Basic Information

Participant: Five graduate students of architecture
Location: Gold Coast, Australia
Period: October 8-15, 2017

Achievements

With the aim of promoting mutual exchange, this workshop was delivered in the form of a reciprocal visit by Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) to Bond University, where Professor Brit Andersen, a Queensland-based architect and a winner of Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal, currently teaches. Since 2012 when Professor Andersen was teaching at the University of Queensland, she and Tokyo Geidai have been partnering to deliver her Japan Study Workshop. In 2017, the workshop was implemented as the short unit project GEIDAI/BOND WORKSHOP 2017.

In the past workshops, students from the Australian state of Queensland visited Tokyo, where they worked with our architecture students to research the architecture in the Shitamachi area of Tokyo and made joint architectural proposals that benefitted from the insights of both parties. However, in order for Geidai students to acquire a global mindset by experiencing the architectural culture of Queensland, more practical, experience-based opportunities were needed to allow them to learn about the architecture unique to the climate of the Australian state, in addition to the conventional exchange programs such as lectures by visiting professors and the exchange of opinions at workshops.

For this reason, the 2017 workshop was designed to allow our students to actually visit some of architectural buildings in Brisbane and Gold Coast. They were also instructed by professors of both universities to conduct research and make proposals on the public space around a library in Brisbane. The research outcomes of which were presented at Bond University with the presence of other local teachers and students.

The focus of their visit in Queensland was residential architecture. The students visited local residences and asked questions to the residents and the architects, which allowed them to deepen their understandings about a lifestyle that is rooted in the local climate as well as the important points in designing residential buildings in the region.

In the research and proposal making phases, the students were instructed to work in line with their respective production activities in Tokyo, while leveraging what they learned through the field visit. Since all the instructions and presentations in the workshop were offered in English, it helped students improve their global communication skills, which is considered to be another outcome of this workshop.