Healthabitat

Paul Pholeros, Stephan Rainow and Paul Torzillo

This exemplary formation improves the health of Australian Indigenous people by improving the living environment using good design.

Paul Torzillo, Stephan Rainow and Paul Pholeros founded Healthabitat in 1991 to improve the health of Indigenous Australians. The Housing for Health program, designed and implemented by Healthabitat, improves the living environments of Indigenous communities and ensures access to safe and well functioning housing that can deliver health benefits. The model has been so successful that Healthabitat has now extended its work to places as diverse as Nepal and Brooklyn, New York City.

Project staff is made up of over 75% local Indigenous people and since 1999, 184 Housing for Health projects have been carried out throughout Australia and over 7,300 houses improved.

The agency of Healthabitat goes beyond the specific projects, with its core principles, the Nine Healthy Living Practices, endorsed as part of federal and state government policy in the National Indigenous Housing Design Guide since 1999. The Guide enshrines knowledge gained through the program that is used to improve new house design and specification and make living environments that better sustain people.

supermanoeuvre

Dave Pigram, Iain Maxwell and Chris Duffield

supermanoeuvre thinks computationally and acts materially to widen the physical and conceptual boundaries of the discipline.

An international award-winning architecture and innovation practice operating out of Sydney and London, supermanoeuvre was co-founded in 2006 by Iain Maxwell and Dave Pigram. Chris Duffield joined as business director in 2010. The firms projects have been exhibited in the UK, US, China, France, Portugal, Italy, Colombia and Australia, and they represented Australia and New Zealand at the 2008 and 2010 Beijing Architecture Biennales. supermanoeuvre is an international leader in the fields of computational design and advanced fabrication, creating innovative projects; expanded modes of practice; enhanced design methodologies; and novel fabrication techniques through experimentation, collaboration, teaching and research.

The practice’s work spans a wide range of production modes and media, including founding specialist technical and education networks that sit outside of regular institutional frames. From structural form-finding software and interactive urban models to cutting-edge robotic design and high-density housing reverse-engineered through Corbusier’s skip-stop diagram, their work is characterised by a consistent exploration of non-linear design processes and self-organisation across material, social and ecological substrates.

Richard Goodwin Pty Ltd

Richard Goodwin

Richard Goodwin Pty Ltd is a multi-disciplinary practice committed to advancing the power of urban planning and rethinking our cities via public art and ‘parasitic’ architectural interventions.

Artist and architect Richard Goodwin established Richard Goodwin Pty Ltd in 1993 to explore how his work as an artist could be widened to the spheres of architecture and urban planning. Richard Goodwin Pty Ltd has evolved from an individual art practice to a multi-disciplinary architectural practice. Fundamental to his work and philosophy is the notion of adaptive reuse and radical transformations.

Richard Goodwin is a professor at the University of NSW, where he has established an Australian Research Council-funded centre called the Porosity Studio to examine and look into questions of public space and its relationship to politics and the radical transformation of architecture. The studio views the city as a laboratory for art, architecture and theory and continues to play with the boundaries of art and architectural practice. It has worked in transport and infrastructure, on international art exhibitions and an enormous range of non-usual collaborations.

2112 Ai (100YR City)

Tom Kovac and Fleur Watson

A group of international thinkers and educators think about the future of Maribor and show how multi-disciplinary and collaboration are essential conditions for future innovation.

Every year the European Union awards the title of European Capital of Culture (ECOC) to one or more cities. The city holding this prestigious title hosts a series of important cultural events. In 2012, the European Capital of Culture is Maribor in Slovenia. As part of the ECOC festivities, 2112 Ai (100YR City) will investigate and identify disruptive patterns of global change and envisage impacts on architecture, urbanism and life in the extreme future. 2112 Ai represents cultural and city engagement at the highest level and communicates how new forms of practice are responding to external demands on architecture.

Director and curator Tom Kovac and Fleur Watson will be leading a huge group of thinkers and educators. Tom Kovac is a professor of Architecture at RMIT University, and visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Fleur Watson is a PhD research candidate within RMIT’s architecture program, an architecture and design curator, author and former editor-in-chief of MONUMENT magazine. Together they offer high-level experience in the areas of practice-led research and the curation of large-scale events, and are proficient at ensuring industry engagement, trans-disciplinary collaboration and public dissemination.

The Architects Radio Show

Stuart Harrison, Simon Knott, Rory Hyde and Christine Phillips

This is a very unique situation where a number of practice directors come together in a not-for-profit vehicle to promote architecture.

In late 2004 practicing architects Stuart Harrison and Simon Knott created The Architects, a weekly radio programme dedicated to discussing architecture, taking it into a broader realm. RMIT lecturer and architect Christine Phillips joined the team in 2008, with Rory Hyde being involved from the early days as a producer and then international correspondent.

The show is broadcast weekly on Melbourne based community radio station 3RRR, on both FM and via the web. Each show covers current issues in architecture both locally and internationally, with guests coming into to discuss their work and approaches to architecture, urban design and sustainability. The show is informal and conversation-based, and neither ‘dumbs it down’ nor makes the discussion inaccessible.

The four members of the show each run separate practices, in building, education and through other media. Their broad local and international engagement is formed around the radio show, which has for seven years taken architecture to the wider world.

Archrival

Claire McCaughan and Lucy Humphrey

Architects from rival firms come together in a non-corporate space to produce work that would be impossible to create within the confines of a standard practice.

Archrival is a not-for-profit Sydney-based organisation founded in 2011 by architects Claire McCaughan and Lucy Humphrey. The organisation formed as a reaction to financial, social, political and environmental forces that are making architectural practice more complex and constrained. As a result, Archrival operates in parallel with everyday practice, allowing a collection of individuals to respond with more creative freedom to the forces reshaping the industry.

By bringing together rival firms of architects, Archrival increases the research capacity and diversity of ideas possible within any given project. This practice also calls into question the obsession with individual authorship. Archrival’s projects are made by many, and are possible only due to the combined efforts of a united project team. Due to the formation’s ‘extracurricular’ nature, the focus shifts from architecture for profit, to architecture for architecture’s sake. By stepping outside of the boundaries of practice Archrival side-steps the conventional competitive market, and creates a new market, where the client is well educated in the value of the architectural product.