RMIT Master of Architecture, Design Studio Semester 2 2016

Supervised by Dr Michael Spooner

Students:

Fiona Plaisted, Zoe Hughes, Aaron Gust, Sina Memarpourghiassi, Sebastian Nicht, Alexis mowela, Yang Ren, Norma Saini, Dale Schlosser, Zemin Yang, Lauren Crockett

The studio FUCKING DAINTY: Architecture in the Realm of the Unreal continues a lineage of studios (Viv, Viv, Vivian!, NoHomo! ,  Dick Black! & SCUM) that are framed by methods and approaches that emancipate and sustain a queer life. In doing so these studios suggested how the problematizing of the threshold between an abject and a normative condition can contribute new insights into the production of space and hence the implications this problematizing has for new architectures.

Such a space constitutes a site of social enterprise that cannot be formally recognised due to its often hermetic production and the prejudiced economies of the world, but that has existed and has been considered historically from the mid 1800s onwards. There has been an extraordinary examination of the thresholds – social, culture and economic – that constitutes the production inside and outside of the quiddity of this space.  Attempts to describe it have reflected on the other, abjection and campness. But it is also by these same mechanisms with which any examination of this space is itself subverted and appropriated.  Consequently this space is contingent and thus the mechanisms by which to engage with it can only ever be improvised.

The studio confronts how the practice of improvisation and its associated instruments of production could be tasked with elucidating the difficult plurality of concerns that tentatively outline this space whilst countering homogeneity.

This studio continues the assault on Jack’s Magazine, a colonial gunpowder storage facility along the Maribyrnong River. The 3m high bluestone walls and 10m high earth blast wall are as alarming as anything by Lequeu, Ledoux and Boullee. A program, as such, is described as a centre for the repatriation and distribution of indigenous objects. In part this was prompted by the British Museum’s exhibition Indigenous Australia: enduring civilization and the NMA exhibition Encounters and the subsequent debate around the objects, stories and peoples displayed in the exhibitions, held within the collections of both institutions and in further private and publics collections around the world. More importantly the studio waas struck by the word indigenous and the curious manner by which it could be pursued.

The intention of ‘FUCKING DAINTY’ is to consider that repatriation and distribution is a fait accompli, and that the techniques and methods of working put forth in previous studios, whilst turned towards a specific queer narrative, are in fact approaches and techniques that can be aligned towards the emancipation of others.

LAUREN CROCKETT
Centre for the Distribution and Repatriation of the Sisters of Melanoma

Like a soft serve smashed upon the sweltering asphalt, Icarus has fallen from the sky. Regurgitated by Apep as he attempted to swallow the setting Amun-Ra, the small lump rapidly metastasised into an object of grotesque desire. Permanently seared into the Maribyrnong landscape, it continues to fester within the confines of it’s own crucible. Hailed as both the new Kingdom of Apollo and a trailer-park tanning salon, the object has become a lighthouse for the vain, the ignorant and the pasty white. But not all who wander are lost, and not all who are perpetually obsessed with self-improvement are gruesome; the sun also attracts the attractive. Intermingled beneath the glowing canopy the visitors slowly roast themselves, creating an amalgamation of sweat, wax and the body beautiful. Ignoring all foreshadowing, they fly ever closer.

AARON GUST
Centre for the Distribution and Repatriation of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

This is a centre for the distribution and repatriation of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence; it is a house without daughters. Born of a great family with a wealth deposited from guano, a mansion is built, a cage for a mother and her daughters. High up the bluestone cliff where the swallows perch, just a skip down the yellow brick road, the nest looms like a grotesque jewel; collecting, gathering, hoarding.

Numbers come but never go as mother manipulates the latch. “But I only want you to love me” she shrieks. She’s the type of broad that has a lot of brooches and will certainly wear them all. The surface thickens, cracks, splits. It calluses, tears, bleeds, much like the heart of the old witch as she desperately clings to past memories and all those associated with them.

Mother’s definitely lost it now with her thick impasto makeup, nasty red lipstick and terrible blush revealing the hallowed face of a nun, the craggy fucking masticated face of age. This is not the emerald city, this is not just another Dorothy, this is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. And even though drag queens only go down, these birds are about to take flight.

The lamentable mother figure coaxes aimlessly, residing to her nest. Once a mansion, now simply a pile of shit. What to do now all the daughters have left the nest… I suppose just reminisce that awkward clap and hope for a better flock next season.

FIONA PLAISTED
Centre for the Distribution and Repatriation of Narcissus

Navigating the turbidly torrential wave of dizzying scepticism the form emerges from the tundra as a manically magical manifestation of the mediation of malingering meditations on the Maelstrom. The bachelor is dead, his neighbour is dead, his love, the darling of his soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in his individuality which he carried to his life’s end. Consolations of reflective indecision wither away to the confrontation of the tasks mother has set out for him. Why mother? Why? The frustration hits when the reality of the depth of the chasm becomes violently irreverent. When that head slits when that head splits when that head bursts, it will be the flower, the new narcissus.

ZOE HUGHES
Centre for the Distribution and Repatriation of Florified mammalian Infraclass Violence

And so the story goes, man will always be beaten so hard and so fast by their marsupial brothers. A species unaltered, undisturbed by the heroic and dumb founded man. Smell the viscous blood, the sweat and the tears. Taste the grit of the true test of man’s physical strength, mental alertness and courage. It is brutal, it is dangerous. It is lunatic. Testimony takes place at man’s peaked physical strength and you, you are an audience to the heroism of this pursuit. Mother will never revolve the tail in man’s evolution, yet man will not stop exercising and entertaining his symmetrically sculpted strength. It weighs up to a collective masturbation to the definition the biceps, the abdominals and the thighs. Audience bear witness to a culture of the elite. Members and trainees indulge in the aftermath, still hopeful that through early mothering of their brothers, the pursuit will be complete. This is architecture of greatness; this is as close as you have ever been before. A Mussolini reared on its tail, in the Mecca of Maribyrnong, where men, desperate to compete, pilgrimage to stroke the bronzed alphas that puncture the sky. The architecture lives on.