UTS Architecture

Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building, 702-730 Harris Street, Ultimo, NSW 2007.

p: +61 2 9514 8024 | f: +61 2 9514 8787 | info@utsarchitecture.net

Repowering Cities
[Sydney Case Study]

Elena Vanz

The studio will explore how electricity shapes urban environments, engaging a multidisciplinary range of factors from political to economic, from cultural to environmental, etc. The challenge becomes to maintain, to retrofit and to integrate existing conditions, providing new centres for electricity production on-site and power distribution networks. Students will look at sites in the city of Sydney

Superpériphérique_Paris

Frank Minnaërt

In 2008 the President of France commissioned ten international multidisciplinary teams to envision the evolution of the French capital as a “post-Kyoto” metropolis. The studio will focus on a specific intervention: the existing Périphérique, a 35km long ring ‘highway’ around Paris and the new superpériphérique. As a key component of the metropolis, the studio will speculate on their future. A trip to Paris (two-week intensive workshop) is a core component of the studio, in collaboration with AiGP and MVRDV+ACS+AAF.

The Ghost in the Machine

Joanne Kinniburgh

Incessant growth of the urban condition brings new challenges and hazards to the way people live and to the way built form emerges in this context.  Responding with intelligence, rather than out of habit, is now required of architects who wish to be authors of a new resilient urbanity.  Beginning with small componentry, this course will unpack and interrogate the elements of urbanity, redesigning them for deployment in response to site-specific threat conditions.

Concrete Tectonics 2

Kirsten Orr

This studio explores new ways of casting concrete that minimise the environmental impacts of formwork and maximise the possibilities for producing mass-customised concrete elements better suited to contemporary architectural challenges. This will be an investigation into the ‘tectonic’ potentials of concrete, exploring the complex connections between materials, the technology applied to those materials and the resulting architectural form.

Death to the City

Niall Durney and Sven Ollmann

Does CBD mean death to the city? Can a constant regeneration of city centre blocks re-invent a negative culture of city by day, suburb by night? The studio proposes a complex commercial CBD site currently under Design Excellence competition and questions whether the white collar workforce generation of the 21st century is no longer scared of subculture and wants life around the office.

“Doubt, delight and change”

Nick Sargent and Barnaby Bennett

This studio will research the generative potential of temporariness in architecture. Against a backdrop of globalisation, financial crises, protest movements and disenfranchised architecture we will investigate the potentials of temporary architecture afforded by its relative freedoms from capital and bureaucracy. Core themes will be activism, temporal design, improvisation/performance, experimentation, community engagement,  and the ethical role of the architect. The studio will primarily investigate / provoke two cities : Sydney and disaster affected Christchurch, and will include a 10 day design/build workshop in Christchurch where temporary interventions are currently being deployed as part of the city’s earthquake recovery.

Trouble in Paradise

David Neustein

An island. Above: the Great Barrier Reef marine park. Below: the world’s fourth-largest coal terminal. Now: an endangered bird colony in a World-Heritage wilderness. Soon: 8,000 temporary workers building three $15 billion gas plants. Equal parts Mad Max 2 and Robinson Crusoe, hard-edged and utopian, this studio investigates how architecture operates at the scale of infrastructure and landscape.

Sensational Instruments: Architectures of Emotion

Thierry Lacoste and Tom Rivard

Too often architecture is held to be the inevitable result arising from the dissemination of quantities, contexts and analyses, where design is an adjunct or result of no more than these quantifiable concerns.  This studio is concerned instead with what architecture might be beyond (or before) the analytical, taking as its starting point the personal, the qualitative and the corresponding emotional response. Modern architecture has been concerned mainly with the use and design of “empty” space, ideally unrestricted by interpretation and inhabitation.  Resisting these conditions, the central aim of the studio will be the interconnection of emotional response, art and architecture through the crafting, not of space or form, but of experiential solutions.

Systems, Simulation and Staying alive

Ben Doherty

Something major has happened, (click the link for the full story) and now you’ve got to design a refuge that will ensure your tribe’s survival. We’ll be building system models in Grasshopper with Python, making infographics out of them and then making a film to tell the whole story. This studio will make you think about buildings, their performance and their occupants as systems.

http://utsapocalypse.net/

Materiality Lab

Sandra Loschke

In line with contemporary and  trans-historical correspondences, the studio sets out to reinvent sheet materials (plywood and glass-fibre-reinforced concrete panels) in the light of new digital technologies. Pursuing the idea of materiality as an ‘active force’, we will design a series of cross-scalar prototypes that develop material standards which can be applied at various scales and in different contexts through prototype-adaptations. These prototypes can be varied to operate at the scale of a detail, a piece of furniture, a room/or pavilion as well as more complex building systems. NOTE: Please allow for sufficient funding for materials and fabrication costs, the extent of which will depend largely on your particular design.

