Semester 2, 2008
Design RMIT Thesis ArchiMajor tecture Projects,
Welcome to the Major Project Catalogue for second semester 2008, a publication from the RMIT Architecture Program. This catalogue represents the work of students undertaking their final design project as part of the Masters of Architecture, and is the culmination of five years of study leading to eventual qualification as an architect. This edition marks a change in direction for our Major Project Publications, in part as a celebration of the inaugural year for our new Masters of Architecture Degree. Instead of a biennial publication and exhibition, representing only a selective range of student projects, we will now be publishing a Catalogue twice a year to coincide with the final Exhibition of student work each semester. All students submitting material will be published, and the catalogue will hope to present an edited but rich snapshot of the diverse themes and ambitious design outcomes that characterise the architecture program at RMIT. The catalogue offers an open-ended and direct curation of the work exhibited. We will let the multiplicity and divergence of architectural agendas speak for themselves. Projects range from complex and strategic urban and suburban propositions, to ambitious formal, spatial and material architectural resolution, to socially and politically driven experimentation through design. All of the projects look forward to a future focussed on the practice of architectural design, and architectural design practice. In turn we hope the catalogue becomes a measure of past achievements, and forms an essential series for your bookshelf. Congratulations to all exhibitors and we look forward to your design futures. Melanie Dodd and Nigel Bertram
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RMIT Architecture Program Major Projects Semester 2, 2008 Catalogue Program Director Melanie Dodd Major Project Coordinator Nigel Bertram Catalogue Design Stuart Geddes – Chase & Galley Production & Coordination Stuart Harrison www.architecture.rmit.edu.au The Architecture Program wishes to thank Thomas and Eva Butler for their continuing support of the Anne Butler Memorial Medal, an annual award for outstanding Major Projects in design.
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Shazana Adnan Hijau at Subang Ria
This project is a proposal of an alternative model of housing development in an underutilized huge park in Subang Jaya, a district that is 15 km away from Kuala Lumpur city center. A win-win situation is trying to be achieved as there is a conflict between the developers and the surrounding community regarding this proposal. The brief for this project to overcome the conflict is to provide a certain number of dwellings for the developers and to retain the amount of green in the park as well as to reactivate it for the community. This project is a combination of a tower and a few low-rise buildings on three main boulevards which are grounded by commercial
and public programs to be used by the residents and also the surrounding community. Just like the name of this project, this project is intended to still look like a park not like a typical residential development. Supervisors: Stuart Harrison and Christine Phillips
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Ben Baird National Academy of Dance
A proposed national dance academy in the heart of Melbourne’s art precinct catering for ballet and modern dance is to provide studio theatres, gymnasium, dining, offices, and a major auditorium for performances. As a design element that would permeate throughout the entire project I used the hexagonal shape found in tulle, a common dance costume fabric. This geometric element is visible in plan, form, structure, and heavily as a decorative device. From the river the building partially suggests the silhouette of a boat, giving it a link to the river traffic and boat houses. The curved feature wall protruding from the
building out onto the landscape also relates to the natural flowing curve of the river and the sculptural features seen on the river bank. The studios are nestled in the trees much like that of tree houses, whilst the use of rigid angles and giant triangular west corner points the viewers eye directly to federation square. Supervisor: Sean McMahon
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Ricky Booth The Space Between
This project investigates the ways architecture can respond to apparent residual spaces caused by the implementation of monumental urban infrastructure. The site for this study is a pocket of land between Racecourse Road and Mt Alexander Road in Flemington that is currently loaded with existing infrastructure. The ground plane is split by Moonee Valley Creek and layered with bike trails, Upfield railway line and City Link. The site is also bound by two major arterial road networks and tram lines. Here strong dynamic spaces evolve. The space that has been forgotten, the space between. To amplify and strengthen the current condition at
lower levels, splayed permeable floor plates hang below the freeway, reaching across the site bridging Holland Park Housing Estate to Flemington Bridge Railway Station. The existing bike trail is extended, looping through the building clashing with the covered circulation spine. The tower is strategically positioned between the freeway and train station rising up allowing for a visual connection to the freeway. Supervisor: Simon Whibley and Paul Dash
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Sarah Chang Jia Ying SIBU – ARK
An old airport site with a small outdoor stadium at one end of the runway, it was easy to foresee a proposal for a public recreational sports centre. In light of the natural disasters happening around the world, stadiums have become a centre for refuge. In order to maximize usage for the stadium, in addition to an indoor pool and basketball stadium, I have incorporated a proposal of a relief centre for the people during flooding of the town that happens annually in this small town. Dry zones have been created around the site to accommodate the transportable emergency capsules that is stored in the stadiums during non flood times. These mounts around
the site then becomes areas for temporary shelter for the victims during flood times. Superivsor: Lindsay Holland
