DAB School of Architecture

Cristina Goberna is an architect, educator and curator.  She is a founding partner in the practice FAKE Industries Architectural Agonism awarded the 2009 Young Architects Forum Prize of the Architectural League of New York and winner of the prestigious European competition Europan in 2003, 2005 ,2009 and 2012.  They currently have projects under construction in Spain and Bogota. As a Fulbright scholar she undertook graduate study at Columbia University and is currently a Phd candidate at the School of Architecture, Barcelona.

Put very simply, architecture’s disciplinary value lies in its material and organisational experimentation. But what are we experimenting on such that we can better understand the success of this work?  Or put another way, in a field that predicates itself on the pursuit of the new through constant experimentation, how do we identify, build on and clarify real (and rare) transformation as distinct from relatively inconsequential novel churn?  In this context, what might be the grounds for a terrain of judgement?

This paper was produced as a consequence of the 7th International Conference of The Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia held at RMIT, Melbourne 3-5th October 2013.

The Renew Newcastle program has had extraordinary traction since it was launched in 2009.  With over 200 proposals and 70 creative projects undertaken in empty spaces in the city of Newcastle alone, there is now a plan to take the program national: Renew Australia.  Franchises are already setting up in Townsville, Adelaide and the Gold Coast.  Marcus Westbury author of the program is a sought after consultant to hurting retail developers and managers all over the country on the prowl for survival techniques.
The Renew Newcastle premise was blindingly simple: following decades of retreating industry; the impact of the 5.6magnitude earthquake that hit the city centre hard in 1989; and the effect of big box retailing placed outside of the city centre, Newcastle was full of empty retail and commercial buildings – this is what Westbury calls his ‘hardware’.
And then there is the software: the success of the program relies primarily on a 30 day rolling licence for the use of buildings. Sited two hours north of Sydney, Newcastle with a coastal lifestyle and low regional living expense already had a thriving arts community but one that needed more cheap places to work and spaces for artists to trade their output. Westbury, an arts festival organiser with no planning or architectural background, but who has a sophisticated multi-scalar and intuitive spatial understanding of the urban and Newcastle specifically having grown up there, set about bringing together the property owners of empty spaces with creative industry.  The licenses are negotiated by Renew Newcastle between a property owner and a creative occupant and allow use over spaces – churches, shops and office space, but guarantees that rights remain for property owners to repossess on limited notice – thereby minimising risk on that side. In return, occupants of the buildings keep them clean and carry out limited maintenance. Renew Newcastle manage premises and occupants in and out, negotiate with owners, and provide a blanket Public liability insurance that covers artists on the program, thereby minimising risk for those on the other side.

Peter Stutchbury’s Depot Beach House, completed in 2008, forms part of an ongoing trajectory of spatial, material and conceptual experimentation by the office that gets played out—both in practice and in the Masterclasses that he teaches alongside Glen Murcutt and Richard LePlaistrier. Stutchbury’s architecture is intrinsically tied to the landscape and his work speaks to a particular type of inhabitation.

To say that space effects behavior is not to speak of architectural determinism.  Architecture, that most spatial of material reasoning won’t, as was argued by 19th century architectural writers, elevate our shaky morality.  Nor will it, as was claimed more recently by urban sociologists, make us behave badly. …..Well, I’m pretty sure it won’t, although one always wonders when confronted by a ‘symphony in beige’ – an office space of a certain color palette with limited daylight and cubicle offices lined up either side of a single internal corridor. But the idea that space effects behavior, and in this case institutional behavior, is what BVN’s new fit-out for the financial institution Challenger is all about – spatial transformation as a tool for organizational change.

Since 2001, argument in the US over strategy in Afghanistan has lurched between the contradictory doctrines of increase (surge) and complete withdrawal (exit).  Like a game of poker the players engaged in the debate wish only to raise or fold.  Calling the game, making the minimum bet to stay in play is not to play at all. Real men and women of decisive action want a radical increase in troop numbers and a swift Taliban defeat; or they want an immediate exit and some relief from troop casualties and the sheer financial burden of involvement. 
Despite this however, the idea of a minimum bet to stay in the game has been gaining ground.  This radical strategy, what one might call the idea of a ‘long war,’ involves a much reduced but longer term engagement in the mountainous country of between five to ten years.  Here, Afghanistan is understood as a strategic chapter within a wider conflict which also involves Iraq, Pakistan and even insurgency front lines within European communities where  Dr David Kilcullen counter insurgency expert argues, human rights laws create legislative ‘safe havens’ for urban insurgency undergrounds.

