Events
Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne
Featured events
The Scent Table with Clara Chanisheff / Xtrascentsory
The Scent Table invites you to encounter air not as empty space, but as an active, living medium shaped by movement, bodies, and materials. Through the act of blending your own scent, you will contribute to a growing collection of scent compositions, forming a shared record of how different people sense and shape their environment. What begins as an individual gesture becomes part of a larger, evolving system—one that is relational and constantly in flux.
By treating scent as both material and messenger, the work proposes atmosphere as a site of exchange between human and non-human forces. Knowledge here is not fixed or hierarchical, but emerges through interaction and co-presence, like a garden of shifting relations where perception, matter and meaning are continually reconfigured.
Extending from the current exhibition, A velvet ant, a flower and bird, The Scent Table proposes intelligence as living, evolving, and relational.
This activity is suitable for all ages (under 12 to be supervised by a parent) and will take up to 20 minutes. You’re welcome to drop in anytime between 11am and 3pm to create your own scent to take home.
Towards a delightful architecture with nature
Please join us for this free public lecture from visiting Japanese Architect, Norihisa Kawashima.
In the face of accelerating climate crisis, resource depletion, and the transition toward post-growth societies, architecture must move beyond technical sustainability and reconsider its fundamental relationship with nature. This lecture explores the possibility of a “delightful architecture with nature” — an approach that integrates environmental performance, circular material cycles, and vernacular knowledge into contemporary practice.
Recent works range from materially grounded, body-centered spaces using earth and timber, to circular building processes that reorganize salvaged and regional resources, as well as the transformation of collective housing in urban contexts. Through passive environmental strategies, adaptable construction systems, and participatory processes, architecture is positioned as an active node within ecological and material cycles.
These practices reframe sustainability not as a constraint, but as a spatial and cultural opportunity. Through light and wind, materials and tectonics, and the engagement of inhabitants, architecture can act as a mediator that reconnects human habitation with natural systems. The lecture proposes that sustainability must be inseparable from delight.