LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Lower Pool Studios - Semester 1, 2012

A Sahara in the head - Mike Hornblow Amalgam - Bridget Keane Eurymodal - Flynn Hart and Dan Nunan Fundamental Forces - Cath Stutterheim Fringe - Jane Shepherd Imposter topographies - Clark Thenhaus Kerb - Rosalea Monacella Mega_Households - Michael Howard Nowhere - Saskia Schut and Scott Mitchell Rich Space - Mark Gillingham Water Lab - Julia Werner

amalgam

Emmett Gowin: glacial furrows and bomb disposal craters, Umatilla army depot, Hermiston, Oregon, 1991.

+ Theoretical positionThis studio takes as its starting point that ‘environment’ is a fluid condition - one that fluctuates materially, qualitatively and quantitatively. Altona Coastal park is the laboratory within which we will question and reconfigure the relationship between water and ground over time.

+ Techniquesthe notion of amalgam requires an understanding of the behaviour of the existing conditions and the development of a strategy for amalgamation. There are two key techniques that will be used to do this.....

1. disruption - changes to the existing performances2. narrative - (e.g. biological, mythical) as a means to reorder the landscape through the series of disruptions

+ ToolsThe studio will focus on model making and drawing, where the act of making is seen as a means to producing knowledge.

Two definitions of ‘model’ will form a framework to oscillate between the abstract and physical:- As a means to question, hypothesise and abstract,- The physical act of making, with physical limitations, failures and material performances that are non-abstract.

OutcomesYou will work through digital and physical models as well as drawings in order to understand formations of the landscape over time. From this understanding you will generate a set of formal structures that reorder the existing landscape.

Structure:Critique/presentations: Tuesdays 2-4pmWorkshops: Fridays 10-2pm

Tutor:Bridget Keane

eurymodaleury: broad, wide, diverse, adaptivemodal: a state of existence, normative living

Tutors:Dan Nunan +Flynn Hart(POLLENSTUDIO)

Tuesdays: 1.30-4.30pmThursdays: 6-9pm

1 x Weekend WorkshopMelbourne Fringe Festival Exhibition

How will our future cities respond to forces of change? In order to live sustainably we need to adapt to constant states of flux caused by climate, politics and social upheaval.

Port Melbourne is an area prone to a range of external influences including possible sea level rise, increasing urban density, changes in land-use and infrastructure. A range of rapid-change scenarios will be tested at various sites against concepts of adaptability, mobility and resilience.

This studio will look towards simple low-cost technologies, mobile and emergency architectures as well as planning for future proofing. Scenarios will be tested on site with 1:1 interventions as well as through digital scenario mapping and animation.

As Eury-Thermal organisms can adapt to a wide range of temperature conditions, so too can a Eury-Modal being adapt to a wide range of living conditons.

Fisk, 1944. Map of ancient courses of the Mississippi River

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forcesTrees are so much part of our urban environment that we tend to relegate them to the humdrum background of our awareness. They survive against terrific odds, as widening streets encroach, and their space is allocated to further development. In recent years, the additional pressure put on them by increasing urban heat load and the southward trend of hotter climatic belt are becoming more apparent. Fortunately for Melbourne, its city council understands their value to our lives. And to the sequestering of Carbon Dioxide.

As designers, however, our role and responsibility is to understand their value as place makers, space makers, and providores of shade and beauty. But each tree has its species’ particular qualities and requirements.

The studio will begin by looking to what drives the engine of the world’s angle of movement and how these fundamentally establish the seasons, the weather and the climatic forces which have given rise to trees.

Trees have very particular needs: these we will attend to through research of surface materials, emerging techniques for increasing infiltration and edge conditions. The main focus will be on the qualities of trees. Drawing is an action which embeds awareness into our thoughts; drawing is thinking, To refine our awareness of these, we will be doing many hand drawings. These will include observational drawings and scaled measured drawings.

We will draw: - the individual characteristics of tree species through life drawing, -the spatial qualities present in selected precedents,- and analytical diagrams of spatial effects.

These drawings will be empowered through the seven fundamental lenses which ground successful design work 01 Orientation02 Shape of the Earth (topography)03 Shadow04 Under the skin (drainage and infiltration)05 Precedent06 Surface treatment07 Seasonal Transition

Finally, you will each incorporate this knowledge into the design for a selected small urban space.

Along side the research and design work, you will be introduced to essential communication skills. These will enable you to situate your work within a presentation format used throughout the studio, in final presentation and portfolio.

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STUDIO LEADER: Prof. Cath Stutterheim (RMIT University / SAALA)STUDIO TUTOR: Karolina Bartkowicz (SAALA)

TIME: Tuesdays & Thursdays (9:30 - 12:30) RM 8.11.45

semester 1 2012 landscape architecture lower pool

Topic: new_fringe is a design studio concern with changes to land use on the peri-urban fringe. Peri-urban zones of cities continue to expand rapidly. New housing replaces what was often productive agricultural land. But rather than consider this is solely as a planning or political or economic problem we will look at it as a rich and dense design brief.

Attempts to incorporate food production into new housing sub-divisions have limited purchase on land-use or food system outcomes. While new sub-divisions in Melbourne promote ‘sustainable’ living, environmental benefits, and the health and wellbeing of the community, to date, food production responses have been limited to community vegetable gardens, fruiting street trees and a ‘chook run’.

Task: In this studio you will produce a site-specific concept for a new fringe that incorporates food production and housing. Your projects may vary from broad-scale planning projects illustrated with site-specific examples through to more thoroughly developed small-scale projects.

