This Bachelors of Architectural Design Studio was a historical precedent and skills-based design course that explored how text is used in the generation of architecture, how architecture is ‘read’, and how buildings are literally covered in words all the time. It was the third studio in my Architecture as Propaganda series.

 

In the contemporary commercial city, applied signs do most of the talking, but historically, public messages would be baked in to the architecture of the city. In Rome it was carved encomiums and tributes on porticos, arches and columns. In medieval Europe, tracery and stained glass told bible stories en masse to an illiterate population. In early Soviet Russia, architecture was derived directly from highly graphic suprematist and constructivist propaganda known as AGITPROP. Venturi Scott Brown’s 1972  Learning from Las Vegas observed that buildings often acted as commercial signs in themselves. n the late 1990s, architects in Melbourne were undertaking intertextual experiments on buildings to test the limits of their – and Australia’s – legibility.

 

The studio brief was to design a CBD mall, the most urban of shopping centres. Unlike most shopping centres today however, the signage and messaging of the retail had to be entirely conflated with the architecture. Each student had a different take on what the architecture would have to say and how it would critically differentiate itself from other offerings. The architectural challenge was to translate critiques of retail into propositions using widely-legible architectural precedents, graphics and tropes; to make it like, literal.