experimental practice

Review: John Wardle installation in Venice

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By Penny Craswell

If the purpose of architectural installations is to explore ideas, experiment with new materials and test new forms, then the installation “Somewhere Other” currently on show in Venice has well and truly achieved its brief. John Wardle Architects was one of only two Australian architecture studios (along with Room 11) selected to show as part of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and worked with a range of collaborators on this work.

Somewhere Other by John Wardle Architects and collaborators. Image: Peter Bennetts

The exhibition theme this year, across both this exhibition and the whole biennale, is “Freespace”, through which curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Irish studio Grafton Architects raise questions about how people relate to buildings and vice versa, what is private and what is public space, and what is the architect’s role in this equation.  Read more →

Review: Experimental Practice exhibition at RMIT Design Hub

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By Penny Craswell

A desolate landscape with a long stretch of road. Two cold war era cars pull up and a man gets out of each car. Both men wear the cliched clothes of a cold war era spy. Solemnly, they exchange a suitcase and files before sobbing, getting back in the car and driving away, all filmed with a slow, meditative quality. This is the scenario in London artist Noam Toran’s video work “If We Never Meet Again” which features what the artist calls an “exchange of things by men”. The work explores design as an event and is one of a number of works exploring the limits of design in “Experimental Practice: Provocations In and Out of Design”.

Curated by UNSW’s Katherine Moline (my Masters supervisor), and RMIT’s Brad Haylock and Laurene Vaughan, the exhibition just finished its run at the RMIT Design Hub in Melbourne as part of the 2015 Melbourne International Design Festival and explores what Katherine refers to as “design gone feral”. Rather than showing design as a finished object divorced from its process, the exhibition seeks out work that is in progress,explores works that push the boundaries of design and art, showing process, design thinking and other experimental modes. By doing so, Katherine seeks to: “shift perceptions that works of art and design ‘arrive’ from nowhere both conceptually and materially as fully formed” and in the process provides a series of works that are about change. Read more →