Architecture Electives, RMIT Bachelor of Architectural Design.

Architecture Design Electives semester one, 2010

Bachelor of Architecture ARCH1040 ARCH1041

Balotting occurs on-line at: http://www.dsc.rmit.edu.au/adballot > go to Architecture section in left menu bar

YOU NEED TO BE ENROLLED TO BALLOT enquiries: Pia Ednie-Brown, Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Design RMIT University, pia@rmit.edu.au

melbourne.australia

Architecture

architecture.rmit.edu.au

Contents.

1. SSCC_ We Are The Revolution – Mauro Baracco – Wednesday 9.30-12.30, 10.11.27

2. Flexible 3D Modelling – Jane Burry – Wednesday, 9.00-12.00, 10.11.24

3. Photography – Hanna Tai – Thursday, 9.30-12.30, 8.11.42

4. Philosophy + Architecture – Helene Frichot – Thursday, 9.30-12.30, Bld45A

5. Contemporary Ornamental Practices – Brent Allpress, Thursday, 9.30-12.30, Bldg45B

6. Pre-Built – Martyn Hook – Thursday, 10-1, 8.11.58

“WE ARE THE REVOLUTION�

(Joseph Beuys, Naples, 1971)

SSCC Elective Sem 1/2010 Offered to students enrolled in the Bachelor of Architectural Design Building 10, Level 11, Room 27, Wednesdays, 9.30 am - 12.30 pm Coordinated by Mauro Baracco The SSCC (Student Staff Consultative Committee) elective is a student-organized and facilitated course intended to design and initiate projects that encourage academic and social collaboration between architecture students and staff. The projects and outcomes of the course will be determined by the participating students in consultation with the staff advisor and other students who are already part of the SSCC Architecture Committee.

Working in teams or small groups, participants will have the opportunity to propose, lead and manage projects that interest them professionally, personally or academically.

While the SSCC Elective course is a one-semester term, the duration of SSCC projects will vary depending on what is initiated and how many students are involved. Shorter projects will conclude in one semester while others might be on-going across several terms. Students are encouraged but not required to stay involved with the projects after the semester ends to experience the full project-management process and contribute to it as student representatives of the SSCC Committee. This system also allows the course to have an open structure and broader participation as it continues in the future.

Students will be involved in organizing and managing the following tasks: - Guest Lecture Series - Guide Book for 1st year students - SSCC Website and Blog - SSCC Newsletter/Journal - SSCC Market - more activities with the aim to activate at many levels (cultural, social, aesthetic and educational among others) forms of relationship between RMIT Architecture students, staff and the wider community.

What does it means to be able to plan the topography of a single digital model that can assume many forms without altering its structure?

How can we link models together or to their environments such that they are dynamic in response to external conditions?

This course explores these and many other questions about change and structuring models for change: issues that tax designers from all disciplines

flexible 3d modelling

for design + prototyping

Coordinator: Jane Burry + Alex Pena de Leon (formally Gehry Technologies) Time: Location:

Wednesday mornings between 9.00am-12.00pm, starting 3rd March Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, Bld 10, Lvl 11 Room 24

Reviews Location:

SIAL Presentation Space, Bld 97 Lvl 3 Room 5

Enrolment

As this is a Quota elective open to all disciplines, and offered in the School of Architecture and Design in the Advanced Technologies pole undergraduate students should enrol with the course code INTE2108 and postgraduates with the code INTE2107 For more details, visit the SIAL website: http://www.sial.rmit.edu.au/projects or contact jane.burry@rmit.edu.au

Course Description The aim of this course is to give students from diverse disciplines expertise in linking these to physical modelling and prototyping. This will be achieved through skills-based instruction and hands - on project - based learning with an introduction to DIGITAL PROJECT parametric design software. It will serve undergraduates in areas of study including but not excclusive to architecture, design, engineering, jewellery, textiles, new media as well as postgraduates starting study and design practitioners seeking professional development. It introduces an approach to modelling that can be applied in design studio, postgraduate project work and professional practice. The course is divided into demonstrations and presentations with hands on exercises and work on a preliminary design task that introduces the main principles involved in associative geometrical modelling. The second component is dedicated to tutorial and seminar support for individual project - based work shared regularly within the class. There will be opportunities to generate physical prototypes using rapid prototyping and traditional modelling techniques. Projects will be reviewed in class as the principal basis for assessment.

