Studio leader: Ursula Chandler
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“Architecture is giving form to the places where people live. It is not more complicated than that, but also not easier than that” Alejandro Aravena
The studio looks to propose an effective, affordable strategy that could meet the housing needs of Greater Melbourne.
Run in parallel with the Bee Breeders Affordable Housing Challenge Competition https://beebreeders.com/architecturecompetitions/melbournechallenge/ the studio will focus on ideas of affordability and specificity in architecture.
Looking at the Epping Train Line we will select sites along the railway corridor, a path, landscape, or brutal urban infrastructure which connects a series of districts, nodes and in-between spaces. We will use this existing infrastructure and the landscape it has generated to re-imagine and re-interrupt the periphery and the non urban, and the community that facilitates.
Through staged strategies, construction innovation and prefabrication, and larger urban and infrastructure planning we will produce robust and long-term proposals, which expand architecture from something which is ‘artistic’ to something which attempts to address the forces that shape our environments; economics, politics, society and geography.
The task is to intervene within one of the existing train station precincts on the Epping line. Through staged intervention each project will propose;
1) A element of re-use or reclamation
2) A new community accessible building or element
3) New housing proposal [refer to competition brief
Projects will oscillate between the existing and emerging landscape and geography of your site, down to the construction detailing and fabrication of buildings and infrastructure.