Expanded Field

Expanded Field staff and visiting critics

Expanded Field Postgraduate

Architecture gallery: Expanded Field projects

Cross disciplinary practice

About the Expanded Field Research Stream

Expanded Field is a cross-disciplinary design research stream within the RMIT School of Architecture and Design that incorporates project based design research across the disciplines of art, architecture and landscape architecture.

Instead of focussing upon the differences between the disciplines, we capitalise on the common ground: the design methods, the scales and nature of engagement, the sites for action, and the methods of production and dissemination of the research. The project is inclusive rather than exclusive. A cross-disciplinary practice can identify the gaps that conventional practice has marginalised – as fertile sites for action. Broad areas of research include public art and public space; ephemeral architectures; social, political and economic infrastructures; and a lateral approach towards social and environmental sustainability.

Expanded Field favours a collaborative approach amongst staff, candidates, and researchers; most of us have received our own degrees in this context and we continue to operate within it through our teaching, project and research-based practices. The public testing and dissemination of the work – through exhibition, installation, drawn and built projects, and publishing – is critical to the project. Examination is by exhibition with an accompanying exegesis. We accept candidates who have a body of work in one of the disciplines and who are willing to engage in critical reflection and self-directed study.

Conventional practice in the disciplines of art, architecture, and landscape architecture has clearly defined parameters and sites and scales of exploration. It is, all too often, object driven on a tabula rasa with the practitioner positioned as the expert with a view from on high. We are critical of these assumptions and seek to reconceptualise the physical and social context of our actions, and our role in the process. The project-based form of inquiry in this research stream affords us alternative sites and forms of production.

We pay homage to Rosalind Kraus’s matrix of sculpture, architecture, and landscape architecture in her seminal essay, ’Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, but instead of reaffirming the distinctions between these disciplines, we are more interested in the spaces in-between. We choose to operate at the edges and have identified these margins as places of becoming, transaction, negotiation, and improvisation. We privilege the question (what if?) over the solution and the process over the product.

The project foregrounds a direct engagement with the subject matter, of being there. The site-specificity of the work avoids generalisation and extends beyond the physical to include the social, political, economic and transitory. We rely upon close observation, analysis and critique to reveal the invisible systems that make things the way they are. The public nature of the work, both in its content and dissemination, enables a continuing and significant engagement.

Collaboration and Common Ground

Expanded Field was consolidated through the research project Ephemeral Architecture of Paul Carter and Leon van Schaik located within the Invitational stream at RMIT. Urban installations for the Melbourne Festival of the Arts in 2002 marked some of the work in progress.

Expanded Field continues in the spirit of this dialogue. We remain active participants within this dynamic laboratory of continuing evolution through research grants, partnerships with other institutions, conferences, and curated exhibitions and installations, in addition to post-graduate supervision. The tone is collaborative rather than the voice of a singular authority and provides a framework for the growing number of candidates falling outside of traditional disciplinary boundaries, or wishing to expand the parameters of their practice.

Whilst we maintain the integrity of our individual practices and contribute to our respective disciplines, collectively there is a breadth of investigation, and opportunities for creative partnerships. What binds us however, is our common ground. We all work across a series of scales: from world economics, the Asian city, river systems and cycles of production to the minutiae of everyday life, the celebration of the banal, and a material thinking and presence. We share a fascination with the transitory and the ephemeral, the changeability of states, the fluidity of time and space – of memory, the passage of light, the movement of water, the actions of people, growth and decay, and things outside of our control. We find solace in the margins, in our professional standings, in the spaces in between – the physical fragments of a post industrial terrain, at the water’s edge, or the invisible social, political, and economic divides. We eschew formalism for processes, cycles, systems and forms of exchange, the dissolution of the figure into the urban field. We design design methods to deal with the complexity of the world around us, some appropriated from other disciplines, techniques of consultation and participatory intervention, observational and analytic tools, and operative diagrams. We thrive in the realm of the speculative, where there is no right or wrong, only alternatives and possibilities to pose further questions.

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