PHOTOGRAPHY & INTERACTIVITY Use a digital SLR, generate images and ideas, and present them as a basic interactive website.

PART 1. PHOTOGRAPHY

PART 2. INTERACTIVITY

Students will first learn how to use a digital SLR, and how to use camera functions to control the results of their photographs. Hands-on classes will explore the photography basics (aperture, shutter speed, ISO, light direction) and how a combination of these factors can be used to control depth of field, motion blur and image quality. Understanding the vocabulary of photography will also assist in the use of modern render packages which make extensive use of camera attributes.

Students will learn how to create and edit a simple HTML website using Dreamweaver software. Web basics such as site design, navigation, links and creating web-based images will be explored.

The second phase of the elective is a practical project encompassing two themes: intervention and perception. Shooting exercises will focus on the photographic possibilities of documenting objects in different contexts.

Photography will be used in several ways in the elective: to document and represent, and in processes and presentation.

Students will also learn how to use Photoshop to import and manipulate images, and to resize and output them for various media.

Finally, using the ideas and images generated through their projects in Part 1, students will design and build their own basic interactive website.

Architecture Design Elective Semester One, 2010 12 credit points Tutor: Hanna Tai Time: Thursdays, 9.30-12.30 Location: 8.11.42

Architecture and Design Elective Program of Architecture, RMIT University, Semester One 2010 Thursdays 9.30-11.30, Blg45A Dr Hélène Frichot, Senior Lecturer, Program of Architecture

Architecture+Philosophy: Writing Architecture

The Writing Architecture seminar is part of Architecture+Philosophy (architecture.testpattern.com.au), which is an emerging research group as well as a public lecture series currently in its sixth year of existence. Participants will be expected to attend the Architecture+Philosophy 2010 public lecture series: architecture.testpattern. com.au This seminar group will engage in the practice of writing architecture by reading philosophical, theoretical and fictional texts and by undertaking and documenting a series of journeys both in motion and in place. It is expected that in response to these fleeting journeys and texts a series of essays will be composed and the practice of writing architecture developed.

The short format of the essay is understood here to be an attempt, or an experiment, and it can be undertaken with words, with images, or through discrete spatial installations. The practice of writing architecture employs any material that is ready to hand from the written and spoken word, to images, to the precious objects and debris of everyday life: Composition relates as much to words and images as to things.

On the way you will be required to explore processes of embodiment, encounter, subjectivation.

You will take many trips on the Hope Street Bus Line to get there.

What you can expect to glean from writing architecture: For what may be the first time in your architectural education you will be introduced to architectural theory and you will see how it can be put to use in a critical manner.

The seminar will mostly take place off campus in Melbourne Central out of a shop front on the third floor. As such the seminar will operate between public and private spheres and in collaboration with researchers from SARU (Social Aesthetics Research Unit) Monash University (http://arts.monash.edu.au/saru/) and also with design students from Interior Design, RMIT University.

The seminar will conclude with a two-day (12 hour) ‘site writing’ workshop with guest professor, Jane Rendell of the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Architecture Elective

Contemporary Ornamental Practices Elective Leader: Brent Allpress Thursday 9.30-12.30, Building 45 Studio B “cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles of everyday use.”

(Adolf Loos) “Featurism is not simply a decorative technique, it starts in concepts and extends upwards through the parts to the numerous trimmings. It may be defined as the subordination of the essential whole and the accentuation of selected seperate features.” (Robin Boyd) “The anguish of the beautiful that shines through the fragility of ornament is atopian: displacing more than could any nudity.” (Franco Rella) Ornament haunts architectural discourse and practice. Theories of the ornamental within the canon, those marginal though often pivotal passages, cross and interrupt the central texts of the architectural tradition, both constructing and internally dividing them. While modernist theory negated traditional ornament, modernist practices involved radical ornamental operations employing autonomous and abstract spatial screens and surfaces. The representational role of ornament in contemporary architecture has remained complex and contested.

This elective will explore shifts in the status of ornament and figuration in contemporary architectural practice opened up by emerging digital design and fabrication technologies and practices that challenge the economies of standardisation. Diverse discourses on ornament will be presented and debated. Project investigations of modernist and contemporary ornamental practices will be undertaken, focusing on qualitative and performative operations and outcomes.