Emergency relief

Venue/Place
Exhibition name

Occupied
29th July – 24 September 2016
RMIT Design Hub, Melbourne, Australia
Curated by Grace Mortlock, David Neustein, Fleur Watson
Year

→ designhub.rmit.edu.au/exhibitions-programs/occupied
Exhibiting Home
Michael Bojkowski
DAE DC&W 2018

1 — Before the Grenfell Tower fire, Melbourne experienced a

rash of events attributed to a lack of responsibility state
government in dealing with apartment developers, including
the Lacrosse Building fire in 2014. Photo: Wayne Taylor
Introduction

RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia

Occupied arrived at a time of political change and sensitivity
around the types of dwellings being developed within the City of
Melbourne and the surrounding municipalities. Concerns centred
around the reshaping of inner city communities along economic
lines, particularly in reference to The Australian Dream—a notion
ingrained within Australian society since the 1950s, centred
around home ownership as an ideal. These freshly defined
concerns were easily applicable to other cities where property
speculation was rife and housing increasingly commodified.
This is key to what Occupied hoped to communicate; that the
urgencies experienced in Melbourne were becoming familar
concerns in cities around the globe and that collaboration beyond
juristrictions could provide, if not solutions, then ‘ways forward’.

Provocation
In 2007, London’s Tate Modern held an exhibition entitled

Occupied
Global Cities to help mark the tipping point at which more than
half of the world’s population were living in urban rather than rural
areas. At the same time the first rumblings of what came to be
known as the Global Financial Crisis (G.F.C.) were starting to make
themselves felt a short walk across Millennium Bridge from the
exhibition. The effects in of the G.F.C. in the U.K. and the U.S.
would cause irreparable damage to these and similar economic
centres around the world. In Australia however, the effect would
be startlingly different.
With a relatively static economy, Australia only felt the tiniest of
ripples of these dramamtic economic events emanating from
overseas. International investors and members of the financial
services industry looking for ‘safe havens’ suddenly took notice
of Australia’s risk-adverse and un-dynamic financial sector,
identifying the country as an attractive place to stash their cash.
Bricks and mortar became the stable investment of choice for new
comers and citizens alike. Barely a year out from the G.F.C.,
in 2009, the Australian Bureau of Statistics would announce
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that the floor space of the average Australian home had grown
 to be the largest in the world, out McMansion-ing even the
Exhibiting Home

United States.
That was the scene out in the ‘burbs. In inner cities, there was
the space, and antiquated planning laws, to allow developers
to build high and cram as many ‘living spaces’ into their new
skyscrapers as possible, creating clusters of monolithic apartment
buildings that incidentally highlighted areas of the city where
planning laws were most lax. Melbourne’s Southbank area
became a prime example of the types of unthinking housing
edifices inflicted upon the city during this time, and have been
increasingly critised for creating a spate of luxury housing
enclaves across the city.

Segway
Back in the U.S. and U.K. the repercussions from the G.F.C. were
being disproportionately felt by the general populace who had
Michael Bojkowski

formed a picture of a banking sector happy to siphon money from

the public coffers to continue to prop themselves up via govern-
ment bail outs. At the same time buildings around financial districts
were emptying out as staff continued to be made redundant
across financial and connected industries. 2011 saw the Occupy
movement rise out of this environment, seeking to address these
imbalances and inadvertently highlighting the wholesale
commodification of inner city space that might otherwise be used
as housing. As the Occupied curators note in their introduction:
“Economic disparities may have mobilised the Occupy movement,
but the focus of its protests was inarguably spatial.”

Air rights
Meanwhile, back in Melbourne former state planning minister,
Matthew Guy, bought in a regime that allowed developers hungry
to include more apartments within property boundaries to bypass
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city council planning laws, as long as they promised to build high.

The effect observers started to notice was the reverse of outer
suburban McMansion-ing. Inner city buildings were getting taller
but apartment sizes were starting to shrink.
 RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia
Occupied

2 — Diagram from ‘Better Apartments: Buyers and Renters

Guide’ released in 2017 by State of Victoria Department of
Environment, Land, Water & Planning in response to a lack
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of guidance for dveelopers on ‘good quality’ inner city living.

