F*** Marry or Kill Is Coming to Melbourne Design Week To Let You Date Buildings in the CBD

A dating app, but for buildings.

That’s the premise behind F * Marry or Kill, an exhibition by RMIT architecture students Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen that’s running in conjunction with this year’s Melbourne Design Week. The idea behind the project is to bridge the gap between architectural and public discourse via a playful, engaging platform.

“We both felt that a lot of discussions about architecture were very insular,” Shen says. “It’s all architects rating each other’s work and not really involving the public.”

F * Marry or Kill will eventually take the form of an exhibit at the sixth annual MDW in late March, but has already launched as a website that mimics the language of dating apps, with the name playing on a classic forced-choice question-and-answer game. Throughout February and March it will be an online forum where you can swipe, match and leave comments on more than 50 buildings within the CBD, including Melbourne icons such as the State Library of Victoria but also newer builds such as the curvy, Beyoncé-inspired Premier Tower on Spencer Street.

By listing buildings in the style of a dating profile, the website aims to provide information to the public about their histories and creative strategies.

“A lot of younger people are really disengaged [with architecture],” Shen says. “There’s not really a forum for them to talk about their city and the buildings that are popping up, especially in recent years where there’s been so many buildings in the CBD going up at a crazy pace.”

Stage two of the project is the physical exhibit during Melbourne Design Week (endorsed by Lyons, John Wardle and SSDH architects), where you’ll be able to check out the results of the forum. After the opening night on March 25 the exhibition will run for two days, showcasing findings and comments gathered by the website during February and March. This will be presented as an award-style ceremony, with the awards including “Cheapest and Most Loved”, “Most Hated” and “Most Controversial”.

The main installation will see a giant scroll of paper hung from the ceiling at West Melbourne’s Blender Studios. Each side of the scroll will display exhibition panels with the website’s statistics, such as how likes and dislikes correlated to the age, program, budget and heritage overlays of the building. The scroll will lead onto a vibrant red carpet that extends to the street entrance of the warehouse.

Gao and Shen – alongside a wider team of designers, developers and researchers – envisioned the project as a way to encourage discussions about Melbourne architecture and design through a fun, non-conventional platform.

“The idea is definitely something that we can keep going,” Shen says. “Depending on how [the exhibition] goes, we were thinking it could be made into an actual app – we could add more buildings to it and the idea could even be used in different cities as well.”

F* Marry or Kill is a free exhibition opening on March 25. Register for tickets here.

fmkbuildings.com
@fuckmarrykill_melb

Project Coordinators
Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen

Project Team
John Szetho, Ethan Wong, Rory Zhang, Winnie Chen, Imogen Smith, Victoria Marquez, Cody McConnell, Jennifer Chen, Jeffrey Xu and Carrie Lu