Studio leaders: Gumji Kang & Javier López-Menchero
Cities continue to grow and their inhabitants flow in to fill the gaps of the city. With their vivid memories of bustling warehouses, clouds of smoke coming out of workers’ cottages, and dust settling on the decades of stories buried behind cold plaster walls, buildings carry on. But do buildings grow with the cities?
With the explosive growth of population and expansion of the cities, there is continual need to reimagine and redesign the existing city fabrics. The current building can be understood as a set of layers (or layered elements) that attribute information - not only about how a city is operating currently, but about how it was lived in the past.
This studio will cover negotiating and adding to these layers rather than replacing them. This studio will be centred around the architectural discourses on heritage, conservation, and contemporary readaptation. Students will be asked to carefully inspect and research an industrial precinct near the Melbourne CBD, at the cusp of change, producing a series of studies to build on their chosen site and program within the precinct.
How would you preserve, reimagine and design the buildings to grow with the city?
This will be one journey intensely urban, intensely dense, and intensely interventionist.
This is NoVacancy.