Design Pod

2000

Winner of the Haworth Asia Pacific Design Awards.

THE CHANGING WORK ENVIRONMENT

It is a reality of the changing work / studio environment that we are working in larger, shared, non-hierachical spaces. For the sake of efficiency many feel the loss of their autonomy, and power over their own actions. By using technology to create a sense of ownership and territory, we can empower the individual, while maintaining a free and fluid work / studio environment.

The Design Carcass and its peripheral studio solution provides a response to this condition.

THE DESIGN CARCASS

As the environment that we work and interact within becomes increasingly synthetic, there becomes greater need for an immediate work environment that is increasingly maluable, tactile, personal and real.

The Design Carcass offers the individual the opportunity to control their work environment and further more give them the opportunity to manipulate and move their work station into any environment desired. In the case of the architect, engineer, landscape designer or any profession that requires careful consideration of site, environment and local conditions the Design Carcass provides the perfect opportunity for on-site design and documentation and also correspondence to home office, consultants or the client.

MATERIAL

The Design Carcass has a super lightweight carbon fibre frame with internal rubber seat padding and an external rubber shell. The lightweight structure allows the user to easily transport the Design Carcass, while its rubber shell protects it from damage. Furthermore, its protective rubber shell allows the user to personalise their Design Carcass through the choice of pattern, colour and texture.

THE DESIGN DESKTOP

Providing the full spectrum of multi-media output the Design Desktop gives the individual control over the everyday tools of the design studio such as communication and basic computing needs. More importantly though, the Design Desktop provides the user with the ability to bridge the gap between 1)virtual drawing and design technologies and 2)the designers mind. It does this by removing the 'Mouse' from the equation.

THE DESIGN Co-Op

The Design Co-Op is an open studio established by the users for the use of like minded people such as artists and designers to pool their resources and produce an environment of shared space, media and ideas.

The Design Co-Op is owned by all and like the contemporary work environment it is non-hierachical. The individual stores the Design Carcass here and has access to all the Design Co-Op’s resources 24 hours a day.

RaeRae House is exhibited in the NGV’s prestigious Melbourne Now exhibition. From the 24th March 2023 until 20th August 2023.

"Just once every 10 years, Melbourne Now is a landmark exhibition, reflecting the creativity, culture and contemporary life of our city.

No House Style assembles leading and emerging Melbourne-based furniture designers and architects whose contrasting styles are emblematic of the city’s creative spirit. Refuting mainstream design trends, these designers and architects are helping to establish a picture of contemporary Melbourne design that is independent, original, plural and expressive of contemporary issues and values.”

The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Fed Square.

With such a wonderful diversity of organisations, how can we design home for each, and a community for all? Our approach is to think of the LGBTQI organisations as houses, and focus experience of these houses inside the organism of the building, around a protected street and town square. We see the mix of individual and collective spaces as an idea of house + village.

The building embraces its context. The paving spills out onto the chaos of Fitzroy Street, welcoming passers-by through a narrow, protected entry. The view to an internal garden draws you in - moving rst through a tight, Melbournian laneway, the space expands to a tall, internal garden.

There are discreet entrances off Jackson Street, and multiple ways to move through, up, across, around and on the building. The joy and colour of the project is found in the experience of moving through the building.

Pride House contains safe spaces that enrich our experience of place. Varying degrees of public / private, individual / collective and introverted / extroverted spaces lter our environment, and connect us to a context that we might otherwise miss. The idea of architecture as a facilitator - as the place for community, re ection and growth - is embodied in the design of Pride House. The building will be welcoming, fully accessible, and will give the community a sense of engagement, of nourishment and belonging.

No rainbow on the front facacde may seem strange, but the materials on our houses represent the rainbow. We use real materials, not just an applied paint colour - materials we can recall from our childhood, with embodied memory, texture and associations. Our differences are part of what makes us.

Difference is noble. We come together to celebrate our collective differences. There is strength in numbers, safety together, and community in diversity. Pride House is a resource, where the opportunity is to design a space for the collective, where the individual can nd their place and ourish.

Ongoing consultation with people of the LGBTQI , Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities will only improve our house + village concept. The users will be the authors of their spaces, while the architects will be curators. 

The diversity of the brief is the opportunity that excites us. The composition of programs in a single building is a great challenge, and our ambition is to celebrate the diversity of this by composing each part into an inspiring whole.