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Chuah, Jun Keat Melbourne Science Museum
Docking on Central Pier, the new museum will be Melbourne’s new monumental landmark that forms or simply ends the triangular ring of science - chaining the IMAX theatre & the Old Melbourne Observatory; ultimately embracing the CBD. Situated on this prime location, MSM is therefore a transitional space where the liquid begins to solidify. This is the challenge of the science which equally means the embodiment of invisible natural principle to archive those discoveries as a progress of human civilization. Forging a symbiotic relationship, MSM forms a close collaboration with the existing programs in the sheds without harming its host, physically
& visually. The programs together with its expressive and fluid form resonate with its context that suggests discovery, progression, and refinement over time. MSM will be a prominent structure visible from Melbourne’s Gateway and Bolte Bridge. Its presence will strengthen Docklands’ ambitious harbour redevelopment and a new center of cultural activity of Melbourne. Supervisor: Peter Corrigan
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Allison Claney The Edge Between – manipulating the surface of Port Melbourne
This project investigates the flexible relationship between land and water in Port Melbourne. It responds to the way that land is cut away and reclaimed according to industry shifts. Situated between the edges of Webb dock and ‘Garden City’, in an existing wedge of slack space a horizontal surface acts both as an extended barrier between these edges and a transitional space that can be programmed to reactivate the desolute beachfront. In three parts, the project deals with ‘cutting’ in water to provide acceptable housing beside industry, ‘extending’ an edge of recreation down to the underused beach and ‘pushing out’ industry into the public realm by relocating the Footscray
market and developing a multi new car dealership to relieve thousands of new cars offloaded and stored at the docks. The surface of the ground is flexible and ambiguous – a carpark converted to sports courts, car test track into a driving school, boat storage into showrooms and boardwalks sunken at high tide to privatise fishing edges. Superivsors: Gretchen Wilkins and Brendan Jones
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Brendan Dawson Preston Campus
Existing TAFE
Market
This project presents a scenario for the expansion of the existing NMIT TAFE campus in Preston. It critiques the idea of the TAFE campus as an isolated precinct that has no civic role. The proposed campus is a satellite to the existing and it allows the TAFE to engage with the market/station precinct. This particular site was chosen because it created opportunities for the TAFE to have an interface with the public realm. The site has frontage along Cramer street, which I perceived as having the potential to become a civic spine. The new buildings complete the procession of large
scale, free standing buildings along this street. I created a hybrid civic language by combining specific aspects from the buildings in Preston with precedents from architectural history. The new campus buildings exaggerate disjunctions in scale and proportion. This is a common feature of buildings in Preston. Supervisors: Nigel Bertram and Kim Halik
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Ilana Freadman Hill of Content
I have designed a refugee centre for ‘Heritage Hill’, a spiritual precinct in Dandenong. My project looks at how architecture can assist with the integration of refugees into mainstream society. A study by the UN and Harvard University concluded the rehabilitation of refugees is a three tiered process. Firstly, individuals need to undergo their own recovery process. Secondly, they require family support. Thirdly, they need help in reintegrating into the community. I bore these conclusions in mind when designing and siting the centre. For example, there is a secluded area for individual rehabilitation that contains a spiritual centre and counselling rooms. The spiritual
area is designed to promote personal reflection and empowerment. There is also a family area with housing and offices. Finally, there is an area for community integration with a library and cafĂŠ. Ultimately, I believe architecture can help refugees reintegrate into society provided that the architect understands their needs and that it attempts to reflect these in the design. Supervisors: Peter Bickle and Jonothan Cowle
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Kylie Freeman Re-Settling Cossack
Re-Settling This project is set in the ghost town of Cossack in the Pilbara, in Western Australia. Eight buildings from Cossack’s pearl fishing past remain in various states of ruin. Each of these building has had the strength to survive Cossacks many lifecycles of inhabitation and abandonment, of floods, cyclones and droughts. A proposal for a new self sustaining town of Cossack has been put out by the local council earmarking Cossack as a tourist town. To this I wish to add miners, in particularly fly in fly out workers whose transitory lifestyle are a detriment to established communities. I am adding four buildings to this town; each is specific to its own context
and is paired with either an existing building or ruin. My buildings are heavy and light, they are about the permeance of settlement and building to outlast the harsh environment, but they are also about the ephemeral nature of inhabitation in such locations. Supervisors: Nigel Bertram and Graham Crist
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Sarah Giblett The Town on the Bay
What defines the Australian town? The way in which we move through the town and experience it, is what defines the town. We tend view the Australian town through the frame of a car window as we travel through. There seems to be an elegant order to the programs that form the landscape of the strip. We are first greeted with the temporary resident, motels and caravan parks and their bright and enthusiastic welcome signs. Then comes the permanent resident, shops, churches and the corner pub, you get a glimpse of the daily routine. Then it’s onto the next. The activity on the strip has become less, towns are moving into large shopping centres, losing their identity.