Of the $500 million in revenue generated annually from the sale of the visual arts in Australia, $400 million of that is spent on Indigenous artworks. A significant proportion of that comes from the Central and Western Desert Region of Australia.

Published on Jun 22, 2012

Solar panels and bike lanes will only take us so far. Tarsha Finney shares examples of a few ways we need to radically rethink how we inhabit spaces in the city and suburbs.

Tarsha Finney is an architectural urbanist, designer, curator and a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology. Her research interests cross several areas: domesticity and the problem of multi-residential housing with specific knowledge of the cities of New York, London, Beijing and Sydney; architectural typology and notions of disciplinary change and transformation; and the architectural urbanism of creativity and innovation in cities.

TEDxSydney 2012 took place on Saturday 26 May 2012 at Carriageworks. Tens of thousands of people enjoyed the day: 800 in the theatre, over 1,000 via big screen simulcast in The Forum, many thousands online via YouTube and ABC Big Ideas ... and up to 80,000 tuning in to ABC Radio National.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations.)

Type vs Typology
Organised by Projective Cities
Series: Symposium: TYPE vs TYPOLOGY
Date: 7/2/2014
Time: 10:00:00
Venue: Lecture Hall
Running time: 316 mins

During the nineteenth century, a deliberate turn away from ideas of imitation and truth‐to‐nature towards concepts of abstraction or objectivity emerged and fundamentally altered the knowledge and practices of many disciplines. In architecture, this important shift resulted in theories of type and design methods based on typology, complementary concepts through which architecture as both a modern form of knowledge and knowledge of form was to be consolidated. In terms of architecture and its instrumentality, type and typology are unique as disciplinary frames through which broader socio‐political, cultural and formal problems can be posed.

To explore the sustained, or perhaps renewed critical, interest in the potential of type and typology, a number of academics and practitioners will discuss their relevance to contemporary architectural practice and research, and in relationship to the problem of the historicity of disciplinary knowledge.

Programme

SESSION 1

10:00‐10:10 Welcome

10:10‐10:50 Sam Jacoby (AAPC): ‘Typal and Typological Reasoning’

10:50‐11:30 Larry Barth (AA)

11:30‐12:10 Hyungmin Pai (University of Seoul): ‘The Diagrammatic Construction of Type’ 12:10‐12:40 Panel Discussion: Chaired by Alvaro Arancibia (AA PhD) and Cyan Cheng (AAPC)

13:00‐14:00 LUNCH BREAK

SESSION 2

14:00‐14:40 Philip Steadman (UCL): ‘Building Types and How they Change over Time’

14:40‐15:20 Tarsha Finney (UTS): ‘The Typological Burden’

15:20‐16:00 Christopher Lee (Harvard GSD, Serie Architects): ‘The Fourth Typology’ 16:00‐16:30 Panel Discussion: Chaired by Naina Gupta (AAPC), Simon Goddard (AAPC), and Thiago Soveral (AA PhD)

17:00‐18:30 COFFEE BREAK (Mark Cousins: Friday Lecture Series)

SESSION 3

18:30‐19:10 Rafael Moneo (Harvard GSD): ‘Type, Iconography, Archaeology, and Practice’

19:10‐20:00 Concluding Round Table: All speakers; chaired by Adrian Lahoud (UCL)

Venue

Architectural Association School of Architecture, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1b 3ES Lecture Hall

Participants

Lawrence Barth lectures on urbanism in the AAs Graduate School and has written on the themes of politics and critical theory in relation to the urban. He practises as a consultant urbanist, most recently collaborating with Zaha Hadid Architects and s333 Architecture and Urbanism on large‐scale projects, and is engaged in research on urban intensification and innovation environments.

Tarsha Finney is an architect, urbanist and a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). She completed an M.A at the AA (Distinction 2002‐2003) and was recipient of the Michael Ventris Memorial Award (2003). From 2004‐2008 as part of the doctoral program at the AA, she was a participant in research seminars led by Lawrence Barth: Rethinking Architectural Urbanism 2006‐2007; Transformation and Urban Change 2007‐2008. She is completing her Doctorate at UTS, Domains ofReasoning/Fields of Effect: The Housing Project and the City. New York, 1960‐1980.

