MPavilion

This discussion celebrates innovative, cutting-edge design by Australia’s small architecture practices and hears from some of the winners of the 2022 ArchiTeam Awards.

Learn more about the innovations behind this year’s winning designs, which rethink housing typologies, blur the edges between the indoors and the outdoors and facilitate new relationships with light and the space around us.

Honouring the ingenious work of emerging, small and medium architecture practices, the ArchiTeam Awards are geared towards supporting these practices’ contributions to the Australian design community.

How can planners and developers design precincts that don’t just look good, but that truly make us feel like we belong somewhere?

This stimulating panel, hosted by Six Degrees Architects, delves into the importance of connection and emotional well-being in place-making.

They use different case studies to look at how to creatively transform a place—rather than destroying and rebuilding it—and at how this approach impacts our well-being and psychology. They also talk about what we can do to respect Indigenous heritage in our built environment.

From understanding our attachment to place to focusing on more resourceful and naturally sustainable ways of operating, we think about how city planners, developers and architects can rediscover how to relate to place, and create people-oriented places that fulfill our emotional needs.

The Parlour for the Summer Salon is a lively intergenerational conversation between Marika Neustupny and Suzanne Dance.

Marika and Suzanne set the scene with a public conversation about life, architecture and everything in between.

Dan Hill curates a discussion with Mae-Ling Lokko, Xu Tiantian and Joseph Grima to discuss the commonalities between them and their work in more detail. After delving into the specifics of the highly-localised nature of Mae-Ling’s and Tiantian’s work,the panellists turn to a broader discussion around whether a local response can contribute to a global response. Questioning how we can factor externalities into the design process to ensure that the idea of stewardship is ingrained in projects, they discuss where responsibilities lie and how we can get more people to pay attention to our global problems.

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The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

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Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

Joseph Grima takes a step back, literally, to show us an image of the earth taken from the Apollo 17 space shuttle. This is the moment when we realise that we operate within a finite, closed ecosystem while coming to terms with the fact that our economies depend on exponential growth. Discussing the historical, entrenched views humans have towards the environment – notably dominated by our economic framework – Joseph unpacks the ways in which this world view was created, how it evolved, and why it is flawed. Finishing with a provocation, Joseph asks us to question whether environmental depletion is necessary and what other models are out there, calling for a ‘non-extractive architecture’ – design without depletion.

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The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

Introducing us to the concept of ‘architectural acupuncture’ Xu Tiantian presents four projects in rural China, where small projects have created big opportunities for revitalising rural villages. Each project is vastly different, an outcome of the highly-localised approach to design using traditional materials and building techniques. In this way, materials and their production are a cultural expression and each of Xu Tiantian’s projects seeks to restore cultural heritage, preserving tradition and history as a resource with which to revitalise local villages. Demonstrating how architecture acupuncture can make use of limited funds to create low-tech systems for public buildings, Xu Tiantian is able to achieve cultural, social and economic sustainability through her work.

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The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

How can dealing with waste become less of a punishment and more of an opportunity? Sharing her work in Ghana, Mae-Ling Lokko explores three key material flows, involving the land, the plate and the building. Using coconut husks and mycelium – a type of fungus used to compost food waste – as examples of alternative building products, Mae-Ling demonstrates a transformational pathway in which agricultural and food waste materials can present new opportunities within a bio-economy. Through her exploration of these material flows she pays careful attention to the humans involved and their potential to disrupt or enhance these processes. Mae-Ling also presents ideas on how designers might engage with these processes to help identify value translation and circulation opportunities.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

In this summative discussion, Mel Dodds is joined by Dave Wandin, Indy Johar, Jane Mah Hutton and Vo Trong Nghia, as together they crystalise the common themes throughout the morning’s presentations. Emphasising our need to examine our relationship to materials, panellists discussed how to re-orient our focus from ideas of ownership towards ideas of material stewardship and responsibility towards the land. Although the scale of both the projects and the ideas presented differed greatly between speakers, they all discuss how the greatest challenge is in the conflict we currently have in our relationship with the environment.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

Vo Trong Nghia’s approach to architecture embodies mindfulness towards materials which demonstrates the possibilities of thoughtful, considered designs. Join Vo Trong Nghia as he presents a series of projects created by his practice – each one a powerful testament to his belief that we need more greenery in our cities for the health of our urban environments, as well as our own. Building predominantly in Vietnam, Vo Trong uses familiar materials such as stone and bamboo in his designs, to create an immediate and direct relationship with the sourcing and production of materials. While this certainly keeps construction processes simple, his designs appear anything but. He credits this material mindfulness to his daily meditation, which he has also embedded in his design practice – a holistic approach toward problem-solving.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

Have you ever paused to consider where all the materials around us come from, and what will happen to them? Walking us through her recent book – Reciprocal Landscapes – Jane Mah Hutton shares her research tracing the origins, labour practices and regimes required to bring five key materials to the streets of Manhattan. Guano fertilizer, granite, steel, trees and wood provide examples of how material flows can be disrupted by humans, and how we have become alienated from our materials, the places they come from and the people involved in making or providing them. Ultimately Jane invites us to consider: how can design, de-construction and materials stewardship help to change the history of exploitation of both people and the environment?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22