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The most typical Australian town is Frankston. Frankston was once described as a ‘summer playground’, but has made the move inside. The project has taken all the quirkiness of the typical Australian town, and put it out on show on the bay. Supervisors: Peter Bickle and Jonothan Cowle
Sasha Hadjimouratis Regarding Brunswick
This project examines the post-industrial landscape of Brunswick and the possibilities for re-use and reengagement with its past. The site lies within the former Hoffman Brickworks on Dawson Street and Gilpin park to the North. The project seeks to create a new sense of regionalism, production and industry through institutional education as its backbone. The currently dispersed cultural community that already occupies much of this industrial area is given a new central community hub within the existing Heritage Brickworks kilns, offering spaces for music events, community groups, festivals and markets. The Brunswick
Historical Society and archive rooms occupy the first kiln along Dawson Street. A band of farming land and community garden plots acts as a mediator between the two halves of the site, which are supported by the Agriculture & Horticulture Tafe. The site can be traversed via an axis road leading to a retail nursery, workshops and visiting Educational Centre. Supervisor: Simon Whibley
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Johan Hermijanto The Coburg Initiative
A high density mixed-use development emerges from the suburban fabric of Coburg. It stands at the end of the Sydney rd retail strip in anticipation of an increase in the local population while being strategically located as a retail hub to service the northern suburbs. Resisting past inner-city suburban high rise typologies, this project integrates itself with its immediate context, negotiating, connecting, activating and extending different aspects of the site. An intelligent skin fulfils various requirements from a building faรงade to a performance space ceiling to providing a pedestrian lighting network. Underneath, a permeable ground level aids movement
across the site from Sydney Rd. to the train station negotiating pedestrians over the car park which maintains its direct connection to the existing supermarkets on site. Residential units vary from medium density courtyard types to apartment towers rising slowly off the retail podium level at varying heights exposing its sky gardens to the north. Supervisor: Martyn Hook
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David Hislop A Spontaneously Combusted Civic Presence: Carlton Public Housing
This proposal seeks to explore the potentialities of the existing Carlton Public Housing Estate bounded by Lygon, Princes and Rathdowne Streets. Public Housing Estates, constructed in the 1950’s and 60’s, comprising of high rise apartment blocks and low rise walk-up flats are a common re-occurrence around inner city suburbs in Melbourne. Re-developments and alterations to these housing estates both in the past and currently aim to break up the existing blocks into smaller sites in an attempt to re-integrate the estates into the surrounding urban fabric. This project considers the idea of maintaining the largeness and singularity of the site whilst also increasing
its civic presence within the surrounding context. It explores the potential density and urban intensity through a large intervention and significant increase in built form and on-site activity. Supervisor: Simon Whibley
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Michael Holah Towards 2030 . Hastings . Victoria
Our impact upon the planet is now evident. Governments around the world are implementing methods to halt what would be in anyone’s terms be catastrophic. The Victorian State Government in 2006 released a report titled ‘Melbourne 2030 Audit’. Within in it highlighted suburbs to be labelled as ‘Activity Centres’, these were to be the new areas of Melbourne that contained 41% of all new housing. Hastings is one of them. The project’s focus is around the need for Architecture to swing towards a sustainable form of higher density housing and lifestyle, not only in our major cities but our growing suburbs. Issues such dwelling diversity,
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environmental sustainability and communal living require all parts of society to re assess just how we live. While the project is Utopian in essence, the necessary shift that Communities need to make in order to preserve a healthy existence is paramount. Supervisors: Peter Bickle and Jonathan Cowle
Grace Chung Yan Hung The Vertical Street
Kwun Tong is one of Hong Kong’s old districts, which the government has planned for urban renewal since 1989. However, lots of the urban renewal projects only concern about maximizing the profit through new massive buildings which consequently leads to the lost of existing community fabric within the site. Through proposing a new community centre complex, my project has taken the existing spatial characteristics of street culture in the site and integrating the idea into the propose building in an attempt to ask whether urban renewal projects in Hong Kong can preserve the community economy, therefore the unseen cultural value of the place rather than always using
the method of tabula rasa to maximize the economical profit that the government can earn. The project establishes a new urban condition where the street is no longer restricted on the ground level, it extends upward from the gap spaces between the buildings and penetrating through the building blocks, creating a new public realm. The whole structure is seen as a public space rather than a building. Supervisor: Mel Dodd
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Ben Inman Clach na Gruagaich
This project addresses the spatial problem of street prostitution in St Kilda, a problem brought about by the gentrification of this bay side suburb. The proposal is three street worker centres and additional amenities for street workers. Working within a skewed historiography, extant within the suburb, this project traces an historical narrative, guided by the surrealist collage novel La femme 100 têtes by Ernst, stretching back to the original St Kilda, the furthest island in the Outer Hebrides and the vessel from which this, not inappropriately Victorian, St Kilda derives its name. Three ‘islands’ in the present archipelago, Stac An
Armin, a 19th Century rooming house and Griffin’s ornamental legacy; three chapters in the narrative, each formally determined by its constituent spatial condition, yet, referential to the other. ‘Loplop, dumb with fear and fury, finds his bird head and remains motionless for 12 days on both sides of the door.’ Supervisors: Simon Whibley and Kyla McFarlane
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Vanja Joffer Urban Textile
Immediately south of the main entry of the soon to be developed Carlton Brewery block lies a small triangular site. While lacking in size it is a significant site in the linking of the Carlton Brewery site to the Melbourne CBD. This proposal explores the use of fibre composites to allow for an increase of space where there is little. Composites are lighter and stronger than steel and concrete but still sparingly used in architecture. The structural base module developed for this project is a carbon- fibre reinforced “Y’ shaped column with a knitted fibre glass membrane finish. The structure lightly rests on ground level, decreases in size and grows in number as it
