Three Constituent Acts - The Parts by Darcie Vella

Three Constituent Parts The Parts

Darcie Vella i

THE PARTS.

I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations who are the traditional custodians of the land in which I live, study and work on. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and future. Sovereignty was never ceded.

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Contents Page Week 0 Project Proposal

Page 05

Grids Page 09 Cane and Coal Page 14 The Local Page 20 The Periphery Page 30 Stored, Preserved, Archived

Page 34

Occupation Page 46 Sheds Page 52 Civil Infrastructure Page 58 The Ground Plane and the Use of Markings Page 64 On Representation Page 70 Production Page 78

iii

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THE PARTS.

week 0 project proposal

RMIT University Master of Architecture ARCH1337 – Major Project Semester 2, 2021

Major Project Proposal Darcie Vella S3838213 18.07.2021

Project Title: Three Constituent Parts

The idea that people have been contained within their bodies was a theme presented by Descartes in The Enlightenment. It was in this, that humans were first defined as part flesh, mind, and soul; flesh rots, the mind is lost, and the soul becomes ever more. Much of what holds together these three constituent parts of the body is the flesh – the container. The boundary of the flesh separates person from person, humankind from the rest of the world.

Boundaries are thought to delineate property; but this opposition, the concrete exterior and interior, does not adequately define the paradigms by which property becomes nebulous, where it stores value or rises and falls by the crests of booms and busts.

MAJOR PROJECT.

I have experienced this paradigm through my hometown of Mackay in North Queensland, a mostly isolated town that has two main exports, cane and coal. The mining boom brought boats, motorbikes, and jet skis and an inhabited civic interior, while the bust doubled unemployment and decreased property prices by up to 65%, leaving the city largely vacant. Within this we may see two planes unfold; one immanent, where these fluctuations are reflected in the built world through either emptiness or excess, and the other immaterial, the financial, economic, and legal instruments by which these things are regulated. Architecture lies in between these two planes, the immanent vessel which is either full or empty, and the physical manifestation of these immaterial instruments.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

As the interstitial layer, architecture may thus become a tool by which these things can be both maintained and resisted, waning into both the metaphysical and the concrete. To this end, the project will propose an investigation of these two conditions on an analogous site in the local, Bridge Road in Richmond, which is reported to have a 25% commercial vacancy rate. The locus of this investigation will surround the Richmond City Hall as a land titles office, the corporeal body of the formless ‘market’ in which property becomes official record. If that which is owned lies on the interior, of which the records office is the head, its effects thus lie on the outside, in the hands, knees or ankles. Property in this instance is a body, commanded by the head, yet expressed in different forms and gestures. To architecturalize property is thus to investigate it in its most fundamental sense, as that which encloses the body (the records office), but also speaks to architecture as relational, a tool by which these things are registered (the peripheries of this).

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THE PARTS.

boundaries and grids

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 01 Portrait of Robert Hoddle.

Hoddle arrived at Port Phillip in March 1837 and was appointed senior surveyor by Richard Bourke. It was here that he established the grid in which Melbourne’s CBD would be laid out, now known as the Hoddle Grid. The lack of public squares or formal open space were discouraged to “deter a spirite of democracy from breaking out”. The grid was considered a commercial instrument of property, to limit demonstration and to create a garrison to exclude First Nations People.1

The Poltiics of Public Space, Volume Two, 2020.

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Fig. 02 Early survey of the Hoddle Grid, showing it’s placement against the Yarra found in the Public Record Office Victoria archive.

MAJOR PROJECT. Fig. 03 The Hoddle Grid and it’s axes showing the ecology of the land it sits within.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

“The foundation of Melbourne did not correspond with universal suffrage, it is not a city design for the interest of the people, but the administration of a population.” Jack Self, The Politics of Public Space, Volume Two.

Fig. 04 Early survey of the Hoddle Grid, found in the Public Record Office Victoria archive.

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Boundaries can be classified at many levels: they may be international (between countries), national (between states of a country), regional (between regions of a state), local (between localities of a region or local government area) or – as in the context of this paper – individual boundaries separating parcels of subdivided land.

Boundaries between countries and states are more commonly referred to as borders, and may be either natural (ie. seas, rivers, lakes) or artificial (ie. defined by geographic lines of latitude and longitude). Borders serve political, legal and economic purposes in separation of the jurisdictions of abutting areas.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Boundaries of land are thought of as generally fixed and do not move, although the interpretation of the location of the boundary can be difficult and professional judgements may vary in the interpretation of evidence of the location. Where ‘natural’ boundaries are formed by seas, lakes, rivers etc the situation is more complex: such boundaries are said to be ‘ambulatory’. Ambulatory boundaries cannot be marked on the ground and are not fixed in one place, but can change position over time through slow and imperceptible accretion or erosion of the described feature.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

country

Intangible

grids

title boundaries

Taxonomy of Boundaries

signs - instructional

signs - locative

material

Perceived

markings

(hard)

The Act

(soft)

The project analyses a series of boundaries, specific to the context of the site. They exist as the metaphysical, hard and soft boundaries and their levels of tangibility and perception. Intangible boundaries can be defined as the lines found within a title boundary, the invisible grids in which a city is planned and country - the ecology of the land which contains the embodiment of time. Hard boundaries are constituated by things such as fences, kerbs, roads, powerlines, urban artefacts and footpaths - things that all either inhibit or allow the movement by human and non-human entitites. Perceived boundaries exist as a way of exclaiming the right of use but do not inhibit that use.

footpaths

urban artefacts

powerlines

roads

kerbs

fences

Tangible

(metaphysical)

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cane and coal

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 01 Welcome to Mackay sign.