Exhibiting Home
Michael Bojkowski
DAE DC&W 2018

3 — Examples of the recent ‘microluxe’ which sees increased

usage compacted into existing dwellings (Microlux apartment,
Fitzroy above) or unused spaces reproposed to include multiple
dwellings (Notel, Melbourne below).
Better Apartments

RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia

It would take the ousting of the previous state government
and the launch of a discussion paper released by current state
planning minister, Richard Wynne, in 2015 to begin to address
the issue of living space within the state’s over heated high rise
development market. The Better Apartments paper was the first
stake in the sand in wrestling back control of the shape of the city
from developers who had found ways to manipulate existing
planning regulations, some of which had not been updated for
over a decade.
Also by this time, Melbourne had been identified as Australia’s
fastest growing city by the Australia Bureau of Statistics. Previous
estimates of 8 million residents (almost double what it is no)
by 2050 have been increased to 10 million after the release of
recent census results. This has made the city a test-bed for the
effect of accelerated development on urban spaces, the
repercussions for living standards and the shape of cities

Occupied
experiencing similar population surges, in line with Global Cities’
observation that more people were now living in cities than any
other types of areas.

The exhibition
With this backdrop, the curators sought to position Occupied
on a more universal plain, outside of direct criticism of localised
political and administrative systems. Instead, the exhibition
collected visions of speculative future scenarios produced
by “architects, artists, academics, filmmakers and dancers”
interested in the devolution of domestic space, irrespective
of geographical borders. The introduction to the exhibition
states: “You will find no ideological certainties or universal
solutions on display. The transformative ideas of our time will
not be sweeping, grandiose visions. Today’s creative thinkers
must find space for an ever-growing populace within a finite
urban fabric. The ideas that thrive in this context will be small-
scale, contingent and combinatory, operating at the margins
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or the in-between.”
 A key aspect of the show was the design of an active space that
Exhibiting Home

directly referenced the transformation taking place within the city.

A programme of events in collaboration with Open House
Melbourne was produced that ranged from lunch-time table
discussions to dance performances based on imagined future
scenarios, to an open invitation to occupy an elevated space within
the exhibition, referred to as Supershared, which was bookable
online via social sharing services.
The name of the exhibition itself was asserted in bold letters
across the glass entry door, suggesting the project rooms (as
RMIT Design Hub refers to them) themselves had been co-opted
in favour of an emergent space that intermingled the personal
and collaborative, the domestic and the worker-day, the public
and the private, the local and the universal.

Describing the space

Michael Bojkowski

Otherothers, the research based off-shoot of architectural practice

Other Architects, (and co-curators of the show) designed a space
that was split diagonally down the middle with exhibits falling into
two camps, interior and exterior.
More traditional forms of exhibition displays where featured in
the exterior section (such as works on plinths or displayed flat on
walls), clearly visible from the exhibition entrance. A mixture of this
and less passive, sometimes programmable displays inhabited
the interior section, accessible through a series of apertures that
punctured the wall in between them. In addition to this main space
there was also a third space titled In-motion which was darker with
a much lower ceiling, positioned at the end of the exhibition, where
video works were displayed. Supershared made up a fourth space,
positioned like a type of ‘crow’s nest’ above the interior and
exterior spaces.
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Exterior
The material aesthetic used within Project room 1 was deliberately
left raw and malleable. The dividing wall running diagonally across
the space making a connection with typical suburban house
 RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia
Occupied
4 — Occupied entrance with exhibition graphics by Sean
Hogan, Trampoline Image: Tobias Titz

Supershared space Interior exhibits

Entrance

Exterior exhibits

Exit

Lifts

In-motion video exhibits In-motion video exhibits

2015

Occupied site plan

Exhibiting Home
Michael Bojkowski
DAE DC&W 2018

5 — Project room 1, viewed from the above the entrance,

showing the division between exterior (left) and interior (right)
 RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia
6 — ‘In-motion’ containing mostly video-based works

