Studio leader: Ursula Chandler
The studio is located on the Murray River from the source at Kosciuszko National Park through to Mildura in Victoria’s west, engaging with its geography, environment, culture and economy.
The management and mis-management of the Murray River is symbolic of our inherent colonial attitude towards our environment. It highlights the need for greater understanding and insight of how we live with finite resources like water, in a drying and shifting climate.
Projects in this studio will look at housing in this fragile and contested landscape, as traditional relationships of population settlement, agricultural development, climate and housing affordability change drastically across the globe.
Housing proposal(s) will be required to be aligned to one of two broad categories;
1] emergency (covid, climate change or weather extremity)
2] transient (relocation, local workers, holiday, ageing)
The studio will focus on staged strategies, construction innovation and large-scale infrastructure planning and master-planning, considering the broader implication of architecture beyond an aesthetic exercise to an act shaped by the environment, economics, politics, society and geography it sits within.
Identifying a specific study area for intervention, we will propose new housing typologies which carefully critique and contribute to their context, and the nuance conditions of a particular site – both physical and metaphysical. Projects will be informed by comprehensive research, illustrative analysis, and experimentation, creating innovative proposals underpinned by a clear theoretical position.
We will look to create a series of interrelated inventions on multiple sites, finding relationships and idiosyncrasies between multiple landscapes and habitation methods.
In addition, our Murray River site is shared with the “Inland-Public” studio and collaborative workshops and social studios are planned, with the aim of giving students a range of studio experiences and learning opportunities.