Whilst it is boundaries that are through to delineate property, these things do not adequately define the paradigms by which property becomes nebulous, where it stores value or rises and falls by the crest of booms and busts. I have experienced this paradigm through my hometown of Mackay in North Queensland, a mostly isolated town that has two main exports, cane and coal. The mining boom brought boats, motorbikes, and jet skis and an inhabited civic interior, while the bust doubled unemployment and decreased property prices by up to 65%, leaving the city largely vacant.

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THE PARTS. MAJOR PROJECT. Fig. 02 Mapping the notable vacancy of Bridge Street, Mackay.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

A two minute walk down Mackay’s “CBD” or it’s equivalent of a high street shows a largely unihabited interior, majority of shops are closed - a consequence of high unemployment and declining property prices. While statistics show that North/Regional Queensland is moving past its year long down turn, walking through the CBD you wouldn’t be able to tell.

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Fig. 03 There are 24 coal mines in the Isaac Regional Council area nad they produce about half of Queensland’s coal exports.

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Fig. 04 Coal exports are loaded up at Hay Point just south of Mackay.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Dubbed “The Quiet Australian’s” by Scott Morrison after a sweeping win in Rural and Regional Queensland last federal election, Mackay’s hesitancy to move away from fossil fuels could partially be blamed for the said property bust. The federal MP for the Division of Dawson is George Christensen, widely known for his social conservatism, his climate change denial and his promulgation of misinformation about COVID-19.

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the local

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Fig. 01 The original Richmond Town Hall building.

Relating itself to Mackay, Bridge Road in Richmond become a place to investigate the material and immaterial consequences of property. It’s reported to have a 25% commercial vacancy rate and a harsh infrastructural interior. The locus of the investigation surrounding the Richmond City Hall, home of the Yarra City Council as the corporeal body of the formless ‘market’ in which property becomes official record.

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arkets et M e r t ll S de a le

d Bowls Club on m ch

ET R T S H C R U H C

Rich m

own Hall dT on

D A O R E GD I R B

Fig. 02 Site map of Bridge Road and Gleadall Street.

MAJOR PROJECT.

While the town hall acted as the anchor for the project, sitting as this monument to property within it’s surroundings - there were other interesting points of contention surrounding its peripheries. Gleadall Street hosts a series of ad hoc and makeshift stalls on a Saturday morning for the local farmers markets, blurring the boundaries of public and private use within the street. Richmond Bowls Club’s members protested the building of a school in the adjacent carpark to their site as it would “ruin their greens”, quite ironic that there is a preference for grass upkeep over the education of children. Nonetheless, if anything, the sites have an awfully strange title boundary - the carpark of the bowl’s club encroaches on the school’s title boundary, causing a weird jut and there is a shared plot for the town hall and old police station. Left over gaps surround the western side of the town hall - a place where no one owns.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 03 Existing conditions of Richmond Town Hall and its peripheries. 23

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Fig. 04 Existing conditions of Richmond Bowls Club and Town Hall adjacencies.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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Fig. 05 Richmond Town Hall on AFL grand final night.

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Fig. 06 Richmond Union Bowling Club.

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Fig. 07 Makeshift barriers line Gleadall Street on a Saturday morning.

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THE PARTS. Fig. 08 Richmond Tigers mural.

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 09 The ad-hoc economy of the farmers markets.

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the periphery

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Aldo Rossi’s understanding of the periphery presented a new urban reality that contained the seeds of the future city. In Rossi’s writings, the periphery is often described in conflicted terms; despite the physical degradation and loss of traditional city form, this new frontier holds potential and may be evidence of a transitional phase in social relations. Although he argues, “the periphery could be a regressive force, for the making of consumers, new markets and facilitating the passive absorption of subjects into advanced capitalism”.

Fig. 01 Whilst the site sits on the periphery of Hoddle’s Grid, it presents an important mediation on the civic pre-conditions laid out by Hoddle.

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Fig. 02 Cover of Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City, 1966.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 03 The Analogous City, Aldo Rossi, 1976

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stored, preserved, archived

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 01 For 67 dollars and 66 cents and a 10-day turnaround, you are able to purchase a title certificate of your property to hang in your home. The Land Data website asserts whilst only commemorative, the title certificate is a decorative memento that celebrates property ownership and makes pride of ownership tangible. This cannot be used for any legal purpose.

It could be understood that if that which is owned lies on the interior of the land titles office, its effects lie on the outside of it. Property in this instance is commanded by the head, yet it is expressed in different forms and gestures. In this project the land titles office, the title certificate, and the place that stores the title boundary is considered the jumping off point - I am interested in the effects that it holds on its periperhies. If the value for property lies within these rooms, stacked in rolls of paper - what is its effects on the built environment that surrounds it? 35

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THE PARTS. Fig. 01 Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck, two of the Shays Rebellion Regulators, from a 1787 woodcut on the cover of Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack.

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Theories of property - who owns what and what they can do with it - hitch buildings to legal and financial systems. Real property, as opposed to personal property, includes land and things attached to it. While built on centuries of common law, a system of real property depends on continuously updated record-keeping. The registration, storage, and verification of official information on land ownership make up the program of the Hall of Records.

In 1786, Massachusetts farmers, back home from the American Revolution, marched on local courthouses to interrupt foreclosure proceedings. Postware taxes were high to defray the cost of war and the state government refused demands to issue paper money, leaving debts payable only in scarce gold and silver. As farmers failed in covering their mortgage payments, foreclosures spread. Eventually the veterans rebelled. They called themselves the Regulators and their emblem was a sprig of hemlock. Advancing from town to town, they chased out lawyers, destroyed court records and restored foreclosed lands to their previous owne The Middlesex Registry of Deeds was relocated, a monument to the mortgage’s contested power, one small modification in the continuous adaption of a system of power to threats of disruption: a demonstation of how architecture instantiates the social facts produced by the market.