Occupied

7 — Students in the Supershared space above Project room 1

2015

All images: Tobias Titz

 buildings by use of exposed wall studs, plasterboard backing and
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untreated timber. This pivoted neatly with the two architectural

models situated in the centre of the space that also included
exposed stud walls used as framing devices (see Key exhibit #1
below). The use of these materials also provided a deliberate sense
of the exhibition being captured mid-evolution or being ‘under
development’. A too stringent or complete an aesthetic might have
been seen as stifling discussion or dissuading participation.

[Key exhibit #1] Offset House, a stand-alone exhibit by

Other Architects was originally created for the 2015 Chicago
Architecture Biennial. The work consists of a series of architectural
models, two of which were on display as part of Occupied.
The first model represents a typical suburban block of houses,
in a style common to Australia’s outer suburbs, not dissimilar to
the idea of the ‘McMansion’. Other Architects have then increased
Michael Bojkowski

the population density within this block using figures at scale, the
same time eroding the building’s outer shells in order to give
occupants a wider variety of spaces to utilise. The resulting rise in
communal activity within the frames of the houses also spills out
into the spaces surrounding them.
The result being that fences demarcating ownership were
removed in favour of shared playground facilities and exterior
cladding was removed to create buffer zones, via balconies
and outdoor areas, between newly compacted domestic zones.
This approach also exposed the diminished and freshly divided
spaces made visible within these larger shells. A second model
isolates a single home, but at a larger scale, with similar alterations
enacted upon it.

Interior
The ‘interior’ sections within Project room 1 were hidden behind
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the dividing wall on initial approach, reflecting a particularly

Australian ideal where domestic activity is generally placed at the
back of a house or property, away from the prying eyes of passers-
by. The exhibits and programmed events behind this wall were
 RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia
Occupied
8 — A diagram of an Offset House, designed by Other
Architects, originally exhibited as part of the 2015 Chicago
Architecture Biennial

then separated into a series of rooms of varying shapes and sizes.

The door shaped apertures becoming invitations cross their
collective thresholds and venture further in. Once through there
were a range of projects displayed in a variety of ways. There were
passive reenactions such as Andres Jaque’s Rolling House for the
Rolling Society, a speculative work from 2009 which took an
EU-centric look shared living spaces and how they might evolve.
There was Spacemarket, the presentation of a social media feed
and app initiated by Perth-based architectural firm Many Projects,
as a way to open up disused space within the city to it’s residents. .
There were 4 other projects in this section, each with their own
‘room’. The last exhibit, at the back of the room was ‘dressed’ to
resemble an incidental, slightly drab and lived-in domestic interior
which was occupied by a resident spasmodically throughout the
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show (see Key exhibit #2 overleaf).

Exhibiting Home
Michael Bojkowski

9 — An impromptu table discussion, outside TOMA’s Never

Discuss Politics at Home installation inspired by the space

[Key exhibit #2] For Never Discuss Politics at Home, Chilean

architectural research collective TOMO, installed Leandro
Cappetto, a member of their group, within a domestic scenario
tasked with challenging the sanctity of the home as a place
shielded from political and economic forces. Every afternoon
from Wednesday to Friday for the duration of the show Cappetto
treated this space as his home, abet a theatricised version of
the idea of ‘home’. The space included a ratty old armchair,
Formica table, milk crates for storage (a stable of many student
houses) and a stud wall partition behind which was a rudimentary
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kitchen. Outside of Cappetto’s allotted habitation times visitors

we invited to make themselves at home within the space where
Cappetto would often leave notes and works-in-progress for
visitors to look at.
This project also raised the question of participation within the

RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia

exhibition context. With a scarcity of visible cultural institutions
for the earnest study of art and design in the city, and indeed
around Australia, performance is often seen as a tool for luring the
general public into visiting cultural spaces. For Occupied,
particpation was framed as a particular type of activitism that the
speculative curation can provide a framework for. The question
becomes one of usefulness. How useful is performance, or other
forms of programming, in encouaging participation? What useful
outcomes are produced by this and other forms of active (as
opposed to passive) participation within the limits of curation?
What is sustained?

