Sunshine Studio Atelier

Turning our empty shopfront into a studio space for the semester.

Last Thursday, 1st March, VEIL held its first atelier style Masters of Architecture Studio at Sunshine Plaza Shopping Centre. Management at the Plaza has kindly allowed us to inhabit one of the empty shops for the semester. The class will run weekly in Sunshine encouraging a more open, community based studio approach.

The 2012 Sunshine studio group began the morning by trekking with folding chairs in tow to their new home for the semester. The University of Melbourne students spent some of the first day fitting out the studio, complete with a long table for group work, individual break out spaces, a lecture space and community consultation table, created from discarded materials from the shopping centre. We also conducted a site visit to the Sunshine station precinct, exploring some of the area and buying Vietnamese bread rolls and rice paper rolls for lunch from local restaurants. The students were introduced to the VEIL thinking by lecturer Michael Trudgeon, and received an overview of resilience and distributed systems by researcher Che Biggs.