Our approach is to work directly with the client and treat each project as a unique challenge. In doing so, we offer individual possibilities and thoughtful responses to people, place and brief. We ask users to be the authors of their spaces and their city. We work directly with clients to to ensure we understand their wants and needs. It is through this collaborative approach that the richness in our work emerges. We ask for open participation from clients and encourage them to draw, research, question and engage. Where others may see compromises, we see client participation as an exciting enrichment of this process.

As well as our direct interaction with stakeholders, the design should encourage and enable cooperation between the user groups, to allow for shared multi-
use spaces and facilities, and create a common vision that bene ts individual aspirations as well as those of the broader LGBTQI community.

The Pride House as a resource is integral to the success of occupation and engagement with the building. We aim to provide a safe, stable environment, affordable work accommodation, specialist facilities, and spaces to celebrate and collaborate.

The brief, and Consultation / Design Ideas documents were a catalyst for
our design approach to this building. Themes of culture, safety, inclusion and celebration set the tone of the overall concept, while speci c needs of privacy, stability, exibility and consultation informed the programmed spaces. Our approach of a collection of ‘houses’ grouped around a ‘semi-public street’ and ‘town square’ addresses the dichotomy of the varied spaces encapsulated in this building. We aim to provide the structure, both physical and social, for the collective housing of the organisations who will nd their new home at Pride House. We see the users as authors of their spaces, and the architects as curators.
The result of ongoing conversations will be the identi cation of further opportunities to enhance the collective experience of Pride House. The ‘street’ and the Forum are vertical and horizontal spaces that tie the ‘houses’ together. Organisations will be grouped around shared spaces, and the distribution of organisations will be curated to expose to the wonderful diversity of people, activity and ideas that make Pride House an uplifting place to be. 

In 2014 Mona’s Kirsha Kaechele, (in collaboration with University of Tasmania and CSIRO), invited us to design a floating lab. One of our favourite projects that, sadly, never got built.

“While we have the cleanest air (we are used as the baseline for measuring the world’s concentration of greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases, other air pollutants), the Derwent River on which MONA sits is one of the most contaminated in the world.

In 2013 Mona established the Heavy Metal Project, under the direction of Kirsha Kaechele, to bring together artists, designers, scientists and architects to use their disciplines to collaboratively study and attempt to clean the Derwent River of its legacy of 20th century industry — mercury, lead, cadmium, zinc and copper.”

2008

CV08, The suburb eating robot.
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CV08 was part of the 2008 Australian Institute of Architects national conference Critical Visions
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The Australian suburb was born out of our dependance on the car. With Peak Oil rapidly approaching the epoch of the automobile with soon come to an end and with it so will the Australian outer suburb. Where will suburbanites live when there is no other means of circulation to their homes? What will we do with our abandoned and decaying suburbs? And most importantly, what will we do with the 50% of Australians that are over-weight due to car dependance and a sedentary lifestyle? Well Andrew Maynard Architects has the answer : the CV08. CV08 is a robot that consumes the abandoned suburbs through its front 2 legs. It processes the materials and fires off compacted recycling missiles to awaiting recycling plants. CV08’s middle legs and one rear leg follow the front legs to terra-form the newly revealed earth with native Flora and Fauna. Vast stocks of the Flora and Fauna are stored within CV08 in carbonite sleep until they are required to colonise what was previously suburban wasteland.

Non Sequitur 01: Charnel House
By Andrew Maynard

Architecture of the body. A necessary materiality in the future of architecture, building and production. With swelling populations and dwindling resources, in the near future our richest resource will be the human cadaver.

Reduce, reuse, recycle – our age is defined by our waste. It is estimated that by 2025 the human population will reach 8 billion, 9 billion soon after that. As our population increases, our resources radically deplete and our production of airborne carbon exponentially grows, the one resource we will have in increasingly reliable amounts is the human cadaver. In 2025, it is estimated, an average of 170,000 people will die everyday. If in reasonable condition, many of our organs can be harvested and reused, but what about the other parts? What of the decaying biomass? The ‘stronger than steel’ bone? The vast quantities of fat? Without limits on population and the onset of reduced resources, we will be obliged to reuse and recycle the human body. How do we make the most of this constantly renewing resource? What potential will this new materiality have for architecture and the building industry?

By 2025, over-population will reduce basic resources. This will result in:

Drastically reduced forests and timber;
Soil exhaustion and reduced food production;
Dwindling supplies of fresh water from increased water salinity;
Depleted stocks of plastics, related chemicals, pharmaceuticals and fuel from peak oil;
Mineral and ore depletion.

