Bush Studio was a project led by Justin Owen as a means to engage architecture students differently than the more normal methods currently used in the Curtin Architecture programe, and test the approach for potential incorporation into the course content.
The basic idea was to go out into the bush, feel and respond to it as site and build, in real-time with their
colleagues.
Students were recruited through an EOI process and sixteen were selected from the overall pool of applicants. Emphasis was placed on vertical integration of year groups.
Students seldom get to handle and use real materials or are asked to make real-time decisions as a part of a design process. We are not Luddites but you need the real to inform the virtual!
I am convinced of the need to explore the design process through real time invention and proposals made in a free and non-institutional environment. So, we explored in collaboration, with uncertainty and anarchic freedom. This contrasts, deliberately, with a system obsessed with prescribed learning outcomes and risk minimisation.
We didn’t have prescribed outcomes—we didn’t have a plan—we only went with the desire to explore the site, the materials and the potential for poetry therein.
The only tools provided were simple hand-tools and fixing methods avoided nails or screws, relying simple carpentry joints and zip ties.
The Bush Studio was inspired directly by ‘Studio in the Woods’ — founded by Piers Taylor (Invisible Studio, UK) as well as other examples of such practice, e.g. Auburn University Rural Studio.
Justin Owens
Lecturer
Course Coordinator, Architecture (Undergraduate)
