A Loose List of Project Ideas

MLA MAJOR PROJECT LOOSE PROJECT IDEAS

Printed: 22.01.2021

ALBERT REX

POSSIBLE PROJECTS (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

1. Enchanting the Roads to the Diggings

On drawing a new take on this formative and fractious period of our history out into the landscape

2. Frontier Wars Memorial

Significant modifications to Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance

3. Design with Maintenance

On the practicable possibilities of user maintained parks

4. Memorial to Christina Stead All about Christina

5. North Wharf Road Conservation Plan

What does, what could, this place contribute to our city

6. Casting Bells

Involves the casting of a large bell

7. Federation, Nationalism & The Heidelberg School

On the significance this period to how we understand the Australian landscape

8. Mount Macedon, Hanging Rock and Black Forest

LA mediated by/ working around a series of texts of cultural significance

9. Bunyip Story

Designing a Bunyip habitat

10. Churches Today

The role of Melbourne’s churches in an increasingly secular society

11. Garden for the Australian High Commission to the UK What would you put in it

12. A Park Built like an Ocean Pool A scraggly confused little safe haven

13. Drawing Out St Kilda Another Drawing Project

14. An Ocean Project

The significance of the Ocean in Australian cities

15. Design with Folklore

Drawing heavily on community resistance to reformation era changes to religious life ‘a longing for this general, easy, undifferentiated inward sensation which gives the greatest pleasure, that sensation of crawling, living within, of having a fire within, which poets and mystics have.’ (Stead 1945)

THIS PROJECT WILL • Be fresh and optimistic • Be informed by a robust and diverse body of research • Be an IRL landscape intervention • Be able to serve as a solid base for a PhD proposal THIS PROJECT WILL NOT • Be about climate change • Champion one side of any genuinely vexed contemporary political debate (Be easily read as partisan) • Be a cynical critique of something

1. ENCHANTING THE ROADS TO THE DIGGINGS

VIEW 1

2. FRONTIER WARS MEMORIAL

Stagecoach

Here we see what it might be like to view the shrine from the garden.

The shrine above Shrine oftowers Remembrance the viewer but is also softened and re-cast in the mottled green light cast be fern fronds.

Collage (This image taken in the Royal Melbourne Botanic Gardens).

Water Colours

OUTLINE

OUTLINE

This project would take a close look at the formative gold rushes that played out in Victorian through the second half of the 19th century. It would draw on primary sources and colonial literature as well as contemporary design and cultural studies to propose landscape interventions along the roads to the diggings that would help Australians more passively and seriously engage with the goings on of this fractious and formative time.

This project would build on an elective I did in 2018 with Anthony Hoete called ‘Representation Remembrance and the Memorial’.

The project wold have the scope to look at the connection between Melbourne and the ‘Golden Triangle’ cities, the physical remains of the diggings (upturned, piled, uneven earth, shafts, tunnels etc.) as well as the identifying and engaging with examples of how the incredibly fast paced growth of this period still impacts how our cities and state operate today.

The idea is that Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance is uniquely placed to start to accommodate a more complicated and fraught understanding of the Commonwealth’s (previously the colonies) memorialisation of war.

Not only is the shrine one of the only grand avenue style axial, organising centres in the city, not only is the memorialisation of war a vexed terrain to negotiate in and of itself, but the growing understanding among the populous that frontier wars did indeed take place presents an opportunity for the shrine to be a testing ground for a reworking of the commonwealth’s memorialisation of it’s past that can draw all of these questions about how we acknowledge our history in the way we organise space.

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• Gold Era Histories of Melbourne/ Vic

• A fresh take on popular understandings of the period

• History of the frontier wars and memorials to the frontier wars

• Broadly looking at how memorialisation operates in a modern city

• Living history manifest in our landscapes

• History of Shrine -> Wars it covers

• Landscape/ narrative interface

• LA + Arch Examples (All kinds of memorials)

• Engaging frontier wars allows for engagement tacit engagement with reconciliation

• Gold/ colonial era fiction/ folklore. Contemporary gold related folklore • Sites of diggings today (ecological profile) • Design Project Engaging with Gold/ Colonial era history • Ways people currently engage with this history & troubleshooting • How gold shaped the city region: What’s good/ bad about that

• How memorials have operated through history • Ways people currently engage with the shrine • How the shrine shapes the city • Healthy chunk of colonial/ cultural studies

• Would look to a proposal that broadens the base of people who feel that the ‘sacred’ spaces of our city talk to them and contribute meaning to their lives

3. DESIGN WITH MAINTENANCE

4. MEMORIAL TO CHRISTINA STEAD

RES PLAN

Train Station

Christina Stead

By Others

Landscape Plan

OUTLINE

OUTLINE

This project would lean more toward the pragmatic and collaborative in it’s undertaking.