The curators
The curation team for Occupied was made up of two architects,
Grace Mortlock and David Neustein, both from the firm Other
Architects, along with lead curator at RMIT Design Hub, Fleur

Occupied
Watson. As a group the three curators chose to disperse their
individual voices amongst the various themes and activities that
make up the exhibition and accompanying programme.
They also sourced projects from similar speculative events
such as architecture biennials, conferences and similar events.
Choosing these distinct channels also allowed access to an
international cast of contributors from a cast list of cities such as
Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Bangkok, Santiago, New York, London,
Paris, Milan, Barcelona and Madrid. Tapping into this cycle of
speculative works that have been referenced and reframed
through multiple exhibitions and events also further dispersed the
fingerprint of the curators.
Within the context of contemporary exhibition making in Australia,
this approach is not unusual. There is often an unspecificity, which
could be perceived as a lack of confidence, in presenting concrete
outcomes. In these cases, the ideal would seem to be to have an
exhibition transformed in unexpected ways over it’s duration.
Visitors should then be imbued with a sense of having helped plot
2015

the exhibition’s course, to an extent.

 Another common thread within contemporary Australian
Exhibiting Home

exhibition making that has really taken hold is the idea that to really
engage with visitors projects should no longer be seen as static
or merely capturing and archiving a moment of observed culture.
For Occupied, projects were chosen from as far back as 2009 but
were explicitly selected to provoke discussion about current
events, rather than cataloguing the past. The historical context
of each work deliberately obscured.
The curator’s address both these concerns in the exhibition
catalogue’s introduction stating that: “The intent here is not simply
to create spectacle or to activate benign participation, just as it is
not to act as an expert or historian within the museological
tradition. Rather, the position is one situated within an emergent
form of curatorial advocacy and activism.”

OC CU
10 — Occupied
Michael Bojkowski

RMIT DESIGN HUB

29 JULY – 24 SEPTEMBER
2016
catalogue cover
by Sean Hogan,
Trampoline
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PI ED
Afterimage

RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia

The impression left by the show was one of a state of urgency,
a need for speed, on a universal plain. Ideas around home,
housing, domesticity, accommodation and private space were
shown to be in a state of flux with historical definitions now
unpinned, although with a steady avoidance of dystopic scenarios.
What you came away with was the idealistic notion that ideas are
a currency that surpasses mere economic value.
What is also emphasised is that domestic spaces do not occur in
nature. Ideas around the ‘home’ and ‘housing’ have always been
created, designed and performed. If anything, during this recent
era of societal dissonance, preconceived ideas around the ‘home’
have gone off-script. We now accept visions of a generation
having to shrug off monetary concerns in adapting to privatised
accommodation like the co-living initiatives set up by companies
such London’s The Collective or The Student Hotel group in the
Netherlands. Recent news articles have continued widening their

Occupied
focus on issues surrounding nationalism and immigration, moving
on from discussing how to house refugees to definitions around
the term ‘stateless’.
If anything, the sense of urgency elicited via the Occupied
exhibition (and implied by the speedy simplicity of the exhibition
graphics designed Sean Hogan) has only accelerated. As useful,
current and as energetic as this show was, there is a vision
whereby for this projects to become truly useful and provocative
it would have to be restaged and updated on a regular basis, not
just travelling but evolving over time.

Michael Bojkowski, January 2018.

2015
 Reference
Exhibiting Home

Better Apartments
Premier of Victoria. 2015. “Better Apartment Design For A More
Liveable City”. Melbourne. → premier.vic.gov.au/better-apartment-
design-for-a-more-liveable-city

Victoria State Government. Department of Environment, Land,

Water and Planning (issuing body). 2015. “Better apartments: a
discussion paper”. Melbourne.