Sam Jacoby is an architect who trained as a cabinetmaker, graduated from the AA, and received a doctorate from the TU Berlin. He teaches at the AA since 2002 and has taught at the University of Nottingham and Bartlett School of Architecture. He has directed Projective Cities since 2009.

Christopher Lee is the co‐founder and principal of Serie Architects London, Mumbai and Beijing. He is Associate Professor in Practice at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Prior to that he was the Director of Projective Cities (2010‐12) and AA Unit Master (2002‐09). Lee graduated with the AA Diploma (Honours) and his Doctor of Philosophy from the Berlage Institute and TU Delft. Lee is the author of Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China, Part 1, Xiamen: The Megaplot, and Working in Series. He co‐authored Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City, and Typological Urbanism: Projective Cities.

Rafael Moneo received undergraduate (1961) and doctoral (1965) degrees from the MadridSchool of Architecture, worked (1960‐61) with Danish architect Jørn Utzon, and studied (1963‐65) at the Spanish Academy in Rome before opening (1965) his own practice in Madrid. Moneo, who founded (1968) Arquitectura Bis magazine, is also a noted theorist, critic, and teacher. He has taught in Spain and at such American institutions as Princeton and Harvard, where he was (1985‐90) head of the graduate architecture department and remains a professor. Among his many awards is the 1996 Pritzker Prize.

Hyungmin Pai graduated from Seoul National University and received his Ph.D from MIT. Twice a Fulbright Scholar, he is professor at the University of Seoul. He was visiting scholar at MIT and London Metropolitan University and has lectured at Harvard, Cornell and Tongji University. His books include The Portfolio and the Diagram, Sensuous Plan: The Architecture

of Seung H‐Sang, and The Key Concepts of Korean Architecture. For the Venice Biennale, he was curator for the Korean Pavilion (2008) and a participant in the Common Pavilion project (2012). He was curator for the Kim Swoo Geun exhibition at Aedes Gallery, Berlin (2011) and was Head Curator for the 4th Gwangju Design Biennale (2011).

Philip Steadman is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies in the Bartlett

Faculty of Built Environment, University College London. He trained as an architect at Cambridge University, and has taught at Cambridge, the Open University and UCL. Much of his research has been on the forms of buildings, and he has published two previous books on the subject: The Geometry of Environment (1971) and Architectural Morphology (1983). His book on biological analogies in architecture, The Evolution of Designs, was published in 1979. His forthcoming book Building Types and Built Forms (2014) brings together several of these themes: architectural history, building geometry, and parallels with the analysis of form in biology.

In response to changes in both the practice of architecture and changes in terms of architecture's field of operation: the global economic, political and cultural context of its production, the following paper proposes to re-examine the inherited unit system of the graduate educational M.Arch design studio. Contrary to 'alternate modes of practice' that propose in critiquing the profession, an abandonment of the discipline of architecture, this paper instead calls for a clarified return in the educational context to architecture's core material an spatial skill set redirected relative to the animating diagrammatic condition that since the 19th century has relied on architecture's capacities in material and organisational experimentation to build cities.

Domesticity, and its accompanying architectural fantasy, have driven urban development since the mid-19th century and most intensely since the 1950s.

It's the dream that allows us to imagine our most intimate familial relationships, those between ourselves, our partner and our children inside a particular architectural form. It's almost always a single family dwelling, on a fenced block, separated from its neighbours with little collective amenity beyond sewage, roads and electricity. There's a back yard, sometimes a dog — we see it on Backyard Blitz and other renovation shows.  It comes to us from Grand Designs as much from New Idea. The American version has a picket fence and pitched roof like a child's drawing. Our version is more likely to be a Federation semi, a Queenslander or a contemporary design as part of a land and house package on the edge of one of our capital cities.

    We like being known by our neighbours, but also I would argue, we like the anonymity of the civilised urban crowd.

But for Gen Y it appears that things have shifted. Research released last week entitled ''Why We Buy'', published by RAMS Home Loans and the market research firm, IPSOS, has shown that despite the increase in the value of residential property, young Australians still want to own their own home. But now, they are just as happy living in and buying apartments as they are houses.