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Fig. 02 Middlesex County Registry of Deeds, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Fig. 03 Plan Department, Middlesex County Registry of Deeds, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Fig. 04 The abandoned former Victorian Land Title’s Office at 283 Queen Street.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 05 The abandoned former Victorian Land Title’s Office.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 06 The abandoned former Victorian Land Title’s Office.

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Fig. 07 Victorian Land Titles Office sale for privitisation.

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Fig. 08 Proposal for a 30-storey commercial tower to host a Greek Museum by Bates Smart on the site of the former land titles office.

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THE PARTS. Fig. 08 Historic title documents found in the Public Record Office Victoria’s archive.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 09 Historic title documents found in the Public Record Office Victoria’s archive.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 10 Title documents show layered traces of previous owners.

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occupation / re-occupation

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 01 The infrastructure of domestic solidarity, Het Nieuwe Instituut on the squatting as a spatial practice.

The project undertakes the process of injecting a series of small scale, formal and informal objects within the site. This act makes use of informal objects to delineate an occupation of a site through Heidegger’s understanding of an object’s ability to “become something of explicit awareness”. The objects take precedent from the Aboriginal tent embassy, which for decades has occupied the lawns of old parliament house as a political re-occupation of indigenous land and the subsequent calls for land-rights for First Nation’s People. Also taking precedent from the practice of squatting through the appropriation of space, which overtime has become to represent a radical new approach to urban development.

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THE PARTS. Fig. 02 The additions of architecture added overtime on an abandoned house occupied by squatters, Het Nieuwe Instituut on the squatting as a spatial practice.

MAJOR PROJECT. Fig. 03 Architecture of Appropriation. On Squatting as Spatial Practice Exhibition. The addition of a stair to the main building bypasses the entrace to create an urban addition.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 04 A squatting manual with the slogan ‘Save a building, occupy a building’ by Woningburo de Kraker, May 1969. Collection: International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Fig. 05 White Houses Plan pamphlet by Provo movement, April 1966. Collection: International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

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Fig. 06 The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is a permenent protest occupation site located on the front lawn of Old Parliament House. First established in 1972 as a protest against the McMahon government’s approach to Indigenous Australian land rights. The embassy has gained legal status of “adverse posession” through its prolonged political occupation.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 07 On 26 January 1972 four Indigenous men set up a beach umbrella on the lawns opposite Parliament House in Canberra. Describing the umbrella as the Aboriginal Embassy, the men were protesting the McMahon government’s approach to Indigenous land rights.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 08 Objects on the site take precedent from these informal occupations of site to provide both a political and social understanding of occupation outside of colonial law.

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sheds

MAJOR PROJECT.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 01 Vanna Venturi House, Robert Venture, 1964 in Philadelphia.

Robert Venturi’s book Complexity and Contradition in Architecture (published in 1966) can be descrived as a gentle manifesto for a non-straightforward archtiecture. Whilst his work with Denise Scott Brown on Learning from Las Vegas questions the role of the high street, something that the project began an interest with - Venturi continued to emphasize the communicative function of architecture through signs and symbols. One of the clearest examples is his firm’s design for the Best Products catalog showroom. An instance of what the architect called a “decorated shed,” the large, boxlike building was clad in decorative panels painted with oversized, colorful flowers—a pattern derived from the commercial wallpaper in Venturi and Scott Brown’s own bedroom, but also an homage to Pop art and popular culture. This major project is particualrly interested in the idea of how the proposed project, like that of a decorated shed or a big box can facilitate a conversation around the architecture of infrastructure and their ability to contain urban approaches, technical resolution and civicness.

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THE PARTS. Fig. 02 Vanna Venturi House, Robert Venture, 1964 in Philadelphia.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 03 Vanna Venturi House, Robert Venture, 1964 in Philadelphia.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 04 National Collegiate Football Hall of Fame in New Brunswick, NJ by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, 1967.

Fig. 05 National Collegiate Football Hall of Fame in New Brunswick, NJ by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, 1967.

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civil infrastructure

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BUILDING LINE

I.O

BACKFILL WITH CLASS 3 RECYCLED C.R WETMIX FOOTPATH

REINSTATE FOOTPATH AS PER YSD401

P.V.C CONNECTOR EXISTING PROPERTY DRAIN 100mm P.V.C SEWER CLASS PIPE CONNECT TO EXISTING DRAIN WITH PLUMB-QUICK RUBBER ADOPTER

BARREL

50mm CLASS 3 RECYCLE C.R WETMIX BASE

ELEVATION

FRCJ.HARDIE SADDLE TO SUIT BARREL DIAMETER. NEATLY CUT BARREL DRAIN AND APPLY RECOMMENDED EPOXY TO SADDLE & BARREL.

GENERAL NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

INSTALLATION WORK TO INCLUDE ALL CONNECTIONS AT KERB AND BUILDING LINE. ALL PROPERTY DRAINS TO BE DIRECTED AWAY FROM VEHICLE CROSSINGS. PIPES TO BE LAID 90 DEGREES TO THE BUILDING LINE WHEREVER POSSIBLE AND THERE SHOULD BE NO BEND BETWEEN BUILDING LINE AND FACE OF KERB. ALL CONNECTIONS TO BE INSPECTED AND APPROVED BY COUNCIL SUPERVISOR BEFORE BACKFILLING. WHERE PRACTICAL INSPECTION OPENING (I.O.) IS TO BE LOCATED ON PRIVATE PROPERTY.

