CRATERS OF THE MOON



SIAL Team:
    Mark Burry
    Andrew Maher
    Jane Burry


In Semester One 2003 SIAL offered an upper pool design studio bringing together students from several design disciplines and two universities to explore the organisation, development and fabrication of built systems collaboratively.

Co-ordinators: Jane Burry + Andrew Maher
Participants: Architecture, Industrial design and Landscape students from RMIT + Architecture students from Victoria University, Wellington co-ordinated by Mark Taylor
Barnaby Bennett, Glenn Coombridge, Zoe Ackroyd Curtis, Dale Fincham, Tom Gooch, Nicholas Hayward, Megan Lutton, Giacomo Maracchioni, Nick Sargent, Andrew Swaney, Lara Tretola, Chien Jen Tung.
Contributors: Mark Burry, Sue Anne Ware and Scott Mayson

This studio emphasised the process of complex design and construction using digital and physical modelling as the media for developing design intentions. students undertook several projects with a major project located at the Craters of the Moon geothermal park near Lake Taupo in New Zealand.

The studio offered the opportunity to experiment with unstable spatial and topological descriptions of form by developing an underlying structure of stable characteristics (parameters) and engaging with a particular type of syntax: associative geometry.
Students had access to the sial student lab on level 8 and were expected to work individually and in cross-disciplinary teams with advanced modelling software such as CATIA.

In 2005 one of the projects from Craters of the Moon was redeveloped and submitted to the UIA International Student Design Competition in Istanbul.  This enbty by Barnaby Bennett and Tom Gooch won the Turkish Chamber of Architects Prize.  The project can be downloaded here.