Amphibious Architecture

….site is a collection of scales, programmes, actors, and ecologies that includes past imprints as well as future changes Andre Kahn

Site: west bank of the Yarra River between the Westgate Bridge and the Newport Power Station (1.5kms long, width 60 metres). A strip of left-over land wedged between remnant industrial infrastructure and the Yarra River.

Project: what type of encounter can be designed between a river and a city edge? The site, along the river’s edge is part landscape/city/river; it has a certain “terrain vague” character. An urban scale response is required that considers the surrounding built fabric, river edge, the existing landscape and its uses. Your response may include the addition of new infrastructure, the overlay of new uses, building and landscape. Predictions of rising sea levels over the next 100years, along with periodic floods and the impact of tidal variations should be considered in your proposal.

Approach: this studio offers you a site based approach to making architecture. This approach will include a detailed site study as a way of determining how and where to intervene in a location. Site definition is a creative process that can motivate and inspire architectural outcomes. You will  undertake detailed drawn explorations of the site to discover its full lived complexity, seen and unseen processes, traces and past imprints impacting over time. This process will draw upon your own observations, archival research, participation in an intensive studio workshop, key texts and case study projects. This process will lead into the production of new drawings to re-define the site. In this studio you will need to devise a carefully considered strategy for the sites future, one that emerges from your site investigations. There will be an intensive studio workshop led by Professor Gabriela Seifert in week 3 of the semester commencing 10.00am Monday 17 March and concluding noon Friday 21 March. You will need to be able to commit to a full week of attendance at this workshop.