Stephanie G. Mathis There are many myths surrounding architects and what they do. The popular cultural stereotypes that have shaped 20th-century architecture are responsible for these misconceptions. From Ayn Rand’s young, individualistic Howard Roark to the utopian visions and widely misquoted Swiss architect Le Corbusier to the infamously difficult genius of American Frank Lloyd Wright.
In Sampling The City, an exhibition that I curated at the National Gallery of Victoria as part of Melbourne now, the challenge was conveying the diversity of design processes: what architects do and how they do it, along with why architectural thinking can be useful to collective communities.
In Australia, an architect is often viewed as a service of luxury, a response to the client’s desire to show wealth and influence. The architect is unable to contribute to affordable housing beyond the bespoke residential sector due to the rationalizations that are used by the project home industry.
In the public sphere, the architect is usually at the rear of a project, such as a school, community center, or public pool. They are battling for the best design within a “value-add mentality” of key performance metrics and budget rationalization.
In the context of four parts, Sampling The City now has a room dedicated to an “architectural incubator,” an environment that provides an insight into six young Melbourne practices at different stages of their careers: Cassandra Complex, Muir Mendes, Studiobird, March Studio, Make Architecture, and Studio Roland Snooks.
March Studio (left), Studio Roland Snooks, Incubator Installations. Photographer Peter Bennetts
Each practice created a wall-mounted installation based on one of five themes: architecture and representation, craftsmanship and materiality, stitching the city, art-engaged practice, or advanced architecture.
Six installations consist of images, drawings, and models, as well as material compositions, with the intention of providing an insight into a variety of architectural ideas and emerging perspectives. Let’s take a closer look at three of the installations.
Melissa Bright of Make Architecture found the exhibition a great opportunity to explore various unbuilt and built projects within their practice. The architects were inspired to make study marquettes by American artist Ed Ruscha’s famous photographic study Every Building along the Sunset Strip from 1966.
The models are beautifully detailed and show a range of materials being tested and referred to. This is an important part of Make Architecture’s studio process for designing a new building. As Bright explains:
We zoom in on a particular project and use the materials and existing details of the house as a basis for our design. We look for new ways to interpret and respond to these materials. MAKE’s inspiration is derived from the small-scale street identities and commitment to livable suburban areas that foster a sense of place and community.
Studiobird is Matthew Bird’s studio, which focuses on material investigations at the intersection between architecture and art. It works with collaborators like the Melbourne contemporary dance company BalletLab. Bird and BalletLab artistic director Phillip Adams created Future Wagon 2013 for the Incubator Room – a vision of a nomad home of tomorrow.
The project speculates on our future residents’ roaming street addresses and the value of material décor: Where will we live and how will our homes appear? The result is made from DIY materials, and it references everything from stagecoaches in the Wild West to gypsy wagons, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion cars, homemade billy carts, and shopping trolleys for people experiencing homelessness.
Bird’s approach is very different from Make Architecture. Bird creates a database of trigger words and images that are typically taken from Google Images.
As part of his process, he asks clients and collaborators for images that will form the basis of an ongoing conceptual discussion that begins to build a project vision. Bird avoids using the term innovation to describe design, arguing that it is more akin to equations than a creative approach.
I am driven to create “new” by asking “what-if?” questions that seem illogical, by combining disparate disciplines and elaborative contradictions, and by arriving at charged spatial constructions. These will offer profound experiences for my clients and audiences.
Roland Snooks, an architect who is at the forefront of “advanced Architecture,” is a pioneer in the use of digital fabrication and computational processes such as 3D printing. His work is a combination of algorithmic design experiments with advanced fabrication technologies, such as robotics. Snooks’ architecture is based on the principles of self-organizing behaviors in biological, material, and social systems.
Snooks’ Sampling The City presents a collection of prototypes made using experimental robotic techniques. The high-density forms can be used to pour concrete into structurally optimized building elements.
The purpose was to show the importance of construction experimentation and its influence on design. Snooks describes his design process as:
Starting either with a research line or a client’s brief, our work is part of a group of international researchers who are exploring the formation processes from complex systems.
These practices reveal their positions through their installations. They do this by showing a series of ideas, which, in turn, drive the architectural process.
The exhibitions convey the richness and diversity of Melbourne’s architectural culture and the importance of architecture to the city’s cultural economy.
