Eclectic Education and the Collaged College
Varun Mathew & Calum York
Awards
- Steensen Varming Third Year Design Integration Prize
- Jury Honourable Mention
Strengths Utilised
- Challenging Norms
- We challenged the brief which allowed us to focus on creating more relevant and productive components to ensure that our project went beyond meeting the initial outcome.
- Reliability
- Having worked on a project together previously, we knew that we could split up the tasks and return with them completed to a high standard.
- Humour
- To make the final semester of architecture enjoyable (and bearable), we added some humour to our manifesto, to our final drawing and in our final 'model within a model'.
As an art high school, Eclectic Education and the Collaged College seeks to emphasize the importance of the artistic process as being as important as the final product itself. Taking such a stance leads to certain outcomes, namely being the creation of a series of buildings that differ dramatically in form, texture and spatial experience. Without the provision of dedicated exhibition spaces, the studio spaces in which students and resident artists work become the exhibition spaces. Furthermore, the connection of these differing buildings via the programmatically-constant ARTery, with its provision of both typical building services (water, HVAC, electricity) and atypical services (paint, ink, goods transport), allows the entire site to become a studio space for those who wish to see it that way.
We realised that conducting the usual diagrammatic analysis of the site (public/private space, sight lines, thoroughfare, etc.) was not going to provide any rich or unique understanding of the site, so instead we put all our effort towards creating a manifesto. Displayed on a series of postcards, they captured the essence of what was to be our architecture and pedagogical stance on this visual arts high school.
