Occupied

Occupied

Presented by RMIT Design Hub
Visit http://designhub.rmit.edu.au/exhibitions-programs/occupied for more information

This is the era of the metropolis.

By 2050, it is estimated that 70% of the world’s population will be urban with Australia’s major cities expected to nearly double in size. We don’t yet know where or how this growing population will be housed, as most of the buildings that will make up these cities have already been built. Furthermore, the city is occupied not just by buildings but also by the political and economical structures that dictate the use of those buildings, and which, at present, hinder sufficient and equitable access to housing.

It’s clear that the transformative ideas of our time will
not be sweeping and grandiose visions. Unlike the great architects of the 20th Century – who wishfully imagined the city as a tabula rasa or accepted exile on the urban fringe – today’s creative thinkers must find space for an ever- growing populace within a finite and decaying urban fabric. The ideas that thrive in this context will be small-scale, contingent and combinatory, operating at the margins
or the in-between, within bureaucratic grey-zones or emerging economies.

Occupying the dramatic spaces of the Design Hub,
this exhibition brings together local and international practitioners and showcases proposals for housing
more with less, retrofitting, adapting and repurposing existing structures and environments. Ranging from the pragmatic to the utopian, the research-driven to the purely speculative, Occupied anticipates the critical design approaches, ideas and strategies of the imminent future.

Occupied also includes Supershared – a shared loft-like space projecting out and into Design Hub’s Project Room 1 gallery space. Supershared is open for students to book and occupy throughout the duration of the exhibition. The project speaks to the dexterity and responsiveness of
the ‘shared economy’ and explores where the boundaries between private and public space are blurred.

Occupied exhibitors include: 5th Studio, all(zone), Ash Keating, Atlanta Eke, Baracco + Wright Architects, Black Kosloff Knott Architects and Monash Arts Projects (MAP), Breathe Architecture, Callum Morton and Toby Reed, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism and MAIO, Flores Prats Architects, Jack Self, Lacaton and Vassal and Frédéric Druot Architecture, Liam Young, Lyons Architecture, Harrison
and White, Maddison Architects, MvS Architects, NMBW Architecture Studio, MAPA, Office for Political Innovation, Otherothers, Spacemarket, Stefano Boeri Studio with The BlinkFish, TOMA!, Vokes and Peters. Supershared is created by Jacqui Alexander and Sibling.

Occupied is curated by Grace Mortlock, David Neustein, Fleur Watson.