Yarra YSD106 Fig. 01Standard: & 02 Yarra City Council standard details Drawing Title:

PROPERTY DRAIN CONNECTION TO STREET DRAIN Scale at A4 N.T.S REV DATE DRAWN BY A 29/11/07 HL B 30/04/12 HL

Richmond Town Hall 333 Bridge Road Richmond PO Box 168 Richmond 3121 Phone (03) 9205 5010 Fax (03) 8417 6666

Infrastructure space, similarly, to architectural space, is often deployed as a kit’ of parts or standard details, filed into an adminis¬trative system and brought out when a new bus stop or road needs to be built. While inevitable, its control over both human (where to walk, the establishment of urban thresholds), and non-human (water, lizards, detritus) entities is undoubted. This piecemeal control of urban disposition contributes greatly to the very ad hoc nature of Bridge Road. By taking the Yarra City Councils Standard details and abstracting them into place with the objects, the project begins to create collective and repeatable language. The abstraction of the details obtained by Yarra City Council questions the projects ability to contend with things not usually contended with in architecture. As the additional layer of boundaries on the sight, not generally interacted with or even seen, the project layers information of the civil services required to maintain sites, and those that are responsible to the owner of the property.

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Fig. 03 The site plan shows the layering of additional information of the site - assets that may not be seen but still exist as a boundary within the site.

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THE PARTS. RL -0.975 RL 0.00

RL -0.128

MAJOR PROJECT.

RL 0.122 RL -0.128

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RL 0.122 RL -0.128

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the ground plane and the use of marking

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 01 Graphic steps resemble the use of two dimensional drawings, Lutejens Padmanabhan, Zurich 2018.

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Fig. 02 Adolf Loos’ House for Josephine Baker, unbuilt. The building contains a formal rationale and experiential richness that is emblematic of modernism’s slowely coalescing intensities of skin, interiority, hygiene, corporeality and transparency.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 03 House for Josephine Baker, Adolf Loos, unbuilt.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 04 GARRU NGAJUU NGAAY (magpie, I see) by Brook Andrew.

GARRU NGAJUU NGAAY (magpie, I see) is a commissioned artwork for the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) by Brook Andrew. The wall drwing incorporates the use of text and new with bold colours white, black, red, blue and yellow - that reference both the Aboriginal Flag and the Union Jack. In this instance, the wall drawing takes over the former Land and Title Building which was recently renovated to become MAMA’s collection exhibition room. The use of marking can become a strong motif for the deliniation of space and as a way to reclaim or reoccupy both land and architecture. The use of two dimensional marking within the project aim to create a replica of the two dimensional drawings found within that of a title boundary, but also hint at a new forming presence within the project - one that can be read and felt, but is not entirely tangible. The imaging of the project also inspired by the works of artists Jeffrey Smart, whose work speaks of a particularly suburban context. The banality of the suburbs is represented in a way examplifies the mystique of the periphery and it’s ability to hold meaning read differently to that of a city centre. His paintings present a stillness, an imagining of this is how it has always been.

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Fig. 05 Jeffrey Smart, Bus terminus, 1973. , c.1925.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 06 Jeffrey Smart, The construction Fence, 1978

Fig. 07 Jeffrey Smart, The Cleaners, 2004

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on representation

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 01 Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida’s project for Parc de la Villete.

The informal and physical objects of the mechanisms of property are then documented and abstracted within the site. Much like Eisenman and Derrida’s adapted project for Parc de la Villete, the project becomes a study of time – past, present and future. To this end, analogies are made between conditions that existed prior to the site, its contours and ecology. The informal occupation of elements of Parliament house, which shares both traces of time and power within its walls. The present, the conditions of the Town Hall and Parliament’s architectural grids that as Pier Aureli describes are derivative formal orders proved to be a powerful form of spatial indexing. And a monument to the land surveyor, through a scaled Theodolite that surveys the street. Representation within the project has played an important role to show both the timescale elements of the acts and relate the project back to the wider lineage in the archtiectural profession. 71

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Fig. 02 Bryan Cantley, Dirty Geometries, 1998.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 03 John Hejduk, Victims, 1984.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 04 Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida’s project for Parc de la Villete.

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Fig. 05 The Title Plan document of the Richmond Town Hall.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 06 Fragment of the Forma Urbis Romae. Image: Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project.

Fig. 07 Plan of Benedectine Monastery, known as the Plan of St. Gall, ca. 830.

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Fig. 06 Thomas Demand and Caruso St John Architects, Nagelhaus, 2007. , c.1925.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 07 Thomas Demand, Social Housing, 2003. , c.1925.

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production

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Fig. 01 Monument to C.H. Bennet sits at the edge of the site of the Town Hall.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 02 The Richmond Town Hall and its adjacencies.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

If the Town Hall is a monument to the market of property, it is recognised in Alois Riegl’s understanding that “a monument is a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies (or a complex accumulation thereof) alive and present in the consciousness of future generations”. Other monuments also sit on the edge of the site, that of the memorial of C.H Bennet, apparently striking an astonishing resemblance to the councilman and a memorial erected by “good friends”. The side reads, “Formed on the good old plan, a true and brave and downright honest man.” Bennett sits as an idle figure watching over both the street and the town hall, despite being apart of a family dynasty that rule the council and monopolised council seats, awarding friends and relatives council jobs before an enquiry into election rigging took place. The memorial is thus a monument for the manifestation of the power that sits within the walls of the town hall.

