Above The two bus shelters produced at UTAS’ 1999 timber design workshop. Top in construction mode.
Each January since 1992, the University of Tasmania has conducted widely acclaimed timber design workshops at its School of Architecture in Launceston. Set up as experimental studios, these have formed the basis of the first-year design program. The workshop productions—small structures built across the campus—mark time. They provide annual measures of, and references to, an emerging Tasmanian architectural vocabulary which is particularly recognisable in the recent Sydney works of UTAS graduate, Drew Heath. For the first time this year, the timber workshop was opened to a broader group of participants: students from mainland universities who hoped to gain intensive experience with timber. Lured by the poetic structures built by their predecessors, approximately 50 participants arrived in Launceston to discover the design potential and practical properties of wood. The workshop was supplemented by a series of site visits, co-ordinated by the school’s timber research unit, and was complemented with keynote lectures by architects Kerry and Lindsay Clare, Peter Ryan | | and Robert Morris-Nunn; engineer Peter Yttrup; academic staff of UTAS, and producers and manufacturers of timber products and services. A practical brief, proposing two shelters along the university bus route, split the group into two design teams which thrived on this creative, yet competitive, interaction.
The workshop discouraged drawing in favour of making models at 1:10 scale, then at 1:1. We discovered that, contrary to the world of orthogonal representation, design-by- making offers inspirations beyond what can be realised in 2-D form. This approach engenders a familiarity with nature of different materials and a sense of how those elements can come together. It allows immediate expression of an idea which can be interpreted and discussed to create, over time, a dialogue within the design process. Workshop participants reverberated with the energy of modelling at 1:1, and took with them a new or better ability to mediate design with construction. At the end of the twelve days, two distinctly different results emerged from an otherwise singular design methology. The focus on process was facilitated rather than critiqued by the teaching staff (Ian Clayton, Gillian van der Schans, Robyn Green and Drew Honeychurch): as long as it could be built, anything was possible. To their credit, the 16-hour days seemed effortless as we carried out every stage of the design, preparation, fabrication and assembly of these objects. We left Tasmania enriched with new friendships, a sense of accomplishment and an appreciation for working with timber; not to mention a high blood-alcohol level. Shahe Simonian is a third year student at the University of Technology, Sydney. Further details of the workshop are on the Web at |
