Current Projects
HomeThis studio is concerned with developing design proposals for a site in the coastal town of Apollo, which is located three hours’ drive west of Melbourne on the Great Ocean Road. Apollo Bay was established in the mid-1800s with an economy based initially on whaling and timber harvesting. The brief for this studio is to develop master plans and detailed designs for a magnificent site at the habour area in the town. The aim is to incorporate a variety of land art and installation proposals capable of generating alternative energy, for example, through the incorporation of solar, wind, wave, and other types of clean energy-generating technology. The idea is that the energy generated will be used to power any program elements associated with the student’s master plans and detailed designs and ideally produce an excess that can be used in the town, in the tradition of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) competitions. While the generation of alternative energy is a primary focus of the works of art, consideration of water, materials, waste, the site’s ecology, and both the local community and tourists will also need to be considered in an effort to make the art and associated facilities as environmentally, socially and economically sustainable as possible.
The site is currently used as a golf course and also incorporates an active harbour with a pier, boat moorings and structures related to fishing, boating, and associated recreational activities. The site is approximately 16 hectares in size, including the nine-hole golf course and foreshore dunes, beaches, the pier and a breakwater jetty. The golf course landscape, which takes up much of the site, is dominated by gently undulating topography, lawn and large existing trees. The Braham River borders the site to the west. While the harbour supports a small commercial fishing industry, tourism is a major driver of the local economy and large numbers of tourists and temporary residents visit the town during certain times, particularly during the summer months, and more tourism-related development is seen as one way of sustaining the town’s future growth.
Studio Outcomes:
Students must complete three assignments over the course of the semester, focused first on undertaking an in-depth site analysis, followed by the preparation of a masterplan and then developing detailed designs for two areas within the master plan. The masterplans will need to incorporate land art installations, along with various supporting facilities and activities while emphasizing the site’s significant natural, scenic and cultural qualities. Over the course of the semester, students are also involved in weekly design exercises and are given a series of lectures on issues related to the notions of sustainability, land art, and relevant technologies, including those for generating alternative energy, bioinspiration and biomimicry thinking and other relevant topics.
Studio Leader: Professor Ray Green
We are interested in designed things; things that work, things that are constructed, found things and things that need to be found. We are interested in how the world is assembled and what it means.
The studio will explore the nature of design through the many lenses of the Great Ocean Road. We will look at how the road could be read as a single thing, the sum of its parts, and as single things that relate to particular projects. As well as how it is read by multiple parties; local landowners, the state, tourism operators, local farmers, surfers, visitors, fisherman, ecology enthusiasts and so on. The lens in which we see a site shapes the way we choose to intervene. We will use our multiple readings of the Great Ocean Road to determine what it is we design and to ask ‘who we are’ when we design.
Design Research Staff: Mietta Mullaly, Jack Heatley & James Cosgrave
Studio Leader: Mietta Mullaly
Undergraduate Architecture Studio.
This design studio is focused on addressing the challenges facing one of Australia’s most successful life-style and tourism destinations: The Great Ocean Road. As a site it is under great pressure from a combination of coastal erosion, the expansion of the tourism industry and climate change.
The central two hundred and fifty kilometres of the Great Ocean Road was designated as a single destination in 2020. Before 2019, tourist visitation was already beyond capacity; evidence of deterioration of sites along the road was impossible to ignore.
The range of future challenges facing the road and the region are complex and multi-dimensional. Any models for the future of the destination will arise from explorations of possible ways to configure factors that are economic, cultural, technological, environmental and behavioural, along with options for the engineering of physical infrastructure.
The studio will consider sustainable systems/information environments / immersive environments:
• Resilient and sustainable production and consumption: energy, water, transport and food.
• New models for civic services and for tourism.
• New models for public parks and shared space.
• New sustainable models for local production.
• Intensification and regenerative tourism; New ways of addressing increasing demand while reducing site load and waste.
• Sustainable visitor movement: alternative visitation and transport systems.
Studio Leaders: Chris Ryan, Michael Trudgeon
Partners: Great Ocean Road Community Network, Aireys Inlet District Association
Master of Design, Innovation and Technology, Eco-Acupuncture studio. RMIT School of Design.