It would be an industry oriented, practical bit of research into potential changes that could be made to how maintenance agreements are drawn up so that communities have broader opportunity and authority not just to influence, but to themselves maintain and make modifications to their local parks and public spaces.

Christina Stead has been a huge influence on me over the last couple of years.

A few of the projects outlined here deal with ghosts and memorials and how we engage with the memorialisation of - and more broadly how we come to terms with - our history.

The fun in this one would be in the detail - in consultation with industry and councils to work out a system that could actually be implemented (contractually).

The project could potentially involve game and data collection/ visualisation elements to help people understand what’s going on in their parks as well as engaging with the idea currently being debated in the federal labour party around the question of guaranteeing full employment.

And while odd, a memorial for Christina Stead does actually tie a lot of those things together pretty neatly, while channeling them through an individual renders them a bit clearer and more manageable.

The idea of a memorial for an individual would also provide a neatly defined ground for the exploration of an interpretation of landscape, a way of doing landscape architecture, built off the back of Christina’s incredibly exhilarating view of the world.

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• Local Government Maintenance Reqs

• Enabling and celebrating local scale individual and collective management and modification of public space

• Memorialisation in arch & land arch

• How LAs can best go about memorialisation/ incorporating an acknowledgment of history into space

• Fostering a sense of pride in and responsibility to public space among communities

• Cemeteries

• Local Government x LA contracts/ contract law • Precedents for user managed parks (East Asia?)

• History around temples and shrines • History of park/ garden management

• A focus on something that could genuinely be implemented by councils and landscape practices

• History around temples and shrines

• Memorials to individuals • Literature x Landscape crossover

• Image a trend to less and less user authorship?

• Australian Cultural studies/ history

• Management organisations like Merri, Darebin Creek.

• Folklore/ ghost stories -> incorporation in to LA & Arch • Stead Novels & analysis of Stead novels

• What Christina Stead’s work & the way she went about it could contribute to the work of LAs and how we go about it • Again looking at the question of what a ‘living’ history looks like and how it’s incorporated in a fluid way into the ongoing management of space

5. NORTH WHARF ROAD CONSERVATION PLAN

6. CASTING BELLS

North Wharf Road

Casting a Bell

From Andrei Rublev

Photo

OUTLINE

OUTLINE

North Wharf Road is a tiny peninsula - a wharf - of as yet undeveloped old Customs sheds the juts out between the Yarra River and Victoria Harbour.

Lendlease was set to begin developing it this year but an apparent market saturation of high-rise apartments and global instability has led to an indefinite pause of their construction program.

Drawn from a combination of Anna Tsing’s book ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’, the novel ‘The Damned’ by Joris-Karl Huysmans and a desire to make things - this project involves in the first place the casting of a large bell.

In the meantime the area is managed by Development Victoria and all the community groups, restoration projects and other loose-enders who used to populate Victoria Harbour have been shuffled over to the wharf.

Its a fascinating space and is particularly enticing as a potential project because I myself have been closely involved with one of the organisations, the Victorian Wooden Boat Centre, that makes the wharf it’s home over the last 6 odd years.

This would allow me to engage with DV, LendLease, the Library at The Dock and all the community groups along the wharf in a way that would make this perhaps the second most pragmatic project of the lot.

Materials for the bell will be sourced first hand from across the state and the bell will be cast with stills from Christina Stead’s short story ‘Morpeth Tower’ carved into the molding.

The idea is that the bell will be drawn together from across the landscape and in doing so some kind of landscape project will emerge - a meditation on extraction and how it isn’t necessarily irretrievably tied to industrial capital.

The aim broadly would be to look at alternative use for the site (alternative to flattening everything and replacing it with residential towers) to protect and broaden accessibility to the groups that work there and the work that they do.

There would also be an experimental performative element, whereby the bell would be taken to a hill somewhere and rung. An experiment would be made of how this impacted peoples’ experience of the landscape in different places.

The bell will be completed in Sem 1 with the ‘landscape’ element being worked up more concretely in sem 2.

