Summary

Cellar is a design, writing, installation, 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 is an exercise in disciplinary commitment and compositional rigour, animated by play, wonder, criticism, care, and constructional acuity within compromised civic conditions. It emerges from the conviction that architecture is a task of sustained attention: to form, feeling, ecology, and the layered contexts in which building occurs.

Background

Nina and Felix studied art and literature before moving into architecture. They work together on Bunurong Country at Garner Davis Architects. There, they deliver carefully detailed 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-led framework for engaging institutional stakeholders like CitiPower. It has been exhibited at the Robin Boyd Foundation and 3553, published in Atrium and Inflection, 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 companion to their conventional practice. They believe that architectural ethics, knowledges, and praxes necessitate disciplined formal expression as well as transdisciplinary experimentation. Accordingly, they work through prose, poetry, drawing, modelmaking, installation, and field recording, creating arrangements of writing, sound, and speculative form.

Themes

The project is focused on attention. It investigates modes of alienation and intimacy among subjects, objects, and environments. These questions are framed by a cluster of ideas across philosophy and cultural theory, including co-authorship, affect, aesthetics, spectrality, autotheory, design for dis/ability, urban ecology, griefwork, and the eco-gothic.

Transmission

Outputs are shared through exhibition, publication, discussion, teaching, and collaboration with other designers, artists, and writers.

Contact

Emails should be sent to info@cella.red.

Instagram handles are @ninanervegna and @un___furl.