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La on nd blo Tit ck les in Off big ice sp en din g

Fig. 03 The mechanisms of property within reach of the town hall.

MAJOR PROJECT.

Fig. 04 The mechanisms of property within reach of the town hall.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Fig. 05 Week 5 panel work in progress

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Week 5 Panel

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JEAN-MARIE SPENCER

WEEK FIVE

THE PARTS.

& ANDRE BONNICE

Commercial Instruments

Three Constituent Parts Major Project Week 5 Semester 2, 2021

MAJOR PROJECT.

DARCIE

VELLA

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

WEEK FIVE

Framing the Periphery

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Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City

MAJOR PROJECT.

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WEEK FIVE

Boundaries

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Cane and Coal

0°44’

90°41’ 91°21’ 91°46’

0°59’

181°22’

0°44’

0°46’

90°46’

270°00’

MAJOR PROJECT.

Bridge Road Title Boundaries

Map of part of Richmond

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

DARCIE VELLA.

WEEK FIVE

Emptiness and Excess

The Interstitial Layer

MAJOR PROJECT.

Abandoned supermarkets in rural Queensland THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Melbourne urban sprawl DARCIE VELLA.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Richmond City Hall Yarra City Council

WEEK FIVE

The head, hands, knees or ankles

MAJOR PROJECT.

The Local

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WEEK FIVE

Monument

C.H. Bennett Memorial

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MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

WEEK FIVE

arkets et M tre ll S de ea Gl

Ri c

The monument for property lies within

the intagible walls

WEEK FIVE

Sites to operate on

wls Club d Bo on hm

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n atio St

nd Town H all mo ch

ormer Pol ice dF an

e Site Surv Th e

r’s yo Office

MAJOR PROJECT.

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

WEEK FIVE

Celebrating with pride

MAJOR PROJECT.

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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Physical and Immaterial Manifestations

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

Past, present and future

La on nd bl Title oc k sO in ff bi ice g sp en

ed, protested, stored and archived

WEEK FIVE

Documented, legalised, regulated, enforc

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MAJOR PROJECT.

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WEEK FIVE

Deconstruction of the edge

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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Week Five Text

When Robert Hoddle laid out the Melbourne city grid, he was advised by the government to not include any public space within the city. Redmond Barry spoke of the grid as a commercial instrument of property that should act without provision of civic or public spaces. Bridge Road, a connecting artery to the grid both south of Victoria Street and connected to Flinders Street through Wellington Parade has become both a commercial and civic hangover of these preconditions laid out by Hoddle.

I have experienced this paradigm through my hometown of Mackay, a mostly isolated town that has two main exports, cane, and coal. There is much contention about the location of Mackay with most people referring to it as a part or either Central or North Queensland, laying on the periphery between both, it itself is not sure where it sits. The mining boom brought boats, motorbikes, and jet skis and an inhabited civic interior, while the bust doubled unemployment and decreased property prices by up to 65%, leaving the city largely vacant.

Within this we may see two planes unfold; one immanent, where these fluctuations are reflected in the built world through either emptiness or excess, and the other immaterial, the financial, economic, and legal instruments by which these things are regulated.

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Architecture lies in between these two planes, the immanent vessel which is either full or empty, and the physical manifestation of these immaterial instruments. As the interstitial layer, architecture may thus become a tool by which these things can be both maintained and resisted, waning into both the metaphysical and the concrete. Architecture exists in the world as a property. This implies the right to build, access, exclude, claim, inhabit, abandon, demolish. To this end, the project will develop through an architectural enquiry of these conditions on an analogous site in the local, Bridge Road in Richmond, which is reported to have a 25% commercial vacancy rate and harsh infrastructural interior. The locus of this investigation will surround the Richmond City Hall and its peripheries, as an architectural enquiry into the spatial conditions and relationships that surround, govern, and influence it.

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

If that which is owned lies on the interior, of which the town hall is the head, its effects thus lie on the outside, in the hands, knees or ankles. Property in this instance is a body, commanded by the head, yet expressed in different forms and gestures. The town hall lay as the monument of authority and rule of law within its surroundings. Starkly isolated, it becomes the corporeal body of the formless ‘market’ in which property thus becomes official record. If the Town Hall is a monument to the market of property, it is recognised in Alois Riegl’s understanding that “a monument is a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies (or a complex accumulation thereof) alive and present in the consciousness of future generations”. Other monuments also sit on the edge of the site, that of the memorial of C.H Bennet, apparently striking an astonishing resemblance to the councilman and a memorial erected by “good friends”. The side reads, “Formed on the good old plan, a true and brave and downright honest man.” Bennett sits as an idle figure watching over both the street and the town hall, despite being apart of a family dynasty that rule the council and monopolised council seats, awarding friends and relatives council jobs before an enquiry into election rigging took place. The memorial is thus a monument for the manifestation of the power that sits within the walls of the town hall. The Town Hall will act as an anchor for the project, whilst simultaneously investigating both the mechanisms and boundaries that operate around it. The ad hoc and makeshift stalls that reside on the blurred boundary of Gleadell Street on a Saturday Morning, the Richmond Bowls Club whose members protested the development of a school on the adjacent site as it would ruin their greens and the land surveyor’s office who resides across the road are all places to start. Perhaps, the real monument for property lies within intangible walls of the invisible title boundary, in stacks of paper within the land surveyor’s office, or sitting behind the receptionist of the Land Titles Office, whom in which you mustn’t speak to without an appointment. Yet for 67 dollars and 66 cents and a 10-day turnaround, you are able to purchase a title certificate of your property to hang in your home. The Land Data website asserts whilst only commemorative, the title certificate is a decorative memento that celebrates property ownership and makes pride of ownership tangible. This cannot be used for any legal purpose. The project then speculates on the mechanisms that overtime have allowed for the both the physical and immaterial manifestation of turning property ownership into power. Whilst on the periphery, the site is placed within reach of these mechanisms. They include but are not limited to, the land surveyors and lawyers’ office, where property is documented and legalised and moves into the tangible realm of paper. Parliament house, where these things are both regulated and enforced but also are protested and resisted. The land titles office, or land registry services where it is stored and preserved, and the

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public records office where it is archived.

