RMIT Design Hub presents New Agency: Owning Your Future, a live research project and exhibition by Sibling Architecture focused on the link between ageing and the design of our future homes.
Posing the questions ‘who do you wish to grow old with? Will your house outlive you? What kind of ancestor do you want to be? What will your future housing look like?’, the exhibition invites visitors to be active participants in Sibling’s research, as the firm investigates and discusses how we might live in the future and new models of home ownership.
The exhibition takes place in RMIT Design Hub’s project rooms 1 + 2 from Wednesday 29 August to Saturday 22 September, 2018 and is complemented by a series of public program events.
The exhibition, curated and designed by Sibling Architecture, will transform the Design Hub into a live research project; gathering data, public conversations, design speculation and feedback about home ownership in the later stages of life.
For New Agency co-curator Timothy Moore, one of the five directors of Sibling Architecture, ageing is a central and ongoing concern for their architectural practice.
“People are living longer today, with Australia seeing one of the highest life expectancies in the world and twenty-one percent of Australians predicted to be over 65 by 2053,” says Moore.
“As the retirement of Australians relies upon the asset of the family home (and superannuation), and with home ownership becoming an impossibility for a huge swathe of younger Australians, the exhibition explores how this will influence future models of living and architectural design for the elderly.”
Kate Rhodes, curator of RMIT Design Hub, says the live research platform opens up the field of architectural inquiry to a wider group of actors, allowing the sharing of knowledge and acknowledging architectural production as a collaborative enterprise.
“As a solo exhibition, New Agency reflects on Sibling Architecture’s practice – how the studio undertakes social enquiry, how it arms itself with expertise and uses the platform of the exhibition environment to test ideas and open up a conversation with its community, students and the general public,” says Rhodes.
The exhibition begins with a series of commissioned films that feature provocations, statistical trends and interviews with different generational groups who imagine alternate ways of living together.
Visitors then move through three activity chambers in the main project space – for reading, listening and talking – that provoke thinking around models of home ownership through the lens of ageing. Upon completion, visitors are invited to participate in Sibling’s questionnaire to contribute and inform the next stage of their research into what the future will look like. The questionnaire is also available to complete online via Sibling Architecture’s website.