There’s an element of an attempt at ‘re-enchantment of the world’ to this, a testing of the idea that magic is real (not in a stupid sense).

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• The various Docklands Development plans and Plans for Melbourne more broadly - the recent history that’s led to the massive boom in towers

• A post industrial project looking at the benefits of alternatives to steam-rollering

• Historical analysis Romanticism/ Mysticism/ spiritualism and their (potential) influence on the discipline

• Explicitly not defining the project in more detail than casting a bell from materials sourced across Victoria

• Reformation and ‘disenchantment’

• Project emerges first in the extractive processes and collaborative relationships that are required in sourcing and making the bell

• Broad research into what happens to ‘left overs’ • Bit of terrain vague/ 4th landscape reading • History of the site - research into post industrial sites more broadly, how the history is respectfully incorporated perhaps in a more meaningful way than just facades

• My engagement with groups on side primes the project to be as much about working with the activities that go on there as with the built elements that remain - exciting on a site where it has been often said that ‘nothing’ is happening • Central focus on broadening accessibility, replicating conditions or increasing awareness.

-> I think this is a magical place to it is more often than not completely overlooked as in need of a complete re-working. How can it’s value be highlighted?

• How to make bells • Bell history and folklore • Articles/ books about the importance of processes of doing and making -> a focus on interstitial moment kind of stuff -> The project coming out of the process of making the bell.

• Second out of what is done with the bell -> Performative also. Testing what happens E.g. if the bell is taken to princes park and rung at midnight.

7. FEDERATION, NATIONALISM & THE HEIDELBERG SCHOOL

8. MOUNT MACEDON, HANGING ROCK, & BLACK FOREST

Opening of the First Parliament..

Tom Roberts

Hanging Rock

Acrylics

OUTLINE

OUTLINE

This project would look take a close look at this formative moment in the post-invasion history of this continent, work to identify what, if any, it’s framing influence has been in terms of how we understand the Australian landscape and look at how this could be amplified, shifted or re-interpreted to help LAs develop a set of strategic modifications to the way they approach to the Australian landscape.

A project based entirely round a really rich set of sites within an easy hour drive/ train of Melbourne.

It would have scope to get into the bureaucratic divisions of power between the Commonwealth and the States and how this influences the nuts and bolts of the way landscape projects are carried out here, it would also include scope to look (similarly to project 1) at how the history of this period can be better incorporated into our landscapes today.

This means that these sites are rich in layered up interpretation (often interpretation that occurs entirely off site - in a book) and so would lend themselves well to a project that’s looking closely at being on site and drawing on site and how that, mediated by a range of significant texts, leads to the building up of a proposal for the site.

Hanging Rock, Macedon, Mount Macedon, Woodend and Black Forest are all pretty historically significant sites that show up in a lot in colonial and Commonwealth Australian history and literature.

This would be a lot more about defining a process than looking for a particular outcome that solves a particular problem.

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• Federation era history/ primary sources

• Proposing modifications to our understanding of landscape based on/ in reaction against these key sources.

• Histories of area

• Relatively simple: immersion in a clearly rich site and associated texts.

• An understanding of landscape which is more explicitly Australia - in the sense of the mechanics of the Australian Commonwealth

• Crossover -> Writing to Landscape (Jonathan from TF?)

• Canberra & the Griffins/ Fed. Era Arch • Ways people currently engage with this history & troubleshooting • Could get up into the 20s and WW1/ the Anzac myth -> Memorials & the Shrine • Federation era fiction/ folklore. Contemporary federation related myths

• Lay claim to a period in history not as caught up in foundation myths and ‘culture wars’ as say ANZAC or the gold rush.

• Wide range local perspectives

• Drawing central to process (anton?)

• Mythology & folklore of area

•Immersion documented by a huge amount of drawing.

•Drawing across the year leads to a proposal for intervention without there necessarily being a contention or problem to solve form the beginning.

9. BUNYIP STORY

10. CHURCHES TODAY

Bunyip

St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne Archival

State Library Vic

OUTLINE

OUTLINE

This project would draw it’s framing from a PhD by Tamsin Kerr about how we might incorporate the accommodation of Bunyips into design and planning processes.

It’s an exciting idea! And this project could test how it might be able to be realised as well as moving beyond the bunyip to look at the accommodation of a broader and maybe ensemble cast of ghosts and monsters.

Some of the most beautiful buildings in our city, taking up large chunks of prime land, were built as part of a cultural behemoth which is diminishing in significance year by year.

