Spotlight 17: Alan Damen

Alan Damen is a (nearly) former student of the University of Melbourne’s Master of Architecture program, working amongst friends at Fieldwork. His interests surround heat, comfort and the ad-hoc and his practice centers on an approach to architecture that seeks to do lots with not much.

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Lucas Osborn (LO): This project is a part of Jimmy Carter’s architecture masters studio at the University of Melbourne. The brief examines the complexity of the dwelling and hyper-rational design for a singular occupant. To start, tell me a bit about the project and what it entailed in the brief.

Alan Damen (AD): The primary constraint with the project was the fact the brief called for a maximum size of 64m3 for each dwelling. It was loosely arbitrary in the design—but also intentional to force you into sacrificing things for someone and the specific way someone lives.

The studio was based on the idea of the Carthusian monks, who had hyper-specific cells, and pews that are specific joinery pieces called prie-dieus—this is how they pray. They also have in their little dwelling a bed, a little kitchen, a little garden, and a little toilet. It's self-contained in that it's everything that this monk needs to live their life.  

We each received a secular occupant, as the key design driver for why you are sacrificing certain aspects to the hyper-rational proposal. That ties into the idea of building less and a reduction in what we consider necessary, I was given a furniture maker.

LO: Was that an approach that you found different and therefore interesting? 

AD: I guess the semi-philosophical and historical underpinning was a new approach. I found that take, of building less not particularly new. A reductionist attitude to what it means to live, or what it means to build or inhabit something doesn't feel like a particularly new take, but I feel no one was talking about it.

LO: I guess another layer on that is the three sites. Your proposal has one site in North Melbourne, one in Castlemaine and one in Lerderderg. How did having three sites change your approach to the task? 

AD: We started with North Melbourne. All sites were considered blank slates, but they were all quite small, nonetheless. I guess first off the bat, the most familiar context, you look at it in isolation, of your occupant inhabiting this dwelling, full time—then slowly throughout the semester unpacking what this person needs and how they live their life.

It opens up the door for fun, idiosyncratic negotiations between rural remote and urban living. Then in unpacking how the person's life unfolds over the three different sites, you also unpack your architectural ideas.

It started off as an idea of the wall or an inhabited wall and a held wall that could separate what the furniture maker did in their vocational life. Initially, that was a very hard line—over the other sites, it unfolded in this continual gradient negotiation of how this person would spend time in the workshop and also just spend time hanging out and cooking and having friends over.  

LO: The idea of living in the home and hanging out, informed the first task which was about your own dwelling. I have a similar idea and have been looking at ideas about your childhood bedroom being a nostalgic aspect of one's life. How did looking at where you live affect or change your architecture?

AD: It was a room that I inhabited only for a year. It's different in the objects you have in there and the way you operate in it. I spent a lot more time in the room that I drew compared to my family room because it has more space, so I could be in the lounge room more. Whereas the walk-up fifties apartment I was living in was a lot more constrained. I think it was intimate to draw something in such detail. We were trying to unpack a highly idiosyncratic piece about how you live in the room. So mine became about blinds and light.  

LO: The blinds and lights relate to how you somewhat critique the wall or the traditional notions of it can you expand on your thoughts on enclosure and clustering? I saw it wall being described as a tool or transformer in your work, can you tell me what is meant by that?

AD: The wall was initially a pragmatic thing—having a held wall, implies that there are skins on either side of that wall. So the attitude towards the envelope or towards skins came from unpacking how I operated my blinds. To have an envelope that allows for some kind of gradient of control, instead of existing in an entire binary.

LO: You described the wall as a tool or a transformer, therefore being an aspect of dividing space, as you said, both binary and non-binary. 

AD: In North Melbourne, it entirely existed as a binary. Unpacking the wall and the wall unfolding, but still being a held element, it allows things that exist off that wall—to be quite free. So the interior plan of all of the dwellings is highly programmed at the wall. It holds and is dense with program, but then the pieces that sit off that wall are allowed to be free.

Things in workshops are often on wheels, especially tight workshops. To be able to have a nest and a home, like a tool rack almost for all of the program and then for things to be able to kind of slowly be unpacked and then put away. It was a pretty clear spatial move. 

LO: I think you called it a functional dwelling. I find that an interesting word, dwelling, or home, or house. All these aspects, why do you describe it as a dwelling? 

AD: A dwelling implies a slightly reduced sentiment to it. It implies that you dwell there and like the program that we had to fit into these things were a place to eat, sleep, work, bathe, cook and defecate. They are hyper-functional activities, rather than, saying someone needs a bedroom, and someone needs a living room, and someone needs a workshop.

There's more complexity to it. Once you unpack it beyond a bedroom, there are notions of overlap, where you break things down to their functional minimums. So a place to sleep is so far different from a bedroom. I think that would be the distinction for me with dwelling and home.  

LO: Were there specific aspects of the project that benefited from an idea of sustainably? 

AD: Material selection feels like a low-hanging piece of fruit. You could take the project and substitute out more sustainable materials quite easily because it's a speculative project, you can do anything. Sustainability is considered a binary point when it's not. It being a grey area in its approach, from the university's perspective, that's hard to assess. I think the studio did a really good job in grappling with that.

The use of aluminium in shading is vastly more intensive compared to a steel product. So making those choices becomes an easy thing. Then there's this endless grey area. Are you using cork as your interior floor tile or are we using logged native timber? The EPiC database is pretty freaking good. They've put so much work into that, but it removes a lot of nuance.

If we're looking at more sustainable, more bio-regional approach—these materials don't have embodied carbon statistics, and if they do, they're provided by the manufacturer who's got a license to sell them in Australia. So, you have to take that all with a grain of salt. As well as the consistent negotiation with the definition of conditioned and unconditioned space. The classic passive house standard box is quite easy to calculate other ways of being in an Australian climate where with more operability is not so easy to come to a figure.

I think it was that the project was a reflection on this person having three dwellings, to be able to move between them for different climatic purposes. The dwelling at Lerderderg is entirely uninsulated, it's a tin box under a big roof. But there's a river nearby, if it's a hot time of year you could go there and just chill out in the river the whole day and not work. 

LO: How does the client being a furniture maker tie back into these ideas?

AD: I think looking at the project through the lens of the furniture maker and considering how someone can have agency in perhaps the design but certainly the construction of their own dwelling. Then alll of the dwellings existed on a continuum of highly bespoke to self-built. Then things that are built slowly, like the Loderderk dwelling, would take place over a series of years. 

To insert agency into the furniture maker is to relinquish control and allow a sense of indeterminism. 

LO: Looking forward now, you're doing your thesis. How do these ideas that you've explored in this project translate to that currently? 

AD: I think that last note about a notion of self-build. it's really easy for students to propose an empty box and say ‘Oh, but they'll fill it in themselves and with all their stuff’.

The idea of individual agency is something I'm highly interested in. A shifting idea of what comfort means and what agency means in what is a climate crisis is really what I’m interested in exploring in my thesis.

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Interview Credits:

Interviewed by Lucas Osborn

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Project credits:

University: Melbourne School of Design

Project images provided by Alan Damen