Dennis Prior
Senior Tutor: Rosie Gunzburg
Studio Leaders
: Ryan Bate, Allan Burrows, Lauren Crockett,
Joseph Gauci-Seddon, Luca Lana, Virginia Mannering

The ambition of this studio is to engage with the complex demands of contemporary architectural design practice. Through a semester of project-based exploration students are introduced to the challenging and often uncertain nature of architectural design, where projective speculation and real-world problem solving are equally valued, and where intelligence, creativity and rigour are positioned as the key attributes of a critical and engaged design practice.

The studio brief is to design a new Library for the City of Melbourne, a proposition that encourages students to think critically about the nature of public space in the contemporary city.

As a departure point for the semester students leverage a broad range of representation techniques to develop a series of speculative maps on the themes of The Library and The City. This body of work establishes the key ambitions of each project, mapping the conceptual, programmatic and contextual terrain from which design propositions emerge.

In the development of their final projects students are encouraged to be equally engaged with the real and the imagined, with the world as it is, and the world as it might be, to pursue an architecture that simultaneously responds to the exigencies of the contemporary condition and the potentiality of critical and speculative design thinking.