Sibling Architecture has teamed up with RMIT Design Hub to present New Agency: Owning Your Future, a live research project and exhibition focused on the link between ageing and the design of our future homes. 

Taking place 29 August to 22 September, the exhibition, curated and designed by Sibling Architecture, will transform the Design Hub into a live research project; gathering data, public conversations, design speculation and feedback about home ownership in the later stages of life.

For New Agency co-curator Timothy Moore, one of the five directors of Sibling Architecture, ageing is a central and ongoing concern for their architectural practice. “People are living longer today, with Australia seeing one of the highest life expectancies in the world and twenty-one percent of Australians predicted to be over 65 by 2053,” he says.

“As the retirement of Australians relies upon the asset of the family home (and superannuation), and with home ownership becoming an impossibility for a huge swathe of younger Australians, the exhibition explores how this will influence future models of living and architectural design for the elderly.”

Posing the questions ‘Who do you wish to grow old with? Will your house outlive you? What kind of ancestor do you want to be? What will your future housing look like?’, the exhibition invites visitors to be active participants in Sibling’s research, as they investigate and discuss how we might live in the future and new models of home ownership.

Nella Themelios, curator at RMIT Design Hub adds: “New Agency is the outcome of the studio’s ongoing research into this complex field, reflecting how architectural practice can meaningfully contribute to wider social and economic issues.”

The exhibition begins with a series of commissioned films that feature provocations, statistical trends and interviews with different generational groups who imagine alternate
ways of living together.

Visitors then move through three activity chambers in the main project space – for reading, listening and talking – that provoke thinking around models of home ownership through
the lens of ageing. Upon completion, visitors are invited to participate in Sibling’s questionnaire to contribute and inform the next stage of their research into what the future will look like. The questionnaire is also available to complete online, via Sibling Architecture’s website.

New Agency: Owning Your Future opens at RMIT Design Hub’s Project Rooms 1 + 2 from Wednesday 29 August to Saturday 22 September, 2018. Admission is free to the exhibition and all public programs.