MPavilion

The first leg of MRelay is devoted to Habitat. As we leap from the starting blocks, we’ll cast our gaze around: at our natural environments, our sense of place and how place transforms us.

Today’s places are changing fast—whether they’re a tropical rainforest or a city such as London, Melbourne or Berlin, a habitat for artists or an ecology for designers. ‘Design thinking’ stimulates a natural inquisitiveness and embraces ideas of origins and place. The way people habitually use spaces becomes a guide for design, alongside rational, economic, civic and environmental necessities. Design is everywhere—what matters is how we look at it.

Habitat was hosted by Simon Knott, director and co-founder of BKK Architects. Speakers included Naomi Milgrom AO, MPavilion founder and commissioner for Australia, Venice Biennale 2017; Andrew McConnell, executive chef of Cumulus Inc. and Cutler & Co.; Alice Glenn, president and creative director of Schoolhouse Studios; Rueben Berg, founder and director of Indigenous Architecture Victoria; Rebecca Coates, director of Shepparton Art Museum; Professor Julie Bernhardt, scientist and director at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health; and Kate McMahon, co-founder of urban-strategy agency Hello City.

Treatment was a two-day, site-responsive public art project on display (via an eighty-minute bus tour) at Melbourne Water’s Western Treatment Plant in Werribee on 14 and 21 November 2015. Curators David Cross and Cameron Bishop invited six artists to work with the plant’s sights and sounds—its treatment lagoons and abandoned former township, its world-renowned wetlands and resident waterfowl—in order to explore its history, landscape and technology.

Listen to this MTalk as David and Cameron lead Treatment’s six featured artists—Catherine Bell, Bindi Cole Chocka, Megan Evans, Shane McGrath, Techa Noble and Spiros Panigirakis—in a round-table conversation that will look back at the project and specifically consider how each artist chose to respond to the 11,000-hectare site. The six works (from performance to sound and film installation) will ground a broader discussion about how we curate and make temporary public art that responds to highly particular cultural, environmental and technological conditions. What benefits arise from artworks popping up in the street, the park, the paddock? Can public art engage a community’s collective mind and change the way it is perceived?

What happens when you combine elements of a sewing machine and an industrial knitting machine? If you’re British-based inventor Oluwaseyi Sosanya, you develop the 3D Weaver—a loom specially designed for weaving in three dimensions. From its Honeycomb and ZigZag weaves to the compressible 0~90 pattern, the machine has potential applications in industries spanning medicine, aerospace, architecture and even sportswear.

In this special MTalks event, moderated by RMIT Design Hub curator Fleur Watson and presented by the GREAT Britain campaign, the British Council and MPavilion, Oluwaseyi will be joined by Paul Stoller, managing director of London-founded Atelier Ten’s Australian office. As design consultants and building service engineers, Atelier Ten have worked on large-scale sustainable projects both in Australia (such as the original environmental concepts for Federation Square) and overseas (including Singapore’s 101-hectare Gardens by the Bay), while Paul himself has been recognised by the US Green Building Council for his leadership in environmental design.

Listen in as Oluwaseyi discusses the 3D Weaver project before he and Paul speak more broadly about taking risks and working laterally, and collaboratively, to develop new ways of design thinking and making.

Australian cities face a range of environmental challenges. Do ever-taller concrete towers pose a threat to the sustainability of our vibrant inner cities? What can we do to protect and preserve green or culturally significant public spaces, especially on our expanding urban fringes? And how do we develop new ones?

A new generation of Aboriginal architects, designers and leaders is making significant contributions to these issues. Jefa Greenaway, director of both Greenaway Architects and Indigenous Architecture and Design Victoria—and the first registered Indigenous architect in Victoria—works to connect the Indigenous community to the built environment, and vice versa. Timmah Ball is a mixture of things: an urban planner, a writer and a community arts worker. She grew up in Melbourne but her heritage, on her mother’s side, is Ballardong Noongar from Western Australia. She is a member of the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes (CAUL) Hub Steering Committee.

Hear Jefa, Timmah and moderator Dr Cathy Oke—knowledge broker at the CAUL Hub—for an inspiring discussion, and discover how Aboriginal culture and knowledge can improve our urban places and spaces.

In these times of global economic systems and the effect of the material on contemporary culture, what does it take to imagine and invent spaces where we can experience collective generating, sharing and discussing under the title of ‘art’? What if artistic practices worked on freeing themselves from the logics of commodification?

Listen to the third and final in our series of salon conversations with acclaimed French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, co-presented with Dancehouse, that aim to link dance and choreography to current issues in arts and society, highlighting the connections between the thinking and moving body and contemporary aesthetic, cultural and political issues. Xavier and a panel of local artists—led by Angela Conquet, artistic director of Dancehouse, and including French artist Mathieu Brand, choreographer Matthew Day and Joeri Mol, senior lecturer in organisation studies at the University of Melbourne—explored ways of talking about, making and experiencing art that really matters. If the idea of ‘artistic modernity’ isn’t an outdated historical program but rather a promise yet to be activated, how can we find a way to rearrange the rhetorical contradictions about ‘dialogue between cultures’ that modern-day conversations produce?

What is Melbourne’s urban frontier in the 21st century? In one of our final MTalks events for the season, former Victorian premier the Hon Jeff Kennett will present an exploration of urban planning, and kick off a discussion about our history, the city’s evolution and the issues we’re yet to face.

Hosted by Gina Levenspiel—author of the recently published Miracle Swamp: The place of Queen Victoria Gardens in the urban, horticultural and creative life of Melbourne—this lunchtime talk will begin with Mr Kennett’s presentation and be followed by a lively panel discussion featuring architects and landscape historians Michael Markham, Peter Brew and Paul Fox.

“How could we create the feeling, the experience, the sensation of a tree canopy, but in a completely abstract way, with man-made materials?” In an interview for Architectural Review, Amanda Levete talked about some of the thinking and collaboration that went into AL_A’s MPavilion design. Here's the first of three lunchtime conversations about this year’s MPavilion construction, and the unique puzzles faced along the way.

Key players from the brief-to-build team—including MPavilion’s Robert Buckingham, Jessie French and Sam Redston, Arup’s Brendon McNiven, Kane Constructions’ Tony Isaacson and landscape designer Paul Bangay (who lent his green thumbs to MPavilion’s flower beds and perennial borders)—will talk us through their material, technological and botanical decisions, offering us a behind-the-scenes look at everything that goes into designing, building and wiring up a high-tech, weather-responsive and modular temporary structure.

MTalks—'Miracle Swamp' book launch • 30 Jan 2016 by MPavilion

MTalks—Interval 'Between a thought and a feeling' • 29 Jan 2016 by MPavilion

How did engineers from Arup tackle the design challenge of seamlessly incorporating sound and light into the 2015 MPavilion?

Key players from the brief-to-build team Robert Buckingham of MPavilion and Arup’s Brendon McNiven talked us through their material, technological and botanical decisions, offering us a behind-the-scenes look at everything that goes into designing, building and wiring up a high-tech, weather-responsive and modular temporary structure.