Maribor 2112Ai

Tarsha Finney

At the invitation of the organisers of Maribor 2112Ai_100YC, and as part of the European Capital of Culture Program for 2012, this studio will consider the extreme 100yr future of the city of Maribor, Slovenia.  Via an examination of the city’s more recent architectural past, the 19th century courtyard block, and through Slovenia’s political past – we will consider what spatial and institutional logic can be drawn from the country’s radically sophisticated political culture that in 1991 allowed Slovenia to slip quietly away while the other five former Socialist Republics of Yugoslavia fell heavily into a ninth circle of nationalist and ethnically cleansed hell.  Part of the studio involves (optional) travel to Slovenia, Austria and Italy in April and participation in the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale in August 2012.

Computational Environments

Dave Pigram

A studio dedicated to furthering the techniques and theories of computational design via architectural projects.  Students will work in pairs and will select from a shortlist of disparate project and technique offerings.
It is mandatory to also enrol in Francois Roche’s Masterclass and to participate in a one-week intensive workshop at RMITs robotic fabrication facility.

Re-Viewing Docklands

Gavin Perin

11507 – SPR 11

The studio asks two major questions: If our understanding of the social is mediated by the image, and techniques of image production, what generative agency does the image have in the making of form at urban and architectural scales? More importantly, how does this agency enable or respond to conditions of social transformation?

Extreme Architecture

Leena Thomas and Jarrod Lamshed

11510 – SPR 11 (Group 1)

Mining and the transition to a Low-Carbon Economy are two topics that currently polarise popular political discourse in Australia. By focusing on Roma – a remote “fly-in, fly-out” mining town in Queensland where the urban, economic, social and environmental conflicts are intensified, the studio will challenge preconceived notions of environmental design and investigate alternate approaches to sustainable urban environments.

Canberra: suggested title(s) ecological urbanisms / where does all this shit go? / ecological junk (space) / infrastructural ecologies

Matt Chan

11510 – SPR 11 (Group 2)

The studio investigates the dynamic relationship between architecture and urbanism. The aim of the research is to discover how architecture can redefi ne its role in making the city. By unscrambling its strategic agency, we aim to find new typologies, reveal organisational structures and discover new forms.

Mediterranean Union: Venice, Trieste, Genoa

Adrian Lahoud

11514 – SPR11 (Group 1)
This studio will develop and project new ideas for infrastructural and typological transformation in the context of three Italian cities, and a broader European social and economic crisis.

NextGen

Tom Barker

11514 – SPR 11 (Group 2)

The studio task is to design affordable housing for Australia, which is currently has the least affordable housing in the world. The studio looks at typologies, materiality, modes of living and communities to develop architecture that is designed to creatively and functionally explore the challenges affordability.

Adapturbia – Adaptive typologies for suburbia

Adam Russell

11514 – SPR 11 (Group 3)

A re-imagining of the single lot suburban subdivision and its nuclear home. The Adapturbia masterclass studio will speculate on the future of the suburb as students proceed from the archetype to the prototype, developing and testing their own projective genealogy of architectural typologies.

Computational Media

Dave Pigram
11515- SPR11 (Group 1)

[Architecture = Computer] – from computational to computing environments

Hank Haeusler

11515 – SPR11 (Group 2)

Drawing on architecture, urban digital media, engineering, IT and interaction design, the studio outlines a possible shift from architecture designed through computation (any type of process, algorithm or measurement done in a computational matter) towards architecture capable of computing (developing, using and improving computer technology, computer hardware and software as a space-defining element).

Design Mock-ups: Kitchens of Tomorrow

Damien Butler
11515 – SPR11 (Group 3)

This studio will explore the transformative nature of digital tools in fabrication markets. Time for the designer to take on an active involvement in the manipulation of space. We will set out to design and fabricate an element of a kitchen that tests…. explores… and delivers transformative concepts.

