Lecturer  at the University of Adelaide, School of Architecture and Built Environment

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/urs.bette

The 'Jump studio' is one of two design courses, which students undertake parallel during the semester. It introduces a performative & experimental approach to architectural design, in which form is produced, evaluated and developed in a series of perpetual mutations. Subsequently the students are confronted with a program [architecture school], which they have to further specify and realise within the given [previously generated] form. The program starts with inventing and building a 'machine that jumps', based on a researched natural phenomenon. Then the jumping machine has to be modified and made to draw. The drawing-results are spatially interpreted in order to generate 3D volumes, which constitute the point of departure for the architecture school. The studio aims to introduce students to the reality of possibilities instead of constraints, and encourages them to search for their own identities within architectural design by giving the freedom to experiment. The course coalesces the conceptual openness with individual assignments, highlighting selected functional parameters, both in order to give guidance as well as pushing the design forward, challenging students to concretely think about 'impossible' concepts.