QUARANTINE V

Situated at the end of the Mornington Peninsula in the Point Nepean National Park, Melbourne’s former Quarantine Station is a fitting location to host the fifth and final (final) QUARANTINE STUDIO. Whilst we are not proposing to relocate modern-day quarantining back to the Peninsula, we are questioning and proposing future uses for the largely abandoned buildings littered throughout this beautiful site.

Given Melbourne’s extended lockdown periods and Melbournians’ inability to travel in recent times, QUARANTINE STUDIO speculates on the rebirth of regionalism by proposing new local tourism activations. QUARANTINE STUDIO will investigate the land, buildings, and structures in and around Melbourne’s original sanatorium, and proposes new uses for the currently underutilized public land, landscape, and infrastructure.

The Point Nepean National Park has been closed off for years and only quite recently been opened to the general public. Its many years of isolation have resulted in the preservation and regeneration of this dramatic landscape.

Students will be asked to research the site from Bunurong times, the sanatorium years where ships plagued by illness were quarantined, the construction of defense systems during the Gold Rush, and the first shot of the First World War. Stories of diseased early settlers, a litany of shipwrecks, and the drowning of Australia’s 17th Prime Minister Harold Holt will be unpacked, researched, mapped, and recorded to uncover programmatic opportunities and inform proposals for new usages of the land and its existing structures.

Students will be asked to review the 2017 Master Plan commissioned by the State Government and currently being implemented by Parks Victoria, question its content, and identify opportunities for new program and subsequent architectural intervention.

The studio will focus heavily on tectonics, materiality, and buildability along with the site. Active heritage conservation, rather than conservation for conservation’s sake will be the driver, eco-tourism is the intended outcome.

In collaboration with Parks Victoria and RMIT, the most relevant projects of all five QUARANTINE studios will be exhibited on site at the end of 2023.

I’ve taken the title of this studio from a chapter of Iñaki Ábalos’ intriguing book “The good life: A guided visit to the houses of modernity”.

We’ll use his essays Picasso on vacation and Heidegger in his refuge as the launch point of a studio that is directly concerned with philosophy as a tool for understanding our current temporal and spatial circumstances and for fostering an idea of architecture in our time and place. Philosophies of existenitalism and phenomenology as they relate to the architecture of the house, public buildings and our place the city.

Last semester we took the length of Punt Road as our site for an idea of Melbourne. This time we’ll look at particular points along this transect from the outskirts of town to the bay.

We’ll take weekly readings from Ábalos, Heidegger and Arendt, among others and design each week a building for a particular site that explores and corresponds with this reading. Your weekly response will be both written and drawn.

The house is a term that we’ll stretch to form a village of components: house of Parliament, doss house, school house, out house, art house, bakehouse public house, chapter house the existentialist house (the existentialist city) tues morning 9:30 with simone koch

The idea of this studio is to use these existing philosophies as agents for your idea of architecture, acknowledging that we each exist in time and space, as does the site and the architecture, and each has a cultural, social and political framework. The interweaving of these is what interests me.

Tuesday Morning 9.30

“Instruments are nothing but theories materialized” (Bachelard)

The novelty of Raymound Queneau’s “book” 100 Million poems is in the way it reimagines the idea of a book, In a conventional book pages contain lines of text and are bound, Queneau book at first appearance accepts this format and is materially identical to a conventional book in all respects other than each line is a page and it is possible to encounter each line in a different order, in a new context within the book.

It is possible to recognise in the unconventional format of 100 million poems as an invention, it facilities or allows us to encounter the world differently, there is also a discovery which takes the form of a critique with respect to the nature of the book. it is possible to think of a book content as being regulated by its architecture. That the architecture is in this sense the possibility of the book, and what the architecture of Queneau’s book demonstrates is that this is not the only possibility.

The studio aims to look at the construction of ideas and the design of architecture. The ostensible content for our study’s high density residential projects though it is not predetermined as to what object the form adopts