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climbs up and gains altitude. The structure is spaced so that the sideway and horizontal shelters alternate between jagged convex and concave configuration, creating a chain mail effect of Y-shaped columns and beams, some working in tension, others in compression. The project is of speculative nature where the behaviour, flexibility, aesthetic and tectonics of textiles are equally important as their properties in strength and lightness. Supervisors: Leanne Zilka and Michael Spooner
James Jamison City Primary School
This project is about a school in the inner city. It exploits existing and makes new connections between key adjacent precincts – the Queen Victoria Market, Flagstaff Gardens and the CBD. A variety of courtyard types are strategically used to enable various forms of occupation and interface between the school and its surrounds. The commercial necessity of residential and office towers are shaped to provide a large court for the school at the scale of the block. Supervisors: Nigel Bertram and Mauro Baracco
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Monique Jones The Melbourne Bike-Share Project
The project is the proposal of a bike-share scheme for Melbourne. Sustainable architecture can be achieved through flexible integrated networks of modular, ecofriendly components, located and specific to site. The system can evolve and adapt to community needs, reflecting and enhancing the urban fabric. The scheme makes economic and environmental sense in a carbon-reducing, peak-oil world. Melbourne is perfect for the bike-share system, with it extensive existing on and off road bike path network. The key to the system is expandability, adaptability, cross-programming and the re-use of existing infrastructure. The initial formula was
to create an adaptable system and modules on a micro level that can penetrate and infiltrate change at strategic positions at a macro level, enhancing the community and urban fabric. The system plugs in to the existing transport and bike path network to enhance the sustainability and connectivity or the overall network. The pilot concept services the Upfield train line. At Jewell station I have used an expandable gantry system to store bikes in anticipation for project growth. Supervisors: Christine Phillips and Stuart Harrison
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Teck Vee, Lim Aspiration: Intervention of Hope
The project is initiated with the redevelopment of Atherton Gardens at Fitzroy and seek to respond to the recent shifts in the social order for refugees and asylum-seekers. The master-planning consist of various programs such as the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) support centre, emergency housing, language school, shop-houses, retails and offices which aim to reintegrate the refugees and asylum-seekers into the society. The social and political aspirations of these urban interventions provide opportunities for these in-coming communities and at the same time, reintegrate the site into the urban grid and overcome the alienation of the existing
social housing. Supervisor: Martyn Hook
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Michael Kats Jewish Community Centre of Melbourne
While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history. “Blood and soil, [and] memories of victimization…need to dissolve before 21st century realities” Adrienne Rich. There fore the new Jewish Community Centre sets a side differences exist between Jew and Jew, and embrace s the things they share in common. The new building is highly visible and accessible to the thousands of people to participate in, walk through it or feel it on the horizon. It will be place that will educate; it will give new skills, so people see the world in a new
way. It will promote peace, tolerance, human dignity and brotherhood for the public at large; an urban space of public awareness. There is no challenge too great for a Jewish culture that stands as one. Supervisor: Peter Corrigan
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Hohyun Kim Ground Plane Resurrection
This project, located in Seoul, rethinks an existing typical urban condition currently dominated by relentlessly repetitive apartment. It is the lack of useful active public space, communal amenity, and spatial diversity that I am particularly addressing through a design solution focused on the ground plane. Currently the existing car park is inbetween the apartment blocks and takes up possible public space. My solution is to create a new ground plane that sits above the car parks, activates the edges with commercial and business programs, and accommodates various communal and public programs throughout the site. And the central pedestrian walkway collectively
links the communal and public programs including the basement car park along the way down to the water edge. In addition, I have altered some of the existing blocks and have developed a strategy to counter repetitive building blocks. Some apartments are extended, while others are reconfigured. This alteration differentiates the apartment blocks in terms of faรงade systems and materials. And it occurs at the residential levels. Consequently, designing a ground level with the insertion of public and communal programs serves to activate the ground plane. Supervisors: Anna Johnson and Mel Bright
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Peter Knight Flying Underground
This project is concerned with the civic, the city and the future. The site is an existing infill multi-storey car park. As car use must surely decline, so the inhabitants of the city are changing. The proposal seeks to accommodate and preempt this change, and in particular give consideration to groups that have previously lacked representation. Programme includes: kindergarten, seniors’ community centre, day-care for dementia patients and an active archiving project with broader public access. The project seeks to overwhelm, challenge and include. This is expressed both programmatically and architecturally within the project. The project is not intended to give a
uniform reading but must be explored to be understood, just as one explores a vibrant city. The wish is that through the combination of architectural moves and programmatic layering, the resultant proposal offers a vision of hope, optimism and enjoyment. Supervisors: Peta Carlin and Michael Spooner
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Ryce Jeng Lin Kong It is the Lanes’ Air Rights
With the use of recyclable ‘kit of parts’, Melbourne city’s hidden laneways are exposed through its itinerant users; the homeless sleeping rough, international students facing pending rent crisis and the 2am locked-out bar crawlers. Plug-in programs cluster in an operative nature in response to the users’ behavioural aspects and movement patterns, offering temporary accommodation and conditioning recycling opportunities within the city. The project looks at three sites: underutilized lane beside Harwood place, Baptist place and Throssell lane, all sharing a close proximity to The Salvation Army thus facilitating a network of serviceable connections. Their
tight rudimentary nature as utility lanes initiates a design response arguing for air rights over laneways.The design employs a tower scaffold’s dimensions. Through ties close to building’s window reveal enables light while the four sided connector tube frame accommodates conduits and allows flexible configurations of the kit of parts (keeping their dimensionality). Volumes are open/closed with door openings governed by track and orientation. This approach proposes a full reconciliation of commercial waste recycling with city’s users, experienced in parts. Supervisor: Martyn Hook