The informal and physical objects of these mechanisms are then documented and abstracted within the site. Much like Eisenman and Derrida’s adapted project for Parc de la Villete, the project becomes a study of time – past, present and future. To this end, analogies are made between conditions that existed prior to the site, its contours and ecology. The informal occupation of elements of Parliament house, which shares both traces of time and power within its walls. The present, the conditions of the Town Hall and Parliament’s architectural grids that as Pier Aureli describes are derivative formal orders proved to be a powerful form of spatial indexing. And a monument to the land surveyor, through a scaled Theodolite that surveys the street.

As if to challenge these political and geographical contentions that sit within the site, the project attempts to both blur and to deny the boundary as a single strong figure and to suggest that the edge can also be a weak figure. Within this the project looks at the boundary, as something that usually holds the power of property within it and to determine it as a multivalent weak figure, that it is possible to pull apart, open it up and to reveal an occupation that could sit beyond the prescribed boundary. The deconstruction of the objects is seen as a way to reclaim, challenge and occupy the boundary, in turn forming a small scale and incremental urbanism while setting up the projects framework to disrupt the everyday realm and highlight the political aspirations of the project.

The objectives of this investigation will define the framework by which the series of civic and public architectural interventions will begin to operate. By both ensuing and resisting the boundary as it stands, the project will aim to incessantly cut away, re-define, negotiate, and challenge the way in which property rewards the claims of some people to finite and critical goods, and to deny the claims to the same goods by others.

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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mapping the occupation

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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just really clearly and succinctly define it

MAJOR PROJECT. THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

This major project is not.. This major project is not a project that looks to rethink the role of retail within the inner and outer city suburbs. This major project is not an enquiry into property rights in the form of housing, although it is understood that the right to housing is a fundamental human right. This major project is not a dream like ideal of the upheaval of property ownership in all forms, rather a renegotiation of its procurement in order to create small scale incisions within the existing urban fabric.

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As an analytical project

This major project is an enquiry into the intangible and immaterial forces of property and the mechanisms that allow it to exist.

This major project looks at these forces and seeks to recognise how they affect the built environment.

The major project aims to facilitate the appropriation of spaces for collective good, by exploring, “ambiguities of proprietorship, of aesthetics, of social relations and the political economy of everyday life as they collide” (David Harvey).

This major project uses David Harvey’s analysis of the boulevard as a public space, or as an arena of political deliberation and participation through the act of a land-grab or appropriation of space as a spatial practice.

This major project makes use of informal objects to delineate an occupation of a site through Heidegger’s understanding of an object’s ability to “become objects of explicit awareness”.

This major project recognises Aureli’s notions of addressing the floor plan (more broadly architecture and its representational methods) as a “concrete abstraction”, as something that even in its own abstract status of notation is both determined by and determinate of concrete conditions and the way in which we dwell, inhabit, and produce space.

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As a formal project This major project looks at architecture as lying within the physical manifestation of these metaphysical instruments, and questions how to represent and therefore resist them in the concrete form. This major project seeks to understand the way in which architectures effects may not be site specific, but how they are relational, moving from the inside out. This major project speculates on the infrastructures and systems required overtime to establish a reoccupation of land within Australia, through a reconfiguration of a new found boundary. This major project claims that a national condition, that of the property market’s ability to store value through busts or booms, in turn effects urban and public space, and applies it to a local condition in Melbourne.

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As a propositional project

This major project takes the apparatuses that govern property ownership and undergoes a process of abstraction that brings tangible consequences to the organisation of built space.

This major project is an establishment of a new order for the creation of the architectural edge and the property title, through the exploration of where they are both born and stored (the land surveyor and the land titles office).

This major project establishes a new way to recognize property, through its inception to its entombment, and in doing so aims to continually renegotiate and recognise a deconstruction of the boundary or edge.

This major project represents the idea of collective action while waiting for change.

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103

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Week 10 Panel

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JEAN-MARIE SPENCER

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& ANDRE BONNICE

Commercial Instruments

Three Constituent Parts Major Project Week 10

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the

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Framing Periphery

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Boundaries

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Emptiness and Excess

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the local

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Abandoned supermarkets in rural Queensland

Melbourne urban sprawl

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Glea del lS tre et M ar ts ke

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occupation / re occupation

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Rich m

Richmo nd Bo

CHURCH STREET

lub sC wl

own Hall dT on

BRIDGE ROAD

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the intangible walls

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celebrating with pride THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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physical manifestations

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

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ng di La on nd bl Titl oc es k in Off bi ice g sp en

reclaiming the boundary

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The Boulevard

Spatial Appropriation and Civil Boundaries

The Technical College of Site Surveying The Land Titles Office

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documented legalised regulated enforced protested stored archived

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Yarra City Council Property Boundary Drain

I.O

BUILDING LINE

and Kerb Channel Typical Detail BACKFILL WITH CLASS 3 RECYCLED C.R WETMIX FOOTPATH

REINSTATE FOOTPATH AS PER YSD401

P.V.C CONNECTOR EXISTING PROPERTY DRAIN 100mm P.V.C SEWER CLASS PIPE CONNECT TO EXISTING DRAIN WITH PLUMB-QUICK RUBBER ADOPTER

BARREL

50mm CLASS 3 RECYCLE C.R WETMIX BASE

ELEVATION

civil boundaries

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civil boundaries

Yarra City Council Vehicle Bluestone Crossing Typical Detail

FRCJ.HARDIE SADDLE TO SUIT BARREL DIAMETER. NEATLY CUT BARREL DRAIN AND APPLY RECOMMENDED EPOXY TO SADDLE & BARREL.