The CitySwitch Lab

Joanne Jakovich

11517 – SPR 11

Architectural Entrepreneurship Cities are agglomerations of enterprise—only that as traditional architects we might never get the chance to hold the transformative role of the entrepreneur. Travelling between Sydney, Tokyo and Osaka, we examine the question of entrepreneurial density and work with entrepreneur mentors to produce working prototypes that transform urban living.

The Contextual Surface and the Agency of Architecture

Gerard Reinmuth

11519 – SPR11

Despite the complexities of working in our contemporary condition, in architecture culture we regularly witness projects reduced to a banal, single image “concept” such as a wave, piece of coral, mountain, or cloud. This studio countered this idea of transcendence with that of immanence – that is the idea that the process of a project’s production is contained within the project itself.

Concrete Tectonics

Kirsten Orr

11505 – AUT 11

A collaborative architectural design studio between UTS and the Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark that investigates the potential of new technologies and casting methods to intensify the architectural properties of precast concrete.

http://concretetectonics.spruz.com/

Materiality Lab

Sandra Loschke

11505 – AUT 11

The materiality lab promotes research-oriented architectural projects developed for realization. Deploying smart design strategies and open systems, the studio explores architecture at different scales and contexts through prototype-adaptations.

Sponsored by fibre C Australia.

Space after Representation: Piranesi’s Carceri

Teresa Stoppani

11508 – AUT 11

G.B. Piranesi’s etchings of the Carceri (Prisons, 1749-50 and 1761) are early harbingers of the demise of the architectural object, and a powerful visual expression of the time that is embodied in an architecture of change. ‘Space After Representation’ proposes Piranesi’s Prisons as sites of contemporary architectural interventions in the city.

Built Emotion

Thierry Lacoste & Craig Allchin

11508 – AUT 11

There are two fundamental ways to look at the universe: the ‘analytical’ view, that supposes that the world is a more or less regular accumulation of components, and the ‘holistic’ view, which looks at the world (or any other entity) as a ‘one thing’ indivisible’ (Yona Friedman 2006). This studio will concentrate on the holistic view, developing the project from the inside feel and focusing on the user sensorial experience.

CBD Second Life

Silvester Fuller

11508 – AUT11

CBD Second Life is focused on developing the architectural activist within each student. The studio aims to uncover development opportunities within the city, specifically by proactively identifying buildings approaching the end of their life-cycle and exploring options to prolong their useful life as opposed to their complete removal and replacement.

Identity Crisis

William Feuerman

11508 – AUT 11

The studio will look at the identities of existing buildings throughout the world as opportunities for new design innovation. ‘Pure’ buildings will be corrupted by one another, as traces of their conceptual DNA are re-appropriated. We will consider design less as myth of invention, and more as a sequence of distortions, corruptions, mutations, and hybridizations of existing conditions into new forms.

The UTS Solar Pentathlon

Juliet Landler

11509 – AUT 11

Ten years ago, the Solar Decathlon Competition was globally launched to challenge university students to provide the public with models of carbon neutral and zero energy housing. This studio will be a smaller, yet still intense competition, adjusted to the 21st Century Sydney and using 1/20 scale physical models and five design contests.

Knowledge, Narrative and Zombies

Ben Doherty
11509 – AUT11

This studio is about constructing great stories, thinking hard, working cleverly and designing an environment that will resist an existential threat.

http://utsapocalypse.net/

Reformulating the Ground: Alice Springs

Tarsha Finney

11513 – AUT11

This year, the focus of this studio will be on the urban condition of Alice Springs itself via the condition of domesticity and multi-residential housing. In response to the expansion constraints on the city, the studio will ask what does it mean to build at density in outback Australia.

http://www.reformulatingtheground.com/

City: Integrate: Transport

David Holm
11513 – AUT11

A masterclass exploring increasing densities and the provision of public space within the transport driven growth of the Australian city. Using Sydney as a test case densities of Asian scales will be explored using historic precedents and contextual applications.

Re: Master

Dave Pigram

11516 – AUT 11

This studio challenges the unnecessary dissociation of serious formal research and provocative programmatic and/or performance based enquiry. Modern masterpieces will be redesigned to project alternative architectural futures where computational techniques establish feedback relations between use, formation, organisation, matter and making.

Grand Paris

Frank Minnaert

11517 – AUT 11

The studio will concentrate on a specific architectural intervention in Paris: densification by creation of a new urban stratum above the existing urban fabric. Formal processes will be tested for the generation and the morphological variations of this stratum according to spatial possibilities, future programmatic needs and the post-Kyoto agenda.