Its a clever and enticing trick: I do not believe in the existence of bunyips, but acting as if I do will result in better outcomes as people, acting as if I do it is a tool I can trick myself with.

So what do these incredible buildings in central location mean to an average city goer? How does an increasingly secular/ pluralistic society engage with them? And is it perhaps time that their civic, architectural and historical significance were prioritised over their functional role as places of worship?

How could a reset in priorities like this be achieved without angering - or better with the support of - the communities that still make use of them in this way?

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• Myths and monsters as tools for leveraging design outcomes

• Designing a Bunyip habitat.

• Histories of Melbourne

• Bunyips are not real but designing as if they were will result in a better outcome for people.

• Histories of the Church

• Large churches and cathedrals in the Melbourne CBD may now be more important to Melbournians in a historical and civic sense they are as places of worship

• Folklore and it’s incorporation into design/ planning projects

• Histories of religious groups active in Melbourne • Data collection/ analysis of use • Interviews with potential users

• What will/ could their role in the CBD be going forward? How might we broaden the base or grow the significance of the role they play in the day to day goings on of the city?

11. GARDEN FOR THE AUSTRALIAN HIGH COMMISSION TO THE UK

12. A PARK BUILT LIKE AN OCEAN POOL

Australia House, London

Mahon Pool, Sydney

Archival

Photo

OUTLINE

OUTLINE

The basic question that informs this project is: What would a garden for the Australian High Commission to the UK look like?

I did an ocean pool studio with Anton James and just find them absolutely compelling.

They embed themselves incredibly securely in an existing environment, wrapping themselves around rocks and topographic features in a way that is incredibly attuned to the ‘as found’ of the place.

It’d be fun because it could get right into the cultural studies weeds of the relationship and the history of the relationship through time. It’s certainly a relationship that remains kind of vexing in terms of the Australian Commonwealth’s development of an independent identity and I can imagine it’d be pretty rich seeing that play out in the design of a garden.

The project would also be at a really tight scale and so a lot of attention could be payed to detailing, detail drawing, construction drawings and the broader importance of detailing and documentation in a way that might not be as achievable looking at some of the larger scale projects.

Their ad-hoc layering up over decades and the rich history that led to their initial construction is also really fertile ground for research and their protective, enclosing nature could play into ongoing stories and myths about Australian isolation and the nation’s relationship to the ocean.

It’d be fun to distill these principles down and re-apply them on land: A park that carves out a little bit of bush or something right at an edge or interface in a way that lets you dip your toe in with very low risk of getting sucked out to sea.

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• ‘Australian’ gardens through time

• Looking at the AU UK relationship

• Botanic garden and their role as part of empire/ colonial expansion

• A very small site would allow a focus on the role of details and detailing

• History of the pools/ period they were built (depression era?)

• A close look at ocean pools based on a contention that they have something to ofter when it comes to broader ideas about the organisation of space.

• ‘National Gardens’, Embassies and ideas about a building or garden summing a nation or relations between nations more broadly.

• The role a garden or park can play for a group of people/ multiple groups of people working to define themselves or their relations

• Edna Walling • The Griffins • Australian, UK, Colonial Histories • A history of the relationship

• Pools built more recently, catalogue of pools, proposals for pools • Examples of any analogues that aren’t pools, any parallels that could be drawn

13. DRAWING OUT ST KILDA

14. AN OCEAN PROJECT

St Kilda Pier

Port Phillip Bay, Williamstown

Photo

Photo

OUTLINE

OUTLINE

This is a bit of an urban alternative to the Hanging Rock project.

It’s a place that I really like and has a really interesting role in the city’s history both in terms of some of the first bits of serious LA master-planning and that kind of optimistic pre WW1 20th century vibe.

The ocean is a pretty fundamental landscape feature and is obviously of particular cultural significance to any society that sets itself up on an island continent.

Similar to the Hanging Rock example, this project would involve a focus on a kind of meditative spending of a lot of time on site (E.g. upward of 24 hours) while doing a huge amount of on site drawing and then taking that away and working into up in a more collage-style way.

There’d be an opportunity to incorporate other elements of other projects into this type of a project, it could be swapped out for: Botanic Gardens, Merri Creek, Royal Park, Williamstown etc.

