Foundation Studio

The foundation studio trains students to observe, record and analyse historic built environments, building on their personal orientation, skills and abilities while also introducing new ideas and approaches. Students specifically learn to distinguish between different modes of surveying and documenting as different forms of knowledge production. They also learn to collate relevant information about a given historic environment from scholarly and archival sources. The studio begins with a personal historyundefined heritage project, where the students’ own backgrounds, strengths, affiliations and interests become the anchors for specific historical explorations. With a sharpened sense of their own subjectivities and the varied, evident and less evident complexities of historic layers, students then engage with a given site to identify, observe, and visualise its various architectural and social attributes. The MAHR students culminate the project by constructing a timeline of transformation while the MCR students develop a statement of heritage significance.