Urban Acu-puncture

First Year x Design 2

Student exemplars: Dane Walker & William Davis

Jamie Lerner's Urban Acupuncture posits that like the body, where diseases may be cured by the prick of a needle, the scars and dead spaces of an ailing city can be stimulated and revitalised with thoughtful interventions. In this studio, students were challenged to create their own architectural acupuncture that responds to the needs of our city. In combing through the Perth CBD, students found ailing sites in need of spatial intervention.

The client was the city and the users were its many varied inhabitants. While the acupuncture may be small, its inherent connection to the people and place renders its impact large. In the second phase of this project, students looked to Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres and developed the Space, Form, Structure and Material of their scheme to resonate with experiential quality. The carefully composed evocative drawings and perspectives are the manifestation of their attempt to repair the torn urban fabric of the city, through small yet highly considered moments of architecture.

Residential Design

Second Year x Design 3

Unit Coordinator A.Prof Francesco Mancini (campus) Chris Mewburn (online).

Student exemplars: Dion Cotterle & Vittoriano Vicaretti

This Unit is around the forming of spatial ideas in response to a problem of inhabitation. The scope is to enable learning about Architecture through a design process which focuses on reflective thinking about precedents and creative making to generate an architecture project at a concept level. In this Unit, students conceive of "The suburban house as a private dwelling and as the generator of collective space." The core of their design problem is the idea that a basic set of architecture type-forms have been successfully and permanently accommodating human inhabitation in time.

What does the term "type" mean in Architecture? How does a form-type morph from location to location, from time to time? What is their relationship with diverse places and cultures? How do people experience, shape, occupy and share them? How is it possible to reinterpret these traditional formal patterns to produce sustainable Architecture today? In this Unit, students explored and responded to these questions via critical interrogation of spatial and building typologies, producing weekly iterations of a single dwelling project that were subject to discussion and critique.

The Dark Hotel

Third Year x Design 6

Unit Coordinator: Justin Owen,

Dark Hotel Cluster Tutor: Chris Mewburn.

Student exemplars: Haydn Lawson, Stephanie Castleden & Jarrod Northey

How can we gather the astronomical in the local and day-to-day to explore the potential in space?

The task for this Unit was to design objects and relationships, buildings and then detailed experiences that mediate between people's visions of the Earth and the Skies above ... We emphasised the architectural investigative process rather than the curated, 'Money Shot': to focus on exploration rather than presentation.

Students were invited to explore intrigue, story and a potential for conversations between pre and post-colonial Cosmologies and ways of measuring the land and the sky: and, by extension, humans.

Working with the Perth Observatory and guest lectures from, amongst others, Julian Gitsham of Hassell London, Project Lead for the First Light Visitor's Centre at Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory and Peter Wheeler from the International Centre for Radio-Astronomy Research, the students were asked to explore visiting, foraging, sleeping and experiencing the site and purpose of the Perth Observatory in the hills above the Perth Coastal Plain.

We asked the students to focus on process in their design work and to consider that as enough: to consider the sketch, virtual-world building through iterative endeavour, the chosen and considered moment arrested and incorporated into a body of work as the stuff of architecture.