Studio 07 – NoVacancy

NoVacancy was a 2020 and 2021 Studio in the Architecture Master of Melbourne’s University.
The studio invites the students to critically assess the existing city fabrics of Melbourne and explore contemporary methods of architectural intervention to negotiate with the heritage elements. In 2020 the selected locations were all in the CBD, and in 2021 an old milling factory in the nearby suburbia was selected to work on the dichotomy of the urban reality of Melbourne.

Cities, People/s, Memories

Cities continue to grow and their inhabitants flow in to fill the gaps of the city. With their vivid memories of gold rush, faint 80s tunes, dust settling on the decades of stories buried behind cold plaster walls, buildings carry on. But do buildings grow with the cities?

With the explosive growth of population and expansion of the cities, there’s a continual need to reimagine and redesign the existing city fabrics. The current set of building elements can be understood as a set of layers (or layered elements) that attribute information, not only about how a city is operating currently, but about how it was lived in the past.

We are interested in negotiating and adding to these layers rather than replacing them, as architectural intervention in response to heritage. How do we preserve, reimagine and design the buildings to grow with the city?

As a studio, we have chosen the journey intensely urban to appreciate the context of Melbourne, intensely dense as our way to respond to the existing condition and the particular idiosyncrasies of the urban model of the city, and intensely interventionist to embrace the changing times.

This is NoVacancy.

The image above takes you to the publication of the Studio which consolidated the theoretical framework and some of the students work. Below you can find some images of the printed copies of the University of Melbourne.