Summary

Cellar is a design, writing, and mapping project by Nina Nervegna and Felix Garner-Davis. It involves material practice and speculative, repair-oriented research into sites around Naarm-Melbourne.

Position

This work operates from the conviction that architecture’s horizon lies not in solutionism or scale, nor in the luxury market, but in sustained forms of compositional rigour, critique, care, and construction efficiency enacted within compromised civic conditions.

Background

Nina and Felix studied art and literature before moving into architecture. They work together at Garner Davis Architects. There, they deliver small, neorationalist civic interventions and buildings, and test processes for design advocacy at the edges of municipal procurement. Their graduate thesis at the Melbourne School of Design, Limb, proposed a reparative rainwater-management and pollination network in Fishermans Bend, developing prosthetic structures for birds, bats, bees, butterflies, and people, alongside reconfigurations of pedestrian and cyclist flow. The approach built on under-resourced community ventures, integrating a design-centric framework for engaging institutional stakeholders like CitiPower. It has been exhibited at the Robin Boyd Foundation and 3553, and recognised with the Bates Smart Award. Nina has also received the Ernest Fooks Memorial Award and the Edward Fielder Billson Medal.

Training

Nina holds a BVA in painting from Sydney College of the Arts, an MDes in service design from the University of Technology Sydney, and an MArch from the MSD. Felix holds a BA (Hons) in literary studies from Monash University, focused on spatial poetics and Gothic literature, and an MArch from the MSD. He formerly edited Malevolent Soap, a journal of international poetry and fiction. His collection drone was published by no more poetry in 2021.

Method

Nina and Felix continue to interweave these interests, viewing Cellar as a vehicle for applied curiosity and epistemic friction, and as an intensifier of their small-practice commitment. They believe that architectural ethics, knowledges, and praxes necessitate disciplined formal expression as well as transdisciplinary experimentation. In that zone, they work collaboratively with spatial and material tools to investigate co-authorship, affect, aesthetics, spectrality, autotheory, urban ecology, and design for dis/ability. Their individual speculations distil these concerns, developing fusions of built form and spatio-material poetry that explore intersections among architecture, griefwork, and the eco-gothic.

Contact

Emails should be sent to info@cella.red.

Instagram handles are @ninanervegna and @un___furl.