Your cadaver will become even more valuable, especially in building, for the human frame offers a fully modular construction type. In fact, building from human remains is nothing new, as wonderful examples such as Capela dos Ossos in Portugal, the Golden Chamber of Saint Ursula and the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic testify.

Your cadaver will be your richest commodity, but really, it already is. By some estimates, your body parts could be worth around AUD$604,000 in total. When one considers the complex make up of the human body, isn’t it a shame to put it in the ground or burn it? 

Think of your body as an asset to be inherited by your family, with the value of ‘the product’ – your cadaver – dependent on the investment made during your lifetime. Over your lifetime, generate a medical record to ensure on-going maintenance. At death, your medical record becomes your product description.

Due to minimal freight costs, cadavers represent a low-embodied energy material. The more populous areas, requiring more resources, have the greatest number of cadavers being produced everyday – an opportune balance.

Health
Lifetime maintenance and investment, for those that can afford to do so, ensuring your body is a valuable asset. 

Funeral
At death, following a brief mourning period, the cadaver becomes an asset inherited by the family or any other party purchasing rights to it. The funeral parlour becomes a factory for product handing, processing and quality control.

Disassembling/Harvest
The cadaver is disassembled so that it can be broken down to specific elements, ensuring it is used in its entirety.

Process
The separated elements are distributed for use throughout the local economy.

By contrast with the cost of beef, meat could be harvested from a human body and sold for around AUD$150. There are 40 litres of precious water in your cadaver; over 2sqm of leather. You could sell your corneas for roughly $6,000, your heart for around $60,000, a kidney for $30,000, your lungs for almost $100,000.

2005

A bike for less than $US35

Aka : One less car

concept
The OLC bike is a very simple, cheap, “one size fits all” plywood bicycle for the mass market.  The materials are all cheap and easily available and, importantly the materials are all recyclable or recycled.  OLC is quickly assembled through the use of CNC technology.  The majority of elements are glued rather than mechanically fixed, providing the bike with incredible strength from modest materials.

Target market
The target market is the mass market.  The price of the bike [$US35] makes it almost a disposable item and a disposable solution for our cities transportation problems.  It is imagined that a company like IKEA with a loyal market looking for well designed quick and cheap solutions for everyday living could produce and sell substantial quantities of OLC using technologies already in place.

Features
OLC has reduced the modern bicycle to its bare bones.  Constructed from plywood the bike is cheap and easily constructed. The bike has only 2 gears. The gears, chain, cogs, brakes and lights are all concealed within the ply webs of the bike carcass.
 

Mob-ile Parliament

A mobile, adaptable architecture is a democratic architecture. Democracy is a weird creature. An illusion of choice. An illusion that those in power are truly answerable to the masses. Many of the spaces that elected representatives occupy are heavily controlled, fortified and spatially manipulated to the benefit of the representative rather than those represented. The disenfranchised, those left out, those left behind, those completely disempowered have only one way to make themselves heard; forced to embrace mobility and guerrilla style hit-and-run tactics. The letter to the editor can be ignored. The push, or the shove, cannot. 

In frustration many choose to express their dissatisfaction and disillusion physically rather than through rational argument. Many aren't even afforded the right to be heard. The security and safety of elected representatives is undeniably important, as it is with all constituents. So how do we allow the will of the people to manipulate parliamentary space to express dissatisfaction with, or celebration of, their representatives? How do we allow them to be seen and to contribute to physical/spatial change, even if only symbolically?

If mobility and hit-and-run guerrilla tactics empower the disempowered and marginalised, if only momentarily, then perhaps a truly democratic parliament is one that responds spatially to the will of the people. Perhaps a parliament can be both fortified and open to attack. What if parliament could be manipulated by the masses? What if parliament's spatial condition is changeable by those that are dissatisfied and marginalised as well as those that are pleased with the contributions of elected representatives? The abrupt, confrontational nature of direct physical interaction is what drives the Mobile Parliament. Though safe within, the politician’s access to view and light can be democratically controlled by the public.

2003

Logging in Tasmania’s wilderness

The Styx Valley Forest is a pristine wilderness in south western Tasmania. It is home to the tallest hardwood trees in the world averaging over 80 metres. It is a unique ecosystem unlike any other. Many of the trees are over 400 years old. In 1996 only around 13% of these trees remain. A large area of south western Tasmania's pristine wilderness is world heritage and is therefore protected. Unfortunately the Styx Valley falls just outside the South West National Park and it is now under attack from logging companies.

The logging companies clear fell such areas in Tasmania and burn any remnant vegetation once they have removed any timber considered of value. The high quality timbers that are then removed are reduced to nothing more than wood chips that are then exported mainly to Japan.