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Hin Yau Lau Public Housing Redevelopment in Ngau Tau Kok
On recent years, the Hong Kong government has implemented numerous urban renewal schemes in aged district. These schemes focus towards getting the maximum land values while original identity and local culture of the district are consequently neglected. This project makes a criticism of the Hong Kong’s government’s vision for the oldest existing public housing in Ngau Tau Kok, with its brutal approach in replacing the entire site with a completely new scheme. It consists of several pedestrian pathways which interpret the spatial models represented by the existing ‘food street’. The famous ‘food street’ reflects something of a paradox – it
is the architectural inconsequential buildings that have developed the most practical and complex response to changing social and economic conditions in Hong Kong. The new pathways try to capture and exaggerate the cultural values at the ground level, with institutional culture such as exhibition galleries and studios introduced to enhance communal activities and communication happened in the site. Supervisor: Mel Dodd
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Li Ying, Patrick Li Yune Shing Caulfield en-VISIONed
Like many suburbs in Victoria, Caulfield is being developed according to the blue prints of Melbourne 2030 and as described by Melbourne 2030 Caulfield is going to increase not only in population density but also as an activity and a community node. The project undertaken on a site bounded by Princess Highway, Caulfield station railway lines and within Monash University precinct is seen as a potentially binding space found in the centre of various civic, housing and educational development undertaken in its surrounding area. The project takes the existing educational condition as a catalytic element to create a community environment towards the centre of the
site. Community programs such as adult education facility, community library and flexible lecture theaters turning to cinematographic projection rooms are activated by the constant use of the site by the students. This potential intertwined environment of community and education is linked and strengthened by a mixture of urban and campus landscape. Supervisor: Paul Dash
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Hao, Li Docklands Sports Park
The site is located at the west of Melbourne CBD. The whole docklands have wonderful waterfront views and convenient transportation. However, we found most people left docklands rapidly, after the footy game ended at weekend. Moreover, I decided to provide a big sports park for the whole Melbourne. Five high-rise build which present five football clubs including North Melbourne, St Kilda, Carlton, Essendon and western bulldogs will set up in this area. Can we turn the constraints into exciting conditions and create a new language for docklands? Can we create a building that not just responds to the
contextual issues, but that is capable of introducing a new impulse in this area? Can we provide a big open space and sports area for Telstra Dome and whole docklands? Can we consider the relationships between the whole Docklands and CBD? Supervisor: Lindsay Holland
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Ross Liddell Dandenong Resurrection
This project explores the possibilities of revitalizing the City of Dandenong through the creation of a new public square and the re-establishment of eroded services within the Dandenong CBD. Over the past thirty years the City of Dandenong has undergone a gradual decline of services and amenity including the ‘strip shopping’ experience, primarily due the advent of the ‘Mall’ and the increasing dominance of the private vehicle over public transport usage. This project seeks to create a new balance between the presently dominant private vehicle and the Public transport/ pedestrian users without deteriorating the existing road networks.
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By promoting such a co-existence and by recentralizing services such as the Public library, Civic administrative offices and a new Education precinct at key locations, Dandenong Resurrection explores the possibilities of an intervention of ‘parts’ as a tactic of engagement in revitalizing the city of Dandenong. Supervisors: Peter Bickle and Jonothan Cowle
David Ma Cho Shing Interchange Centre
Interchange Centre is the beginning of a new urban centre and a link between Craigieburn and Epping in 2030. Supervisor: Keith Streames
-FWFM 0OF
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Felandro Madjid The New Jakarta Town Hall
The project investigates on how the contemporary architecture and colonial architecture is being perceived and how it should be perceived in modern Indonesia. The project is an extension of an existing town hall built during the dutch colonial period. The intention is to link back the public to a private government building by creating a civic centre consisting of a gallery and a theatre. The project sits in between the existing town hall and the merdeka square (a major landscape development built in colonial period). The project is also to provoke on how government view their architecture. A government is a celebration of
public and so does its architecture. Supervisor: Jan Van Schaik
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Nur Ajlaa Mamat Franchise Typeface Typology
This project investigates and critiques the QSR franchise building typology that is considered to be a frozen mechanism that denies change and emphasizes standardization across all aspects of its business. Their ugliness lies in the homogenous system of ‘attached signage’ which dominates every space and form. Robert Venturi considers it to be “architecture without architect”, of which its only concern is to become a money making machine. Therefore, we have to consider the direction the franchise industry is heading if architects don’t play a role. Increasingly, franchise buildings are sold along with the business license therefore a standard building procurement
system that is fast, relocatable, quality controlled, and cost controlled is highly beneficial to business owners. Within the constraints of prefabrication and modular, the project engages with the expression of building as sign and revises the existing homogenous typology by using typeface as a comprehensive communication tool that is embedded in the buildings thus creating form. By isolating every function within the building type into letter blocks, the proposal creates an open source menu of letter modules from which brand architecture can be formulated. Supervisor: Barbara Bamford
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Rilla Maxton Fitzroy Greenhousing
PLAN AND SECTIONAL MASSING STRATEGIES
DETACHING
STEPPING
PUNCTURING
HANGING
PUSH/ PULL
ANGLING
T2
SEED ROOM
T3
BUILDING ACCESS
T1
EXISTING CONTEXT
T3
SHARE LAUNDRY
PEOPLE
VEHICLES
ADJOINING PROPERTY
DELIVERIES
CIRCULATION WITHIN FLOORPLATES
T6
SIGNIFICANT VIEWS
T6
INTERACTION T6 T7
GROUND
ONE - FOUR
FIVE
ROOF
BUILDING - SUN - WIND
LEVEL 5 PLAN / 1:200
ROSE STREET
ROOF PLAN / 1:200
KERR STREET
