Raffaello Rosselli - Portfolio

Tinshed

admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 04:23:25 +0000

The humble tin shed is an iconic Australian structure. The project was to re-purpose an existing tin shed at the rear of a residential lot,
The shed in its current state was dilapidated and structurally unsound. The original tin shed was disassembled and set aside while a new timber frame was erected. The layers of corrugated iron accumulated over generations of repair were reassembled on three facades.

The project embraces that it will continue to change with time through rust, decay and repair.

Photographs: Mark Syke, Richard Carr

The shed can be experienced through airbnb

Tidal Baths

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:12:43 +0000

Tidal Baths, on the island of Fort Denison, explores how architecture can engage with temporality of its environment. To bathe you strip down, you remove oneself of your timepieces, your identification and preoccupations. Now other references of time take precedence: the harmonics of the tide, sun and breeze.

The baths are an instrument that allows one to experience architecture in flux, as spaces change with the tides. One then becomes aware of and lost in these natural measures of time.

For a more thorough exploration of this project look at the accompanying digital book.

Baaa Stool

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:43:58 +0000

A steel armiture surrounded by an aerated plaster form. The stool followed my interest of controlled decay, the flesh like temporal external layer and the underlying bones. Built for the RE:SEAT exhibition just after finishing university.

This stool was shown in the RE:SEAT exhibition in 2011 and attracted a buyer.

Cocoon Lamps

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:20:05 +0000

Cocoon Lamp was inspired by the case moth, a moth that for protection makes its cocoon from sticks and kindling of the area.

The production aim was to reuse the many off cuts or splinters of timber that find themselves at the end of their life-cycle.

The lamp uses no glue or nails to fix these timbers, using only friction of a specially designed mechanical clamping system that insures that the sticks will not fall. An alternate design simplifies this further using wire rope that feeds it electricity. This allows the product to be easily disassembled. A crude construction apparatus allows for rapid production. Producing greatly varied lamps within the confines of a strict process.

This lamp won the Noel Chettle Student Art Award for Object Design in Semester 1, 2011.

Subdividing Suburbia

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:21:53 +0000

Subdividing Suburbia explored an alternative approach to densification of rail corridors, in this case in the suburb of Granville, from highrise development to low two storey small dwellings. Through a proposed mixture of 1-3 bedroom housing we were able to fit approximately 12 dwellings to a an existing single freestanding house. This subdivision required an access lane on each lot. The generic nature of these subdivisions prompted us to envision a pattern book approach to housing design, allowing great variation with a simple planning system. We designed two building designs to illustrate our point but could support any number of pre-approved designs.

It was acknowledged that local and state government assistance would be necessary to aid in the areas densification and therefore a system below was used as a guideline:

Architects are invited to speculatively design houses suitable for the location.
These houses are fully documented and submitted for Development Approval
Homebuyers may choose from these pre-approved designs
A homebuyer may customise their chosen design within the parameters set out below without voiding DA.
Changes outside this scope will need to be resubmitted for approval to ensure environmental amenity and integrety are maintained.

We proposed extending the existing mainstreet to follow a neglected creek. Mixed use zoning will activate the streetway and ghatt style steps down the creek will provide seating for the varying water level heights.

Hunter Restaurant

admin — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:17:27 +0000

A project born over bottles of wine. Having designed (in collaboration with my partner) the labels for a few bottles of wine for Hunter Valley winery Harkham Wines, The owner, Richard Harkham, was exploring the idea of a new restaurant on site and engaged Tony Bilson as the chef to compliment his wines. We provided a sketch design and rudimentary analysis for the project, but alas it soon fell apart.

The brief was for a rustic but small budget restaurant that captured views of the mountains at top of a small dam. Simple materials of concrete, rough sawn timber and steel re-enforcement, that formed pergolas to provide cover with vines.

This project was designed in collaboration with Andrew Short.

Puppet Pavilion

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:33:58 +0000

Puppet Pavilion is a soft amorphous hanging theatre space that inhabits the cavernous but intricate Turbine Hall. It envelops the audience and performers intimately like a child’s fabric cubby. The structure removes the static formality of familiar structures and appeals to our yearning of simpler times, of soft, tactile spaces, to cuddle and be lost in. The form of the pavilion is produced through the interaction of gravity on the tessellated grid surface hung in tension from an array of winches. These winches can be controlled to contort the surface, like a marionette or puppet, to provide spaces suited specifically to the mood of the audience.

The form of the space can dictate the mood of an event, it can be small and intimate, large and expansive, tall and dramatic, low and claustrophobic. Colourful on the outside and muted on the inside, it wraps around the performers and audience while leaving the floor clear for the director’s and set designer’s program.

The surface is composed of triangle modules made from thick shag hair carpet tiles. At the centre of the surface large triangles dominate. The triangles recursively reduce in size, as a fractal, towards the outer edges. The smaller triangles, now at a human scale, allow the audience to disrupt and interact with the surface as they pass to and from the space. As the surface is changed and comes to rest, the geometry creates a form much like the drapery studies of Albrecht Dürer or Leonardo da Vinci, but faceted and abstracted.

Boulevard Drive

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:15:38 +0000

This project, one of three on the same theme, sprang fourth from a brief concerned with unsolicited urbanism. The site is a lot on William St, Sydney – a leftover space from the development of the eastern distributor. We proposed the space be used as a boutique drive in theatre, re-purposing the existing billboard as the screen. We embarked on an unsolicited marketing campaign at the site to raise awareness of our proposal. This involved using a street line marking tool to mark at 1:1 scale our plans for development, seen through the ticket booth, snack bar, projector booth and car spaces. Other unsolicited marketing included stencils adds on footpath around the site and posters of hypothetical movies posters plastered on the surrounding walls.

This was part of a intensive workshop run by Rory Hyde on unsolisited architecture and undertaken with design partner Andrew Short.

Collision Course

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:13:08 +0000

The virtual has collided with the physical on a neglected rail line. The granular nature of the web has caught on to buildings. No longer are they monolithic entities. Faceless large institutions are falling to small agile communities. Self managing applications efficiently collect, organise and assign groups of distributed interests to a physical location. Majong players from southern china, Hip-hop for retirees, 1337 language courses are all allocated a carriage number and time of departure.

This work was selected to be exhibited at, The Shape Of Things To Come: Sydney In The Year 2030, Sydney Architecture Festival, Commissioned By The City Of Sydney, Customs House