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 ALTER: the 80's and 90's
Upperpool Design Studio 6-8RMIT Master of Architecture (Professional Degree) Semester 1, 2007 & 2008 Studio Leader: Brent Allpress, RMIT Architecture Research Director alter - to make other This studio investigates design questions concerning the role of the alteration, extension or addition in the context of revisions of recent architectural history. Buildings from the 1980’s and 1990’s are now reaching an age where they are beginning to be renovated, refitted and otherwise altered or extended, Melbourne Central, Ringwood Plaza, and the St Kilda Town Hall being prominent and contentious local recent examples. This raises a range of difficult and interesting architectural questions regarding the status and relevance of relatively recent architectural history, the heritage framework, if any, for these works, and design opportunities to engage constructively and critically with revisions of these projects. This studio develops design strategies and responses to alteration and extension as a specific category of design practice activity. Modernist architectural theory resisted the additive and promoted the tabula rasa as a means to ensure the autonomy of the new original modernist work. Adding to and altering a modernist building thus presents an internal conflict and contradiction to be worked through. Previous cycles of this studio have focused on alterations to works from the modernist period up to the 1970’s. Certain strands of practice in the subsequent period selectively extend the modernist project and many of these assumptions still largely hold. Other strands of practice in the 1980’s and 90’s actively sought to revise the assumptions of modernism. It is an open question whether these works therefore invite additive and supplementary interventions. The ornamental haunts architecture. Modernity has been defined by what it negates, by the attempt to break with culture, history and context. The apparent modernist rejection of the ornamental provides the figuring of that new autonomy, the tabula rasa or clean slate uncontaminated by the mistakes of the past. Ornament returned with postmodernism in the 1970’s and 80’s, but primarily in the service of communicating cultural meaning. The underlying architectural armature often remained unchanged. The architectural discipline today remains entangled in a set of theoretical and cultural assumptions that have their origins in modernist rhetoric and subsequent reaction. This studio provides a framework for investigating the complexities of the legacy of the Modernist prescription against the additive and the ornamental while also providing an opportunity to reconsider and revise the postmodern account of the role of ornament and the status of context. Recent non-standard digital technologies that revise modernist aesthetic economies of standardization also shift the debate on the role of figuration beyond representation and communication. Students were welcome to explore this as a focus. Precedent projects were analysed involving alteration, extension and addition strategies. A specific exemplary work of recent local architecture from the period was chosen and investigated through a series of exploratory ornamental design operations, testing its particular cultural, spatial, architectonic and representational limits. These initial exercises informed the design of an alteration, extension or other addition to the chosen local building, a critical intervention that opens the architectural project up to a reworking. The initial series of investigative operations informed a proposition about the proper limits of the work, leading to the development of design strategies for engaging critically with and remotivating an existing architectural context and program. The design brief of this new architectural complex was to house an archive of the chosen local architect's body of work and provide facilities for a proposed Institution of Australian Architectural Research that includes temporary and permanent exhibition spaces and an auditorium for public lectures and conferences. This Design Studio provides a vehicle for focused research into local architectural precedent, provoking a critical and creative design response. Shadowing I.M. Pei - ALTER Design Studio Student: Tian Wu RMIT Master of Architecture (Professional Degree) Semester 1, 2008 Alteration to I.M. Pei's Collins Place complex from the mid-1980's to house an Institute of Australian Architectural Research.    Altering the Arts Centre - ALTER Design Studio Student: Wei Liat Tan RMIT Master of Architecture (Professional Degree) Semester 01, 2008. Studio Leader: Brent Allpress. Alteration to the Melbourne Arts Centre (Hamer Hall), by Melbourne modernist architect Roy Grounds, to house an Institute of Australian Architectural Research.   Altered Generic: Institute of Housing - ALTER Design Studio Student: Felicity Roake RMIT Master of Architecture (Professional Degree) Semester 1, 2008 Alteration of early 1980's commercial apartment building by SJB Architects to house an Institute of Housing, with case study apartment fit outs drawing from Australian housing exemplars. Project Coodinator: Brent Allpress, RMIT Architecture Research Director | ||||||||
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