Supertight: Models for Living and Making Culture in Dense Urban Environments

Graham Crist is Associate Professor of Architecture at RMIT University in the School of Architecture and Urban Design. He is a founding director of Melbourne based practice Antarctica: Architects. Graham is currently director of RMIT's Practice Based Research Symposium PhD program in Asia and directs international engagement and recruitment for the architecture discipline. He is formerly discipline head of the RMIT Master of Architecture program in Vietnam, and of the Master of Architecture program in Melbourne. He recently curated along with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and John Doyle, the major exhibition Supertight in Melbourne, themed on hyper-density in Asia. His work has been published in, amongst other places, Architecture Australia, Architecture Review and Monument, and has been featured in major exhibitions including Melbourne Now and the Australian Venice Biennale show `Abundance'. His writing in academic environments and for professional journals Architecture Review Australia and Architecture Australia is focused on pressing issues facing cities and their design.

The rapidly growing large cities of Asia are critical to understanding our future footprint. Asian cities provide insights into new ways of being densely urbanised. The by-product of this unprecedented metropolitan convergence will be the emergence of new urbanisms and new architectures, new models for living and making culture. The Supertight refers to the small, intense, robust and hyper-condensed spaces that emerge as a by-product of extreme levels of urban density. Tightness arises as consequence of density, but tightness itself is not density. Tightness is a series of social, economic and cultural practices that have developed in cities as a response to the rapid growth and consolidation of cities. While architectural models of density have been heavily explored, this project investigates the culture of tightness that has emerged in Asian cities over the past thirty years, and the role that designers play in the material and social behaviours of tightness. To be tight is to be small and constrained, but also to be open to the economies and social intimacy of being close. Ultimately this project aims to unpack and convey both the delight and difficulty that emerges through the close occupation of large cities.