PAUL VAN HERK

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 the 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. For the Romans it was carved glorifications and tributes in triumphal 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 a graphic form of communist propaganda known as ‘agitprop’. 1972’s ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ observed that buildings had become commercial signs in themselves, and in the late 90s a number of architects in Melbourne were undertaking intertextu- al experiments on buildings to test the limits of their legibility.

 

In the studio, the brief was to design a city centre shopping centre, the poster child of the 21st century city centre. Unlike most shopping centres today, the signage and messaging of the retail within would have to be ‘baked in’ to the architecture. Each student had a different take on what that message was, based on a personal critique of contemporary retail including unethical supply chains and misleading marketing. The challenge they had was to translate this critique into a generative proposition using existing architectural precedents, graphics and tropes – and make it literal.