From this rape and pillage of Tasmania's previously untouched, pristine landscape, Tasmania receives only AUD$10 per ton of woodchips. Reference : http://weblog.greenpeace.org/tasmania/

GLOBAL RESCUE STATION,generation 1 [existing]

In an attempt to halt the clear felling of the Styx Valley a large group of activists formed human barricades to stop the entry of bulldozers and log trucks. The centre piece to the activists protest is the GLOBAL RESCUE STATION [GRS] perched within the canopy of a grand old Styxgum fondly named Gandalf. The GRS has been manned by numerous local and international activists since November 12, 2003. Made simply from 2 simple platforms suspended by rope from the branches of Gandalf The GRS has been the centre piece of the tactics employed by the activists.

Tactics are:
- to have a visible protest presence within the forest.
- provide a structure that, once manned, authorities would be reluctant [if not powerless] to remove.
-Through its manned presence it not only protects Gandalf but furthermore it protects a large area because if any surrounding trees were felled they may damage the GRS or Gandalf thereby endangering those activists present.

Now, with winter looming, the platform is being removed.

The proposed GRS Generation 2 protest structure is a more permanent and more drastic level of direct environmental protection.

GLOBAL RESCUE STATION,generation 2 [proposed]
GRS Generation 2 is a conceptual investigation that extrapolates the

tactics employed by GRS generation 1.

GRS gen2 is designed to:
- spread its load over three trees, rather than the canopy of a single tree, thereby protecting a number of trees per structure.
- provide a structure to protect activists from the potentially threatening winter 

2007

Austin Maynard Architect’s Mini-Living INVERT proposal is a house that expands and contracts in response to the evolving needs of the family. Rather than design excess space for the future, the small family of four is equipped with what they need now.

The use of prefabricated modules as incremental building blocks allows for this future expansion. Maybe grandma moves in, twins come along or someone starts working from home. A new module can be delivered for the rooftop crane to add to the structure. And when they retire, they can sell the office module to fund their Dublin trip. Or when the youngest moves out, she can bring her bedroom with her.

We build up instead of out. Small and vertical means we maximise outdoor space. Each module is a skeleton structure wrapped in a skin to suit its intended use. Natural light is abundant and cooling breezes find their way through the modules, which each open to outside.

On the ground floor, the study is a room enveloped by garden. One level up, two bedrooms face east. There is a herb garden on the roof of one bedroom module, on the same level as the kitchen, dining and ‘garage’. Another level up, the living room is surrounded by light, air and roof gardens. Well designed compact homes orientated towards generous outdoor spaces are far healthier than huge homes that internalise all functions and fill the site.

Our house also tries to give more to the community. City streets are increasingly monopolised by parking. To take back these public spaces, the crane that cherrypicks the modules also plucks the car from the street. Populating our streets with people, not cars, allows communities to thrive!

Australians see small as a compromise, but thoughtful, compact spaces - Mini-Living - can maximise the quality of all our spaces. 

Corb V2.0

2004

Ever wanted to live in the penthouse every now and then?

Want to get away from your annoying neighbour with the big stereo and bad music taste?

Want to have a party without disturbing others?

You want a different view every now and then?

Corb V2.0 gives you the opportunity.

In Towards a New Architecture Le Corbusier wrote about the new epoch of housing he saw as intrinsic to the modern technological achievements of man. It was the machine that would make a better world. Through density, housing would not only be cheaper, but far better.

“The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house.”

Like Corbusier, we love machines, but let’s not turn the house into the machine, rather let’s use the machine to erode social hierarchy and flatten real estate economics.

Corb V2.0 takes well-designed apartments [rather than badly scaled containers] and uses modern infrastructure to deal with the areas where apartment blocks fail, ie; social hierarchy and lack of adaptability or responsiveness. Through the mobility afforded by shipping equipment, the utopian ideal is once more subverted back to a housing solution, which Corbusier dreamt of back in ‘23.

Within Corb V2.0 spatial hierarchies, traditionally determined by wealth, and the implied status these evoke, are dissolved, real estate values become flattened and a new lifestyle alternative [already adopted in mobile technologies such as phones and laptops] begins to emerge in housing.

The mobility that Corb V2.0 allows also gives the residents an unprecedented degree of control over their social environment; the programmable stacker establishes a feedback loop of user’s responses to density, orientation and height. This is fuzzy logic on a grand scale.

Corbusier said that houses should be machines for living: we think that houses should be robots. Say hi to Corb V2.0.