2025

86533_Spatial Agency

  • In this design studio, students will develop a series of schematic housing proposals that respond to the social, cultural, and environmental needs of the local Aboriginal community on the South Coast of NSW. The focus will be on a range of housing typologies, including designs for Elders, youth, and multigenerational households. These designs will serve as a foundation for community engagements, allowing the proposals to be refined based on feedback and input from the community. The designs must be socially and culturally responsive, incorporating sustainable and context-sensitive strategies, while addressing environmental factors such as seasonal variation, orientation, prevailing wind, local weather conditions, and the use of sustainable materials.

    These schematic housing proposals will lead into the development of masterplan concepts for a larger site, aiming to accommodate up to 140 new homes. Students will consider how the designs support the social and cultural aspirations of the community and ensure a strengths-based approach to Aboriginal housing design. The final designs will be sensitive to the local landscape, with a focus on creating homes that are adaptable, culturally relevant, and environmentally sustainable, while enhancing a strong sense of community and self-determination.

  • Studio description: Australia’s dual crises of domestic and family violence and housing unaffordability mean that crisis services turn away 1 in 2 women every night. Many of these women have children in their care.

    The Blacktown Women’s Refuge studio combines the challenge of designing crisis accommodation for women and children escaping domestic and family violence, on-site support services workspaces, therapeutic, and communal gathering areas. In partnership with Women’s Community Shelters, a leading organisation that provides accommodation and support for women and children through a network of nine safe havens across NSW metro centres.

    Blacktown, on the lands of the Dharug people, 34km west of Sydney is one of Greater Sydney’s most multicultural areas, managed by a progressive council and host to a thriving arts and sporting community. Blacktown also consistently records one of the highest volumes of domestic violence related assaults in NSW, with over 2,100 incidents reported in recent annual data (BOCSAR 2023).

    The Blacktown Women’s Refuge Studio takes a trauma-informed design approach to design practice, and includes visits to the Blacktown site, meeting with Women’s Community Shelters experts.

    Studio brief: The proposed design will develop a core and cluster model refuge with 8 to 10 self-contained crisis accommodation units (cluster), and a domestic and violence support service (core). The existing community centre provides adaptive reuse opportunities for the core, adjacent a parkland with potential landscaped connections between living, working, and social spaces. The units will be located on the adjacent tennis court. Design solutions will focus on trauma-informed design strategies for children on the site.

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  • The Centre for Neurodiversity design studio will explore an inclusive approach to architecture that is primarily informed by the nuanced ways in which neurodiverse people inhabit and interact with space.

     Situated in the Cliff Noble Community Centre, corner of Renwick St and Suttor St, Alexandria, students are asked to develop a proposal for the refit of the Community Centre that supports the core needs of neurodiverse people and their range experiences.

    Investigating the adaptive and transformative potential of public institutional interiors to become more inclusive and accessible, The Centre for Neurodiversity will take a community development approach to design practice enacted through a series of quick charrette-style design exercises, and consultation with neurodiverse people, to develop and establish a set of design principles.   

    Underpinned by a commitment to participatory design methods, The Centre for Neurodiversity investigates a range of design processes and techniques, in combination with theoretical explorations informed by the principles students establish in the discovery and concept phase of the project.

  • Studio Jerringa is a design studio focused on the development of community infrastructure with the Jerrinja Aboriginal Community at Orient Point.  The Jerrinja Aboriginal people are from the NSW South Coast and their traditional lands include Cullunghutti, Shoalhaven Heads, Greenwell Point, Orient Point, Culburra and Currarong.  The Jerrinja Aboriginal Community was established in 1900 as an Aboriginal Mission known as Roseby Park.  Renamed Jerringa in the late 1960’s the Mission land was given back to the Jerrinja community in 1983.

     

    Of the original Roseby Park Mission houses built in the 1950’s, only one cottage remains today.  Sitting vacant, Jerringa residents have expressed interest in repurposing this former home as a community facility.  Studio Jerringa takes a community development approach to design practice enacted through a five-day study tour to Orient Point in Week 7, to work with the community to establish their programmatic requirements and aspirations for the new facility.

     

    Engaging with Indigenous sensibilities to land and Country, students will develop speculative design proposals that respond to social, cultural and environmental requirements to develop a new multipurpose community facility that builds on Jerringa cultural strengths.