GENERAL NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

Yarra Standard: YSD106 Drawing Title:

PROPERTY DRAIN CONNECTION TO STREET DRAIN Scale at A4 N.T.S REV DATE DRAWN BY A 29/11/07 HL B 30/04/12 HL

Richmond Town Hall 333 Bridge Road Richmond PO Box 168 Richmond 3121 Phone (03) 9205 5010 Fax (03) 8417 6666

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RL 0.122 RL -0.128

RL -0.975 RL 0.00 RL -0.128

COSTING ESTIMATIONS

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS. COST ESTIMATION (EX. GST) MANUFACTURE

ITEM 1

GS3.1 - ENTRY SIGN: BASIC (DOUBLE SIDED)

$4,927.50

$2,744.00

$742.50

$1,218.00

$708.75

PS3.4A - DIRECTIONAL SIGN: BLADE (SINGLE SIDED)

$2,744.00

RS3.1A - TRAIL SIGN 1: BLADE (SINGLE SIDED)

$2,744.00 $2,646.00

FS3.2 - FACILITY ENTRY: CANTILEVER (DOUBLE SIDED)

$438.75

FS3.3 - FACILITY SIGN: CANTILEVER (DOUBLE SIDED)

$1,764.00

FS3.4 - FACILITY SIGN: REAR MOUNT

$770.00

$843.75

TS3.1 - TEMPORARY SIGN (PANEL & PAINTING ONLY - GRAPHICS TO BE ORGANISED BY YOU AT SUPERSCREEN)

$266.00

TS3.2 - TEMPORARY SIGN (PANEL & PAINTING ONLY - GRAPHICS TO BE ORGANISED BY YOU AT SUPERSCREEN)

$641.25

$392.00

TS3.3 - TEMPORARY SIGN (PANEL & PAINTING ONLY - GRAPHICS TO BE ORGANISED BY YOU AT SUPERSCREEN)

$420.00

TS3.4 - TEMPORARY SIGN (PANEL & PAINTING ONLY - GRAPHICS TO BE ORGANISED BY YOU AT SUPERSCREEN)

$756.00

CITYWIDE SIGNS & NEON PHONE: (03) 9357 0570

Yarra City Council Light Pole with Luminaire and Signage Standard Details

LEAD TIME: 4-6 WEEKS PRICE BASED ON SUPPLY ONLY

SUPERSCREEN PHONE: (03) 9510 6559

ARTWORK REFERENCE

GS3.1.ai CONSTRUCTION PACK REFERENCE

GS3_1-01 (PG6)

FRONT VIEW

(Scale 1:50)

SIGN TYPE

DATE

ENTRY SIGN: BASIC

13.05.2011

COMMENTS

- FOR PEDESTRIAN & VEHICULAR TRAFFIC - RECTANGULAR FORMAT - YARRA BRANDING - DOUBLE SIDED - DIMENSIONS: 4500 x 640 x 100

civil boundaries

SIDE VIEW (Scale 1:50)

SCALE

1:50 @ A4 DRAWING REFERENCE

GS3.1 Yarra Standard:YSD1205 Drawing Title:

WEEK TEN.

DIADEM RECOMMENDS:

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$742.50 $742.50 $978.75

$1,764.00

14 15

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$742.50

$2,744.00

RS3.2A - TRAIL SIGN 2: BLADE (SINGLE SIDED) FS3.1 - FACILITY SIGN: POST (SINGLE SIDED)

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$978.75 $2,362.50

PS3.3A - NOTICE BOARD: BLADE (DOUBLE SIDED) PS3.4 - DIRECTIONAL SIGN: FINGER BLADE

9 10 11

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$2,362.50

$3,024.00 $4,872.00

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$4,320.00

$6,328.00

$5,138.00

PS3.2 - PARK ENTRY (DOUBLE SIDED) PS3.3 - NOTICE BOARD: POST (SINGLE SIDED)

COST ESTIMATION (EX. GST) INSTALLATION $2,632.50

$5,502.00

GS3.3 - ENTRY SIGN: WIDE (DOUBLE SIDED, ILLUMINATED)

PS3.1 - PRIMARY PARK SIGN (DOUBLE SIDED, NON ILLUMINATED)

5 6

$2,436.00

GS3.2 - ENTRY SIGN: STANDARD (DOUBLE SIDED, ILLUMINATED)

TYPICAL LIGHT POLE WITH LUMINAIRE

Scale at A4 N.T.S

REV DATE DRAWN BY A 18/12/18 OK

Richmond Town Hall 333 Bridge Road Richmond PO Box 168 Richmond 3121 Phone (03) 9205 5010 Fax (03) 8417 6666

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RL 0.122 RL -0.128

THREE CONSTITUENT PARTS.

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Week Ten Text

This project, entitled Three Constituent Parts, is the imagining of a reality set out through a series of acts into the near or distant future. Whilst it could begin now, it’s presence is established through a layered understanding of the boundary, and the subsequent influences and mechanisms of property, all of which propel the project from one outcome to another.

