Occupied: The Era of the Metropolis

Open until Saturday 24 September, Occupied, brings together local and international practitioners – from artists to architects – to showcase proposals for housing more with less, retrofitting, adapting and repurposing existing structures and environments.

We live in the era of the metropolis, – by 2050 it is estimated that 70 per cent of the world’s population will be urban, with Australia’s major cities expected to nearly double in size.

Unlike the great architects of the 20th Century – who wishfully imagined the city as a tabula rasa or accepted exile on the urban fringe – today’s creative thinkers must find space for an ever-growing populace within a finite and decaying urban fabric.

all(zone), Light House: The art of living lightly, 2015. Photography: Soopakorn Srisakul

The ideas that thrive in this context will be small-scale, contingent and combinatory, operating at the margins or the in-between, within bureaucratic grey-zones or emerging economies.

Ranging from the pragmatic to the utopian, the research-driven to the purely speculative, Occupied anticipates the critical design approaches, ideas and strategies of the imminent future.

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Rolling House for the Rolling Society, 2009. Photography: Miguel de Guzman.

Occupied exhibitors include: 5th Studio, all(zone), Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, Ash Keating, Atlanta Eke, Baracco + Wright Architects, Black Kosloff Knott Architects and Monash Arts Projects (MAP), Breathe Architecture, Callum Morton and Toby Reed, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism & MAIO, Flores & Prats Architects, Jack Self, Lacaton & Vassal and Frédéric Druot Architecture, Liam Young, Lyons Architecture, Harrison and White, Maddison Architects, MvS Architects, NMBW Architecture Studio, MAPA, Otherothers, Peter Bennetts, Spacemarket, Stefano Boeri Studio with The Blink Fish, TOMA!, Vokes and Peters. Supershared is created by Jacqui Alexander and SIBLING Architecture.

Occupied is held at RMIT Design Hub, Corner of Victoria and Swanston Streets, Carlton