I could build on ground work undertaken in Bridget’s Soup studio to look at the bay and surrounds (shipwreck coast?) and get into some history and cultural studies to draw together a proposal that comes up with some kind of coherent idea about what the ocean does/ could mean to the Commonwealth culturally and then gets amongst how modifications to the landscape/ the way we interact with the water/ could help us better/ with more awareness, come to terms with that identity.

Storm-water management might be a fun, simple way to start to get in amongst that land/ water interface.

Any of these again would be more about developing and refining a process than solving a problem or addressing a contention that has been a motivator at the onset.

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• History of area

• More potential sites for process heavy immersion and lots of drawing focused - projects.

• Australian History

• How the commonwealth could better relate to the ocean

• Local perspectives • Crossover -> Writing to Landscape (Jonathan from TF?) • Drawing central to process

• Process/ Production > Aim

• Australian Cultural Studies • Ocean/ Bay ecologies

• How this could help re-frame the commonwealth’s place on the continent

15. DESIGN WITH FOLKLORE

THEMES As I went through these a started to notice a few key themes coming up again and again.

Here they are nicely summarised: • Opening public space to the physical impressions of it’s users, making space for marks and modifications to help people reconcile the material world with their imagined worlds -> be more invested in the material world.

• The way The Commonwealth of Australia’s elemental stories and myths mediate how we understand the landscape, how work on the landscape could invert this, rewriting or shifting the focus of the aforementioned stories.

• The ocean and its cultural significance to the Commonwealth • Revitalising/ rewriting parts of our landscape that have become clunky or awkward in terms of what they mean to us: E.g. Churches, Colonial History • Making space in the landscape for ghosts, monsters and myth - based squarely on the understanding that they’re not real • Drawing, walking and a meditative immersion on site mediated by a large number of drawings. That are then percolated, consolidated, modified and refined off site to build up an intervention that isn’t bound by a problem or contention Spiritualists

By Others

OUTLINE A very broad based analysis of how people around the world design with contemporary, living folklore.

An opportunity to dip into rural resistance to the changes to religious (everyday) life of the reformation as well as the motivations for the end of 19th - start of 20th century spiritualist craze.

• The agency and empowerment of making things. Literally building or digging -> having the agency to do so in public / semi public space.

• Multiple, small, fractious interventions rather than a coherent plan. A focus on small scale and things that can be built rather than regional planning/ zoning style proposals.

Like a number of the others I’d broadly be looking at the relationship between a landscape of myths and stories and the actual physical landscape we see, how that’s different for different people, and how we might allow for a freer movement between those 2 foundational informers of our world view.

POSSIBLE CROSSOVERS

Obviously this is one that ties into a lot of the others and could find a site in any number of the potential projects outlined above.

• Folklore, Bunyips and layered histories, mediated by a huge amount of drawing and time on site, at North Wharf Road.

• Bunyips run into colonial literature at Hanging Rock.

AREAS OF RESEARCH

IN SUM

• Making space for folklore to play out along the streets and in the parks of urban environments. Exampling/ championing small modifications that contribute to a collective identity/ sense of community. (Along the line of those mini book libraries people put up).

• Design with FolkLore around the World

• LAs often pin-point the birth of industrial capitalism as ‘where it all started to go wrong’.

• Making room for ghosts at the Queen Victoria Market

•Jonathan from TF3 • Crossover -> Writing to Landscape • Historical study of how folklore played out in the landscape • The reformation and the ‘disenchantment of the world’ • Historical study: Romanticism -> Spiritualism and their connection to the emergence of landscape architecture as a discipline of it’s own -> how that influences how LAs look at the landscape today -> opportunities for change/ greater awareness.

• McHarg of course famously blamed all of Christianity but what would LA look like if it took the approach that the reformation and the purging of a holiness from most of the material world was actually where the problems LAs so often come up against have their root?

• More to come...

DESIGN RESEARCH STRATEGIES 1. Annotated bibliographies 2. Annotated primary sources, drawings & site photos 3. Collaged/ overlayed primary sources & site photos 4. Drawing/ painting on site 5. Performative drawing. Painting on site (encouraging engagement from randos) 6. A lot of drawing 7. Models on which drawings are based 8. Animations/ cartoons - Series’ of drawings communicating movement/ change 9. Long walks drawing at intervals 10. Immersion in site (24 hours +) 11. A focus on a refinement of that messy/ composite drawing style 12. A journal/ blog (weekly?) of how the project’s progressing. (300 words + key good & bad + a drawing)

ALBERT REX . 22.01.2021 . s36-2426@student.rmit.edu.au . 0401541693