Bridge Road, a connecting artery to the grid both south of Victoria Street and connected to Flinders Street through Wellington Parade has become both a commercial and civic hangover of these preconditions laid out by Hoddle.

I have experienced this paradigm through my hometown of Mackay, a mostly isolated town that has two main exports, cane, and coal. The mining boom brought boats, motorbikes, and jet skis and an inhabited civic interior, while the bust doubled unemployment and decreased property prices by up to 65%, leaving the city largely vacant.

To this end, the project has developed through an architectural enquiry of these conditions on an analogous site in the local, Bridge Road in Richmond, which is reported to have a 25% commercial vacancy rate and harsh infrastructural interior. The locus of this investigation has surrounded the Richmond City Hall and its peripheries, as an architectural enquiry into the spatial conditions and relationships that surround, govern, and influence it.

MAJOR PROJECT.

The Town Hall acts as an anchor for the project, whilst simultaneously investigating the effects on the urban conditions that surround it. The ad hoc and makeshift stalls that reside on the blurred boundary of Gleadell Street on a Saturday Morning and the Richmond Bowls Club whose members protested the development of a school on the adjacent site as it would ruin their greens were all progenitors for the siting. I suspect that the real value for property lies within the intangible walls of the invisible title boundary, in stacks of paper within the land surveyor’s office, or sitting behind the receptionist of the Land Titles Office, whom in which you mustn’t speak to without an appointment.

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For 67 dollars and 66 cents and a 10-day turnaround, you are able to purchase a title certificate of your property to hang in your home. The Land Data website asserts whilst only commemorative, the title certificate is a decorative memento that celebrates property ownership and makes pride of ownership tangible. This cannot be used for any legal purpose. The project speculates on the mechanisms that overtime have allowed for the both the physical and immaterial manifestation of transforming property ownership into power. Whilst located on the periphery, the site is placed within reach of these mechanisms. They include but are not limited to, the land surveyors and lawyers’ office, where property is documented and legalised and moves into the tangible realm of paper. Parliament house, where these things are both regulated and enforced but also are protested and resisted. The land titles office, or land registry services where it is stored and preserved, and the public records office where it is archived. The project is broken down into a series of acts that build upon each other overtime, through a succession of informal and formal, permanent, and permeable occupations. The acts renegotiate with the specific conditions of the site in order to create small scale incisions within the existing urban fabric. Act one begins by recognising the boulevard as a public space, or as an arena of political and economic participation. The street in this instance acts as an ad-hoc economy for the precinct in which rows of informal shelter line Gleadell St on a Saturday morning to re-claim a use outside of its intended purpose. By establishing and mapping the occupation of the street, through a series of marked landscape interventions, the projects begin to establish this interior space as one for spatial occupation. The ground plane offers the opportunity to graphically represent this informal occupation and in turn resembling the two-dimensional drawing of that found in a title plan. This strategy hints of a new territory forming within the precinct. And becomes an important mediation in transforming the informality of the public space into a political organisation of space, of which architectural form may not simply be a consequence but a powerful and influential political example Act two undertakes the process of injecting a series of small scale, formal and informal objects within the site. This act makes use of informal objects to delineate an occupation of a site through Heidegger’s understanding of an object’s ability to “become something of explicit awareness”.

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The objects take precedent from the Aboriginal tent embassy, which for decades has occupied the lawns of old parliament house as a political reoccupation of indigenous land and the subsequent calls for land-rights for First Nation’s People.

Also taking precedent from the practice of squatting through the appropriation of space, which overtime has become to represent a radical new approach to urban development.

The objects shift their focus from the in-between boundary of the street to the edge condition. They not only challenge the boundary of the title but begin to challenge a secondary boundary, one of civil management through a series of pre-existing constraints.

This piecemeal control of urban disposition contributes greatly to the very ad hoc nature of Bridge Road. By taking the Yarra City Councils Standard details and abstracting them into place with the objects, the project begins to create collective and repeatable language.

Act three positions itself as an architectural outcome achieved through the conglomeration of the prior acts. The Technical College of Site surveying exists as repercussion of the prior establishments of new boundaries within the site, in turn responding to the requirements for how it is taught and documented.

The slippage in the floor plates creates a spatial misalignment that responds to the existing title boundaries of the site. Where the floor plate shifts from the prescribed form of the existing site, there becomes the fossilisation of the prior objects, such as the shed, into an architectural form.

Small moments created by these misalignments allow for an architectural expression defined by a negotiation in thresholds.

MAJOR PROJECT.

In turn an entry threshold entering into a subsequent entry threshold aligns itself with the repercussions of the expression of these problems The rigid elements within the program juxtapose the materiality of the shed to create solid elements within the façade – in turn creating a negotiation between program, material, and light. These negotiations result in a series of void spaces, that create carefully nuanced lighting conditions within the interior spaces

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The building mediates with the precinct through a strong geometrical insertion, whereby the school reclaims an active presence and also suggests an active role for the school in political future of Melbourne. The project thus acts as an instrument in which architecture gives substance to the expression of these problems, and questions how to challenge our perceived understanding of the boundary. I am interested in how these points of difference may play out within the building and relate themselves back to more informal occupations of a site – how architecture may work with things not generally considered or contended with. This major project aims to establish a new way to recognize property, through its inception to its entombment, seemingly ending the succession of acts with the expression of a Land Titles Office. If that which is owned lies on the interior, of which the Land Titles Office is the head, its effects thus lie on the outside, in the hands, knees or ankles. Property in this instance is a body, commanded by the head, yet expressed in different forms and gestures. This major project grapples with the intangible and immaterial forces of ownership and presents an idea of what happens in the in-between while we wait for change.

113

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