Image above, TarraWarra Museum of Art.
RMIT University’s architecture and design department will team up with the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australia’s first significant privately funded museum, to run a research laboratory studio and public forum on the subject of climate change and the built environment.
Operating out of TarraWarra’s North Gallery, twenty students from RMIT will examine the ecological impacts of global warming on the TarraWarra Museum and estate in Victoria’s Yarra Valley. As part of the research studio, the students will also propose built solutions for sustainable and resilient futures.
Charles Anderson, who is Senior Lecturer at School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, will spearhead the studio. Collaborators Dylan Brady (studio505), Michael Trudgeon (RMIT D-Lab/Crowd Productions), will also join the studio as tutors.
Over a two-month period, students will conduct small-scale experiments, culminating in a 1:1 scale site-intervention installation, created from recycled materials from the TarraWarra Estate, local waste stations, and second hand opportunity shops.
During the laboratory, students will have the chance to collaborate with Arup, an international engineering company, to test and explore their new Weather Shift software tool. This new software allows designers to model the relationships between built form and future weather systems.
The general public is also invited to engage with studio participants as it is believed public feedback on the students’ inventions will be crucial to the success of the laboratory.
The studio concludes with a public forum on Sunday May 31, from 12 to 5pm, where participants and invited speakers, will discuss climatic design futures and their economic, political, and cultural impacts.
The research laboratory, which runs from March 28 to June 8, and the public forum are part of ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2015, a Melbourne-wide Festival. The festival seeks to harness the creative power of the Arts to inform, engage and inspire action on climate change.
For more information about Phase Change, click here.