Mess. Everyday Babylon.

Studio Leaders: Simon Wollan, Ammon Allan Beyerle

Investigating two key issues in architectural design: the messiness of the everyday, and networked systems as an organisational model and creative tool.

The year is 2032, the car is no longer affordable, and radical changes in our systems of exchange have occurred. We’re not yet entirely sustainable, but we’re getting much closer. Rowville has a train station. People live in a dispersed community network, where visible and invisible systems operate to sustain a diverse, comfortable and healthy way of life. There have been many changes, but this 2032 future looks strangely familiar…

Messiness: If everyday life spawns aesthetics of waste, reuse, chance, the unexpected, change, rotting, fecundity, are there ways of using these to redefine the received ideals of urban design: appropriation, permeability, accessibility, porosity? How can the lived reality of buildings inform architectural production?

Networks: Thinking connections and flow is now an everyday experience, yet too often these concepts are treated as immaterial and aspatial. How do networks shape the material world? What does it mean for design to view the urban fabric as a space of excess and deficit of potential, and to view architectural production as an intervention into this field of systems?