Victoria State Government. Department of Environment, Land,

Water and Planning (issuing body). 2017. “Better Apartments”.
Melbourne. → planning.vic.gov.au/policy-and-strategy/planning-
reform/better-apartments

The Australian Dream

Michael Bojkowski

Boyd, Robin. 1960. The Australian Ugliness. Melbourne: F. W

Cheshire.

Pam, Eko. 2010. Re-designing the ‘Great Australian Dream’:

Creating a More Sustainable Housing Future.
→ ro.ecu.edu.au/theses_hons/1356

Hill, Dan. 2018. “Essays: In Every Dream Home A Heartache: The

Great Australian Dream And Its Architecture”. Blog. City Of Sound.
→ cityofsound.com/blog/2007/09/in-every-dreamh.html

Global Cities
Tate Modern. 2007. Global Cities. Exhibition. London, United
Kingdom: Tate.

Williams, Eliza. 2007. “Global Cities At Tate Modern”. Creative

Review. → creativereview.co.uk/global-cities-at-tate-modern/
DAE DC&W 2018

International Monetary Fund. 2007. “IMF Survey: World

Reaches Urban Tipping Point”. IMF. → imf.org/en/News/
Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sores104a
Australian Property Boom

RMIT Design Hub/Melbourne, Australia

Cadman, Emily. 2017. “What’s Driving Australia’s Property Boom”.
Bloomberg. → bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-01/will-
australia-s-property-boom-fizzle-or-froth-quicktake-q-a

Santow, Simon. 2009. “Australians Live In World’s Biggest

Houses”. ABC News. → abc.net.au/news/2009-11-30/australians-
live-in-worlds-biggest-houses/1162630

McMansions
Hilton, Joni. 1985. Braces, Gym Suits, And Early-Morning
Seminary: a youthquake survival manual. Salt Lake City, Utah:
Covenant Recordings.

Musante, Fred. 1998. “Can Big Houses Be Too Big?”. The New
York Times. 15th November 1998.
→ nytimes.com/1998/11/15/nyregion/can-big-houses-be-too-
big.html

Occupied
Planning
“Melbourne’s High-Rise Policy ‘Weak, Ineffective’: Report”. 2015.
ABC News. → abc.net.au/news/2015-02-09/melbourne-develops-
the-city-centre-with-dire-consequences/6080146

Horne, Ralph; Nethercote, Megan. 2015. “Life In A Windowless

Box: The Vertical Slums Of Melbourne”. The Conversation. →
theconversation.com/life-in-a-windowless-box-the-vertical-
slums-of-melbourne-41181

Microlux
Brown, Jenny. 2017. “Size Isn’t Everything: Melbourne Apartments
Breaking The Mould”. Domain. → domain.com.au/news/
melbourne-apartments-size-isnt-always-everything-as-these-
clever-small-designs-show-20170702-gwzrmz/

Occupy movement
The Occupied Times of London. 2011. → theoccupiedtimes.org/
2015

Population growth
 Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2017. “Ten Years Of Growth:
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Australia’s Population Hot Spots”. ABS.

→ abs.gov.au

The exhibition
Open House Melbourne. 2017. Event.
→ openhousemelbourne.org/

Other Architects. 2015. Offset House. Architectural Model. First

exhibited, 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial. → otherarchitects.
com/other-spaces#/offset-house/

Mortice, Zach. 2016. “Is This the Suburban House 2.0?”. City Lab.
→ citylab.com/design/2016/01/is-this-the-suburban-
house-20/424473/

Social sharing
Many Projects. 2011. Spacemarket. Social media feed. Perth,
Michael Bojkowski

Western Australia.
→ manyprojects.com.au/spacemarket/

Supershared. 2015.
→ designhub.rmit.edu.au/news/supershared

Statelessness sharing
Lyons, Kate. 2018. “UK Home Office Tells Stateless Man: Go
Home”. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
news/2018/jan/22/uk-home-office-tells-stateless-man-go-home.

Exhibition Design
→ trampoline.net.au/#/occupied/
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