Losing place: Urban Islands and the practices of unsettlement on Cockatoo Island. (1st June 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Rivard, Tom
• Is Part Of: Design ecologies. Volume 9:Number 1/2(2020)
• Page Start: 33
• Page End: 50
• Publication Date: 2020-06-01
• Subjects: Design -- Environmental aspects -- Periodicals; Architecture -- Environmental aspects -- Periodicals; Sustainable architecture -- Periodicals; Sustainable design -- Periodicals; 720.47
• DOI: 10.1386/des_00003_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2043-0698

Abstract

Contemporary architectural practice posits the City as an agglomeration of built fabric and its resultant spaces; congruent theories of place attempt to discern opportunities and create methodologies to engage with and inhabit this fabric. These theories of urbanism are reacting to a socio-economic culture that demands precision, rationality and above all clarity, producing a spatial realm increasingly branded, deracinated and politically circumscribed ‐ clearly defined, delineated and described. Architectural pedagogy is often troubled because of its service to colonization: form serving image, function slaved to economics, space subsumed into spectacle. The City, though, is fluctuating, multifunctional and elusive ‐ demanding a conceptual entanglement of impermanence and incompletion. To explore the gap between professional practice and intuitive inhabitation, the Urban Islands project was developed. Urban Islands is an independent intensive studio programme run for two weeks each July on Sydney's Cockatoo Island. The studios are run by emerging architects selected from around the world, and engage master's students from six different Australian universities, in an environment meant to unsettle, unmoor and ultimately, enlighten. Deliberately eschewing linear and hermetic modes of studio discourse and instruction, the programme instead adopts strategies of wandering and migration to create an immersive investigative environment. Urban Islands utilizes narrative, fiction and a hermeneutical approach to education to re-theorize the studio. Subsequent re-readings and misreadings of place offer its participants agency in determining their roles in that space, as well as allowing for new ways to both measure and mark the earth. This article outlines the constituent conceptual concerns informing the programme, illustrated by select examples of work that enmesh analytical theory and creative design practice to propose an expanded geography of the city, one of excisions and allegory and, most importantly, one wide open to interpretation.