This project is concerned with density, communal living and urban sustainability. It proposes a formula for integrating housing and working with urban agriculture above a ground level of public retail. The building in this model becomes a hybrid being, made up of mixed programs; which are interconnected and add to the rich layering of Fitzroy. What has been created is a living condition necessary for sustainable city dwelling. The project proposes dense living units which convert between housing and working models. Living and working within the same area discourages commuting and encourages urban
place and cohesion. Collective housing is embraced, and unnecessary housing elements are stripped back when these can be shared in the building or sourced in the area. Agricultural precedents were drawn upon in the design of the building’s facade; timber fruit and vegetable boxes and steel cage greenhouses formed an aesthetic context. The buildings growing levels, living and working spaces, harvesting and sales space provides for a constantly active and ephemeral environment. Supervisors: Graham Crist and Nigel Bertram
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Stephen John McKay The Phillip Island Arc
With a restricted range of activities and opportunities for its ageing, permanent residents, Phillip Island also faces seasonal issues when tourists increase the population tenfold. The beaches become heavily developed, demand for water and energy increases alarmingly and the environment suffers. To solve such issues, this proposal aims to utilize more of the large proportion of unused land, by developing a central strip. This will draw people inland, create alternative transport zones, promote the collection of wind, solar and water resources and provide environmental protection and educational information and activities. This will ensure a greater range of opportunities and facilities
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(including accommodation), for a varied clientele of many ages, throughout the whole year. The central hub of the activities is located on the arc of the main road, as it enters the strip and the sheer size of the gateway building will give the strip the prominence it deserves. Phillip Island’s long term survival depends on this interaction between smart development and environmental consideration. Supervisor: Brendan Jones
Mitch McTaggart Common Boundary
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This project examines the role of the institution within the city. Situated on the inferred intersection of civic and institutional precincts I have proposed a centre for Film & Media Studies to be incorporated into RMIT’s Brunswick campus. This building will act as an interface for the RMIT campus which is currently excluded from any public role by the train line which physically demarcates the two precincts. This building will act as a common boundary; a negotiation between the interests of both spheres. Echoing the picturesque garden, the historical precursor to film, this project favours an unresolved engagement with the inhabitant and the city. With strong
emphasis on landscape, buildings float on the site allowing for wandering circulation. Glimpses through to its open public interior are encouraged whilst always remaining in dialogue with its industrial urban context. Like the aspirations of the picturesque garden this is a site for collective life, a user’s space. Supervisors: Peter Bickle and Jonothan Cowle
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Azree Yusof Re-surfacing Northbank
The western end of Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station has been for over a century an area that has served only for the purpose of transportation, condemning it into a detached urban landscape. This project attempts explore the possibilities breathing new life to this highly-condition but valuable piece of land by creating a series of programs that will engage the various disparate occupants of the surrounding areas, the CBD, Southbank and commuters from outside. The project proposes a new facility for the CAE, homeless support services and supportive housing that tie in to the site conditions. The exploration of ideas and
programs attempt to bring a more engaging experience of the city for the urban inhabitants and users but also as a reflection of Flinders Street Station’s importance to Melbourne city. Supervisor: Lindsay Holland
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Barend Meyer Super-shed Suture
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Waterfront City will supplement big icons and low prices with a carefully concocted seductive urban experience, including a collection of locally exotic programs. This role for diversity and vitality within the touristic scenography appeared compromised however by the necessary introversion of these activities. Amalgamation is the primary act. Diversity is assembled under one roof, making an interior world. The shopping/sight-seeing circuit plugsin via an elevated gallery, traipsing capriciously across the mosaic of performers, maximising perceived contrast. Rising above, spectacle camouflages complexity: a rippling roof reflects an ever blue sky. But the exploitation
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of programs and their subcultures to supercharge the experience commodity is also countered to create the possibility of real exchange. The gallery is designed also as suture, creating points of interface between unfamiliar subcultures. Parts of the omnivorous shed envelope are manipulated to invest proper (relative) intensity at a scale calibrated to different external situations. Supervisors: Nigel Bertram and Paul Minifie
Ilani Hana Masturah Westgate Water Centre
The project responds towards the environmental issue in Port Melbourne which is the water shortage problem. The site is located in Westgate Park in respond to the drying lake. The aim and goal is to sustain the lake and at the same time help to supply water to non residential area in Port Melbourne. One of the strategy is to sustain the lake is by creating a canal that connects Yarra River to the Westgate Park Lake. The architecture incorporates with landscape and infrastructure in order to explore the opportunity to establish the park and rejuvenate the slacks spaces in Westgate Park. By creating a canal, it helps to create a desirable landscape to attract the public
to the park, giving people especially the Port Melbourne residents a public park and an open space to escape from the congestion of the city and industrial area. The Westgate Water Centre features an educational area and research center for Port Melbourne. It encourages public to educate their self about natural water and how the treatment process work. Supervisor: Gretchen Wilkins
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Syazwani Mohd Khairi Brunswick Artsy-ficial Park
The signs of gentrification are increasingly evident in different parts of Brunswick. This is the issue that Brunswick is currently facing; change without changing. The question that it posed is how to maintain the qualities that give character to Brunswick, but at the same time allowing change to be embraced. It is often a misconception that to maintain a certain character of a place, the place itself has to be locked up in a glass box and viewed from a distance. But in reality, it is the people that inhabit Brunswick that give meaning to the place. Brunswick is identified by the people that live, work and play there, calling it their home.
