Fire, Water, Building
Opening Friday 20.02 from 6pm onwards.
How to build with fire and water in a time of risk aversion?
“Fire, Water, Building” reimagines architecture’s relationship with nature, shifting from risk aversion toward a more deliberate engagement with these elemental forces. Set against the backdrop of recent environmental crises—bushfires, building fires, and floods—the exhibition examines safety-driven design paradigms and the regulatory logics that shape contemporary practice. In their place, it calls for a more nuanced, historically informed, and ecologically attuned understanding of how humans inhabit shifting environments.
Bringing together 13 practices working creatively with fire and water, the exhibition assembles projects, research, and speculative works that propose alternative ways of building, caring, and living with risk, where Fire and Water aim to be understood, negotiated, and designed with.
Contributors: @alankim.xyz@architectureassociates@watersarchitects@architect_brewkoch@avavavavava@collectiveterritories@heliotope_studio@sblastudio@ssdh.studio@mic_mahn@melbartlibrary@nmbw_architecture_studio@sibling_architecture@simulaa_
The exhibition also features work by RMIT Architecture students, alongside an extended literary library on fire and water curated by Melbourne Art Library.
With thanks to RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design for their support.
Curators: @24nuggets@allanburrows
A few eerie photos I shouldn’t be in possession of. Managed to evade the super diligent security guard at Ryue Nishizawa’s Hiroshi Senju Museum. And Hiroshi Hara’s Tasaki Museum; closed for the season, but fortunately the attendant granted me a few quick snaps inside. #nophotos
Visited Keisuke Oka’s Arimaston House a few years ago and could see nothing more than its hoarding. It’s now almost finished and it’s even more remarkable than I imagined. Improvised and hand built for nearly 20 years. The entire building is set to be shifted back 10m on rails to conform with planning/future redevelopment. Wild. Also hard not to acknowledge Tange’s Kuwait Embassy nearby. #arimaston #oka
Terunobu Fujimori’s Tile Museum in Tajimi. The towns ceramic / pottery trade dates back 1300 years to the Heian period (784-1185). Kinda wild. No wonder Japanese tiles are just better.
Makoto Sei Watanabe’s K-Museum is apparently set to be demolished. It was only open for a few years, closed in the economic bubble, and was left abandoned for a couple of decades. The museum made visible networks of energy, information, infrastructure and other invisible systems supporting Tokyo and projecting the city’s future development. Watanabe described this building simply as a brief moment of repose, ‘a dash’, between one city and the next. #makotoseiwatanabe
