TARNEIT: Baby Features

Rapid urban growth can present teething problems when the timing and sequencing of development is off. There are traffic jams when public transport delivered too slowly; houses half built languish when builders go bankrupt or council permits stall; commuters need to arrive over an hour early to find parking in busy train stations. This is all playing out in Tarneit, a western fringe suburb currently set to almost double its population by 2040 and has the second busiest train station in Victoria, second to Southern Cross Station in the CBD.

With these growing pains, are there any desirable “baby features” of value? What can newness bring and what gets lost in a city’s development and maturity? And if there are desirable baby features, can we keep them?

In evolutionary development biology (evo devo), this process is called heterochrony. When an organism truncates development of certain parts (paedomorphosis) and extend development of other parts (peramorphosis), new morphologies can arise. A giraffe’s long neck, and an axolotl’s regenerative tadpole-like baby features are the result of heterochrony.

We will exploit ways architects and urban designers can manipulate the difference in the timing, rate or duration of the developmental process of a city so certain parts remain nascent, while other parts mature. We hope for some strange results.

“Tarneit Baby Features” is a continuation of previous design studios that see the environment (built, natural or denatured) as inherently unstable and in a constant state of flux. We will seek opportunities for developmental innovations and wondrous urban effects with cultural value for its inhabitants and users. We will study the activities, needs and aspirations of Tarneit’s various ethnic communities and its predominantly migrant population, while considering the ecologies of grasslands and creeks of this area.

We will design generative processes that will tweak the consolidation. erasure, dispersal and the sequencing of urban forms and actions across the proposed plan for “Tarneit Major Town Centre” that extend north of the current boundary held by Tarneit Station, and look for design opportunities both in the masterplan precinct scale and in architectural scale of buildings. Students will undertake weekly tasks to explore master planning strategies working in groups for the first half of the semester and produce a final architectural proposal to be designed individually.

We will also use animation and mapping techniques to visualise ideas of systems and sequencing of change. Students will use After Effects and Premier Pro to produce animations, they should download this software and ensure they have adequate computing capabilities.

In our vision Tarneit’s future growth, what can benefit from a city keeping it’s baby features, and how do we do this?

Wednesdays 5pm - 9pm at 100.06.006

Week 1 – First class Wed 19th July Introduction Presentation by Vicky Lam and Caleb Lee followed by an Aftereffects Workshop run by Quan Tran.

Week 6- Tues 22th Aug 9:30 am – 12:30 pm

Combined Super Crit with Loren Adams’

“Regulatory Nonsense: Strata Party” studio and Caitlyn Parry’s “Mongrel Assemblies” studio.

Vicky Lam Associate Lecturer at RMIT Architecture