Therefore, the proposal is to create a place that explores and exploits the human qualities and activities that come naturally from Brunswick. A strong core of visual artists has lived around the area for at least 15 years. A broader artistic community has bloomed- writers, film makers, photographers, ceramicists, musicians, sculptors and performance artists. By integrating an arts based facility with a public centre, Brunswick Artsy-ficial Park fuses activity with both architecture and landscape, a hub for the arts that flows on to adjacent spaces. Supervisors: Stuart Harrison and Christine Phillips
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Tom Morgan Sharkmouse Project #3 – Hibaaq’s Boat
There is a very specific, glazed stare that you receive when you mention that you are doing social housing. It is one of indifference, and it says; ‘Well, bully for you. Would you like a medal?’ Part of this reaction rests on the fact that the social is pursued as cover – as window-dressing or wallpaper; as evidence of the student’s magnanimity. Yet the core problem rests upon the impossibility of designing the social – for it is primarily a policy, rather than an architectural, issue. This is not to discount the importance of the architectural – it is simply to acknowledge that design descends from far reaching policy decisions; decisions that require decades of experience to draft,
mediate, and implement. Moreover, there is a disturbing tendency to dictate ways and means of living – as if social tenants did not already know how to do this! Thus we have the paradox of the simultaneously arrogant and obsequiously humble architecture student, meticulously re-inventing the ancient art of inhabitation. The solution, inasmuch as we remain naïfs, is to highlight the intriguing language of these buildings, their instrumental relationship to the city. And, y’dig, it’s easier than going into politics. Supervisor: Mel Dodd
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Tze Ek, Ng National Performing Arts Centre, Malaysia
The development is to incorporate and portray a concept which encompasses the social, cultural and aesthetic qualities of Malaysia. Design amenities for musical activities, facilities for cultural shows and exhibitions. This will be a centre to promote social, cultural and aesthetic awareness. The new centre sits between all three existing art centres interlinked by road networks and most of Kuala Lumpur’s rail-based public transportation. The performing arts centre should undertake a greater sense of responsibility to the city it serves. It must, in its development, maintain its open urban character and
expand its civic role. It should strengthen its advantaged position by actively seeking to create value in a multiple of ways. A truly great performance space will, by itself, stir the imagination, draw out hidden creative energies and promote a high level of excitement and anticipation simply by the nature of its design. Such a space, through the influence of its ambiance, will lure the world’s greatest artists, to work their magic within its confines. Supervisor: Peter Corrigan
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Sam Perversi-Brooks Institute of Marine & Antarctic Studies
The IMAS Project within Hobart’s Sullivans Cove offers an Architecture that positions Tasmania as a state of change, creativity and innovation – expressly manifesting these values within the built fabric of the city, in order to both strengthen and make vivid this commitment. Raised above the cove and the public space of the existing shed below it – the project attempts to capture and embody some of the qualities of The Shed, The Ship and The Antarctic (the stark beauty of it’s landscape, elusive, sublime, the radical stillness and remoteness…) something from another place – an abstract – but localised, anchored by and paying tribute to the existing shed structure.
In this way the project itself can be read as an analogy, a metaphor for the boldness and importance of the education and research it houses, the wide range of investigation it facilitates – so integral to Hobart, and so critical to the wider world. Supervisors: Nigel Bertram and Carey Lyon
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Frankie Piesse Architecture for a Fluctuating Landscape
Traversing sporadic but fragile ecosystems of waterways and remnant indigenous landscapes, this proposal overlays a parkland structure to the existing fabric between Broadmeadows and Thomastown, addressing issues of inaccessibility and degraded adjacent land. Densified housing occurs along an easement line between existing industrial and residential areas. By removing fences and reorienting housing, the new communities are connected by shared open space. The park is encouraged as a space that spills into and over industry and housing as green wall and roof elements. Additionally, it provides pedestrian connections between existing community and educational
facilities, whose program has been expanded to make use of the disused Broadmeadows Outdoor Swimming Pool site. The abandoned Campbellfield quarry is re-visioned as an educational conservation landscape. An interpretive space and an environmental research facility are connected by a pedestrian bridge through the clay pit. As terraced landscape buildings, their form and programme engage with project aspirations of rejuvenation and consolidation of open space. Supervisors: Mauro Baracco and Gretchen Wilkins
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Augustine Savage Those Theatres in the Park
The project is a large extension to the existing Capital theatre and Art Gallery in the Bendigo Arts Precinct. Supervisors: Graham Crist and Nigel Bertram
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Hang Yuan Seow Melbourne Library of Culture and Religion
This project offers a new urban impact of cultural and religious significance in Melbourne’s diverse demographics. It is defined in seven parts – the Public Library, the Performing Arts Building, the Reading and Congregation Hall, the Religion Centre, the Gardens, the Retail, and Residential. Each element pursues the social significance of what is truly global. It works to bring about acknowledgement and a new type of programme belonging to all social contexts, denying discounted importance to individuality. This project is with or without holistic or cultural identify except to project worship.