Of the 400 Australian athletes at the 2012 London Olympics, 64% came from a Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) background. This included runners, swimmers and the gold medal winning Men’s K4 Kayaking team. We know that innovation and elite level success in Australian sport has been dependent in part on the serendipitous development of ‘sporting ecologies’ such as the one that produced this success, SLSA working in partnership with organisations such as the Australian Canoeing High performance Unit and the Australian Canoeing National Elite Development Program which works to identify Canoeing and Kayaking talent through programs such The Next Wave pathway for young paddlers emerging out of the competitive SLSA networks.  Of the 400 Australian athletes at the 2012 London Olympics, 64% came from a Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) background. This included runners, swimmers and the gold medal winning Men’s K4 Kayaking team. We know that innovation and elite level success in Australian sport has been dependent in part on the serendipitous development of ‘sporting ecologies’ such as the one that produced this success, SLSA working in partnership with organisations such as the Australian Canoeing High performance Unit and the Australian Canoeing National Elite Development Program which works to identify Canoeing and Kayaking talent through programs such The Next Wave pathway for young paddlers emerging out of the competitive SLSA networks. These ecologies are networks of athletes, civic organisations, expertise and information exchange that operate at multiple scales, from the suburban neighbourhood, to regional and nation wide elite and professional organisations. They function by cultivating talent in very young children at a grass roots neighbourhood level on the one hand in local life saving clubs up and down the coast.  These organisations then identify amateur athletes with potential and carry them through to elite level competition across what in time becomes a diversified field of sport, linking different, often unrelated sports, competitions and sporting organizations with great medal winning success. The real contribution of the sporting ecology has been its taking of underperforming talent in one sporting arena, Surf Life Saving for example, and accelerating athletic performance into another field: Olympic level swimming, running, kayaking and canoeing for example, and through this success providing the next wave of young athletes back at the local club with the role models and ambition to aspire for success beyond the local neighbourhood competition.
What has been less discussed however is the wider projective role, relationship and potential that these ecologies might have in city building itself. Since the early decades of the 20th century, leisure and sporting infrastructure has been central to our patterns of spatial reasoning about the city at the scale of neighbourhood.  The Neighbourhood Unit has been a powerful instrument in urbanism’s city building arsenal operating at this scale of ‘community.’ At the core of this is a series of civic institutions like Surf Life Saving. The Neighbourhood Unit is a diagram that appears in the late 1920’s and is concerned with negotiating the relationship between a cluster of problems regarding work environments, housing, transport in the city and sporting and leisure infrastructure. Central to its function is a worrying about what size the scale of stable ‘community’ is.  Around the developed world the Neighbourhood Unit remains even today, the model for ‘stability’ and ‘collectivity’ against which we measure our speculations and interventions into the city at the scale of ‘community’.

There is a business case for diversity and it has been around for a while. The top 50 companies for gender diversity in the Fortune 500 outperformed the NASDAQ by 28.2% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 22.4% over a 10 year period.  In addition, almost 90% of Fortune 500 companies have women on their board of directors (2006).  Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women achieved higher financial performance than those companies with the lowest.  There is evidence that Boards with at least three women have an even better financial performance with Return on Equity at 16.7% (average 11.5%) and Return on Invested Capital at 10% (average 6.2%).

Kenneth Frampton, in a 1973 Architectural Forum review of the 1968–1973 Bronx-sited Twin Parks Housing Development in New York City, asked: ‘to what purpose do you assign the space under the pilotis? The problem posed by the pilotis [ … ] is integral to the original model [ … ] What would the inhabitants of the Ville Radieuse have done with these continuous arcades? [ … ] This is the typological burden … ’
The apparent banality of Frampton's observation obscures what is revealed in the lifting up of the building on pilotis: the ground itself. Rather than follow Frampton's use of typology as a descriptive tool in the service of a critical judgement, this paper will instead see the question of type as one involving a diagnostic and propositional gesture within the design process itself, and as part of an ongoing and critical questioning of the city. The paper will explore how the three-dimensional articulation of the ground level evident in a trajectory of projects in New York City has been a site of concentrated architectural research from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary approaches to urban intensification. Here the ground can be seen to be both an object of architectural investigation and spatial reasoning, and at the same time, to operate at a strategic intersection with the spatial politics of the liberal metropolis.