Associate Professor Charles Anderson
Higher Degrees Research Coordinator, School of Architecture & Urban Design
RMIT PROFILE | ORCID ID | PRACTICE WEB
Associate Professor Charles Anderson is a registered landscape architect whose teaching and research focus on the fertile character of collaborative and interdisciplinary modes of practice. This work advocates for processes of place-making, which, rather than reproduce planned environments as systems of control, configure place as a discursive contested meshwork of movement, encounter, and exchange.
Charles has collaborated with industry, practitioners, academics, cultural institutions, and non-governmental organisations, nationally and internationally, on projects that engage with climate change and the ongoing processes of economic extraction, speculation, and growth that drive socio-political disruptions and ecological crises. This work explores human-non-human entanglement and situated ecological knowledge(s) to reconceptualise and reconfigure formations of terrestrial habitation.
In the last decade, Charles has collaborated with Dr Alban Mannisi to develop an international research project entitled Design Diplomacy. This work, which constitutes a series of embedded on-site workshops, investigates design practices and customs that exist outside of international environmental conventions with the aim of reporting on and disseminating off-the-shelf and non-speculative practices. Emphasising and brokering an expanded interdisciplinary and collaborative dialogue between experts, governmental institutions, Indigenous knowledges and practitioners, and diverse communities, this research project seeks to empower civil society and provide emerging generations of built environment practitioners with a richer knowledge of the opportunities offered by the expanded landscape economy; it demonstrates ways of doing things differently.
Charles’ most significant recent projects include New Quay Central Park (SAALA with Aspect Studio), which was awarded a 2023 AILA Victoria Award for Parks and Open Space, two contributions with Alban Mannisi to the 2021 Virtual Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (Parlamento, an International Public Forum, and Design Diplomacy, a project exhibition), Experimental Cites: CityX, a series of interdisciplinary studios delivered with Tom Kovak (RMIT Architecture) as part of the 2020/2021 CityX Venice Architecture Biennale, and CAStudios: a practice, a 2018 exhibition at the Gallery Wydzial Rzezby, Krakow, Poland.
News + Events
Teaching
Research