Theory: Formal theoretical positions for the generation of your concepts will be offered through the reference/reading material [on sustainability; food security/food justice and peri-urban issues], the reading groups and guest lectures. A core research question that you can customise will guide your inquiries through design to propose a new set of land-use relationships for housing and food production in a peri-urban location in the Wyndham city municipality.

Techniques/tools: will include weaving together fieldwork, mapping [hand and digital] the theoretical positions and the propositional capacities of diagram-ming to develop new design ideas.

Educational philosophy: it a ‘community of learning’ studio where we all help each other to learn, to think more clearly, to be less guarded and to have more fun while develop strong innovative projects.

Guest: Professor Michael Buxton who has significant expertise on peri-urban issues will be involved in the studio.

Class times:

To ballot for this studio you need to be available Tuesdays all day and Wednesday after-noons from 2.30pm

Schedule for 75% of semester is: Tuesday _ all day

for 25% will be Tuesday afternoon + Wednesday afternoon

new_fringe [a foodcity studio]Jane Shepherd_ RMIT FOOD LAB [Food and Landscape Architecture Bureau]

image: Animal Superpowers” by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada

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tutorDr Rosalea Monacella

timeWednesday 10am-5pm

class commences Wed 7th March

room88.05.01

credit36 credit points

(equivalent to 1 Design Studio + 01 Eelctive)

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‘MEGA_HOUSEHOLDS’ FRENCH FOOD LANDSCAPE STUDY TOUR LOWER POOL STUDIO semester one 2012

FOOD_LAB

(FOOD LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE BUREAU) MICHAEL HOWARD

here INSIDE I AM (outside?)I FORGOT HOW I GOT HEREI AM WANDERING wondering

through far away places (this one?)I want to be NOWHERE

(else but here)

with Scott Mitchell&

Saskia Schut

Broader issueWhen so little now seems “unmapped” “uncharted”, we say (like Arakawa and Gins) this induces death. What of uncertainty? The unknown? We ask you, in the realm of your own garden (the backyard of your suburban home, or the balcony of your 10th floor apartment, the courtyard of your inner city share house... or other) to design a small space to feel lost... (disoriented, adrift, nowhere to be found, strayed, missing, consigned to oblivion).

By adopting a term such as ‘lost’ the body is reinstated as primary to design processes; imagination is brought to the fore and the rationalist (categorised, mapped) space is challenged. The term makes room for ‘otherness’, ‘darkness’, the unknowable, the ‘wild’ and the fantastical.

Scale and OutcomeDesign for a small garden that engages the notion of “lost” through spatial and material manipulation.

Tools and Techniques* fictional narratives* 1:1 material experiments* 1:1 spatial experiments* model making* film/photography

Tuesdays 1:30 - 4:30pmFridays 1:30 - 4:30pm

Time: Fridays 9.30am to 4.30pm Location: Building 45.A

Water LabDesigning with urban water-land-dynamicsSTUDIO THEME The studio will explore and design with the inevitable dynamics of Melbourne’s water system. Through de-sign you will be negotiating the constantly changing sites be-tween land and water considering human needs for space for their urban way of living and infrastructural requirements for water detention areas. Our broad research question asks: How can we design with the forces of accelerated water dynamics as one of the results of climate change? Climate change impacts, whether they arise as flooding or drought, have presented us with challenges that ask for novel, ground-braking, complex and critical design-propositions, which provide a highly flexible and functioning response to water extremes and at the same time high quality public space and urban living. In this context the studio asks further how we could challenge the notion of ‘Water Sensitive Urban Design’ beyond the usual small-scale rain garden projects? It is a great term expressing a complex large-scale urban design ambition. The reality though is that it seldom exceeds the design of rain gardens or wetlands. This studio wants to think of Melbourne as a water sensitive urban landscape in a larger scale mode and seeks conceptual design ideas which respond to phenomena of motion, of disturbance, of dynamic and of change and understand these as the building blocks for contemporary urban design.. Site-specific designs will then explore how this approach could manifest in form.

DESIGN APPROACH This studio will work with an integrative design approach, which doesn’t distinguish between the phas-es of analysis and design as separate parts but rather under-stands them as simultaneous and interwoven acts of a creative

design process. We seek new kinds of visualisations as both a foundation and a result of new ways of understanding and capturing the dynamic and complexity of urban landscapes. In other words, design is an act of understanding or design is to understand. Unpacking and getting a comprehensive idea of Melbourne’s urban landscape systems and their complex opera-tions the studio will begin with creative-intuitive design inves-tigations as ‘tools of understanding’. Not to stay imprisoned by our bias and preconceptions, the terms and images that we have known but mainly refer to former times and environmen-tal/urban conditions, we need to open ourselves to the subject matter we want to design with as little prejudice as possible. Therefore the studio emphasizes on seeing the unseen, reading the unread, feeling the unfelt, uncovering the hidden, mapping the unmapped, visualising the invisible, untangle the tangle.

STUDIO OPERATION The studio group will meet up regularly on Fridays all day. The studio will start with clearly formulated assignments of creative-intuitive investigations to be worked on from week to week. Eventually you will develop your own de-sign projects and will be asked to formulate your own design steps (in co-ordination with myself as your tutor). Work constel-lations in this studio will shift between working individually, in small teams, and as the entire studio group. There will be in-class-lectures by the tutor and guests as well as from students of the studio, on-site trips, in class debates and workshops, 1:1 critiques, and regular short presentations. The studio will be un-derstood as a ‘learning workshop’, which requires an interactive engagement and continuing design practice.

Landscape Architecture // Lower Pool Design Studio // 1st Semester 2012Tutor: Julia Werner