It is between a disjunction of the identity differences that this project belongs to, as it acts to signify an embodiment of cultural exchanges while encapsulating the spirituality of a multi-diversified state of polarization. Supervisor: Peter Corrigan
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Joseline Setiawan Epidermal Infestation
Shanghai is the most populated city in China and the density is increasing in an incredible pace due to constant influx of working age people from the rural areas around Shanghai. The old ‘Longtang’ housing model cannot sustain the increasing density. Longtang is a traditional housing typology that is specifically Shanghainese. This model was derived from the cottage type housing during Shanghai’s early international concession period history. As the result of its configuration, the Longtang model gives rise to dynamic ground level activities. The present model that is replacing the Longtang housing type copes with the high density problem the city is
facing however this model creates enclaves. Epidermal Infestation attempts to propose the alternative, a model that copes with the same density the high rise enclave model is sustaining but retaining the dynamic ground level character the old model has. Supervisors: Sand Helsel and Rosalea Monacella
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Tan, Sim Eng Urban Social Living
People who don’t have shelter are not homeless! Homelessness is an inadequate experience of connectedness with family and community. Therefore, this project aims to bring people together in a community. The site is on a transition area between city and the northern suburbs, both part of the CBD fabric extension and yet self characteristic. The housing tower is designed with different depths of northern facing balconies that act as private outdoor rooms for different usages of the individual resident. Social spaces and community terraces are then imposed into the tower as vertical social interaction. The different social spaces provide the
building as a whole and the neighborhood with a sense of a new identity. In addition, a TAFE cooking school on the site is intended become part of the building funding source. It is a facility for younger homeless and the tower occupants to learn/train a skill for their self improvement and/or for their future employment. Another active space is laid over the parking spaces as a sport court which is mean to be shared by housing and cooking school occupants, again acting as a catalyst to bring tower community together. Supervisor: Keith Streames
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Melissa Thong Migrating into Architecture
In recent years statistics have shown that the city of Greater Dandenong has become the most ethnically diverse suburb in Victoria. Although Dandenong prides itself on its multiculturalism, yet little of this variety of ethnic influences has been expressed in Dandenong’s architecture. Currently, migrant influence and expression can only be observed in small grain businesses that are scattered through the streets of the retail precinct. My project attempts to extract the qualities found in these places and explore them on a larger scale in an attempt to ask whether guest cultures can make a valuable
contribution to the architectural expression of suburban hubs. As a cultural and business incubator, the building plays with the ideas of a shell, stitching unused spaces together to form connections, and the expandability of tenancy modules. Hopefully this exploration opens up suggestions to the way we think about multiculturalism in relation to architecture. Supervisor: Mel Dodd
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Mimi Westhorpe Archive
nature and inherent intertwining functions. An oxidised concrete exterior peels inward, permeating the interior with external strength. The connectivity between the building and the park encourages an engagement between participant and place; the natural environment mingles the past and the present. Here posterity is preserved through the continuous nature of the Archive. Supervisors: Graham Crist and Nigel Bertram
Entitled Archive this project investigates the boundaries of human life. It incorporates a Seed Bank, Information Repository, a Donor Tissue Bank and a Mortuary. These destinations are both welcoming and confronting. For some they remain liminal spaces to be avoided, while for others they become imperative spaces in journeys they must take. Established in a parkland area in the South Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, abutted by the Monash Freeway and Gardiners Creek, remnants of its original function as a gasworks are extant. The main structure which at first appears a stereotomic volume begins to show its porous
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Wong De Yi domestiCITY: Feminist Concerns on Melbourne Inner-city High-rise Residency While much has been separately discussed in terms of consumerist ties to liberal feminism, modernist architectural ties to feminism, and the urban city’s ties to its architecture, there lacks discourse on an increasingly prevalent and peculiar intersection of these mutually-compounding factors. Presently, Melbourne CBD contains over 6,800 households, comprising 17,290 people. The fact that the innercity’s steady population growth is projected to reach 23,225 residents by 2021 (Casey, 2008) legitimises the continued erection of the city’s high-rise apartments as “integral to the production of sustainable cities” (Costello, 2005). Yet, little discourse has occurred in an attempt to understand this phenomenon of city domesticity as a contributing consumerist option that is considered both enabled by and enables feminism in the urban arena. This has resonance since research has uncovered an underlying configuration of gender performance in consumption in the apartment developers’ construction of the city (Fincher, 2004). This paper positions contemporary Melbourne inner-city residential development within this compound framework to show that the dominant domestic profile—suggested by building developer narratives and entailing building design— tacitly figures a feminist model of womanhood freed and limited by ‘choice’ consumption. The focus on developer narratives on the urban resident offers a unique profile of women whose place in these houses is in the performance of consumption either by their displacement from the home, or of a particular marketed domesticity. It discusses the minimalist design corroborative in the de rigueur glass facades— compounded by spatial layout—as framing the home as a platform for this intricate show. Ultimately, it seeks to highlight a tension inherent in the precise amalgamation of not only an unquestioned inversion of modernist belief of Industrial feminisation of the home, but also the commodification of liberal feminism as a consolidated package sold as ideal city domesticity.
Written thesis Supervisor: Hélène Frichot
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Nadia Zulkefli The ‘Selang’ at Ampang
The current massive hillside development in Kuala Lumpur create a continuity of uncontrolled urban sprawling which cause the damage of greenery tropical forest due to poor planning of hill side development and unbalance program that only deviate to upper class society. The need to cater public recreation facilities to public is essential as the beauty of greenery hill side ambience is for everyone to experience and in the same time the continuity necessity of providing residential program to keep the density within the place. The ‘Selang’ is a mix development hill side project of public facilities and residential consist of various type of apartment,
restaurant, observation deck, information centre, spa and health centre. The whole master plan is adapting the layout of Malay traditional house as the language of communal space is spoken through the transformation of the zoning. Selang means transition or in between space, which been division to each program and act as pedestrian walkway as the grid of the whole building placement. The roof of traditional Malay house is manipulated in contemporary way to give the hierarchy and responding to sun orientation and wind direction. Supervisor: Anna Johnson and Mel Bright
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