Venice Biennale
Trinity College Project 100 University of Melbourne
A1 Panel
A2 Panels
A4 Panels
Trinity College Project 100 University of Melbourne Building Area
3900m2 A hall of residence for 110 students
Location
Parkville Melbourne, Australia
Est. Completion
2020
Hayball and Openwork Landscape are currently undertaking the ‘Project 100’ design commission at Trinity College, a ground-breaking concept in student residences for Melbourne University. Conceived as a contemporary building set within in an historic and iconic 19th Century cultivated landscape, surrounded by formal ‘Oxbridge’ style campus buildings. Our approach is collaborative, working with a range of organisations interested in the concept of repair and rejuvenation as well as gradual and organic ‘slow site’ architecture principals in order to gain a better understanding of the deep connection to indigenous culture and the profound importance of ancient and modern landscapes to the College, including its central playing field known as the Bulpadock and the Project 100 site. The fold informs our approach to understanding a hidden collision of time and place and asks how we can renegotiate boundaries across a site and its forms. This understanding informs a strategy that unpacks palimpsests, latent conditions, and refreshes other ephemeral modes. In asking about what a place might look like influenced at its inception by indigenous and spatial environments, these other layers may invert the 19th century space and create speculative counterpoints that reframe the traditional architecture and landscape masterplan as an immersive experience.
Reconsidering a post-colonial perspective to emphasise a more horizontal and temporal perception of place, and rethinking what may have happened under different conditions, informs an evolutionary contemporary strategy. Indigenous planting interlaces with existing native and European deciduous tree-scape, and new built typology is reconstructed as a more porous interface. Rusticated masonry pitch and height are in effect realised as an escarpment (analogy) and a shifting landscape of transparency and solid masonry where critically, the inner program experience is pushed both inside and out, creating expanded configuration and sight lines, and imploding the 19th century brick and vine facades with punctuated windows. A non-exact, non-prescribed experience, landscape is the masterplan antiaesthetic, where the trace of walking informs immersive reconciliation of the material, ephemeral, and physical.
INDIGENOUS PLANTING PALETTE ECV 55
TREE
GROUND
Banksia marginata Eucalyptus pauciflora Eucalyptus viminalis
Arthropodium strictum Austrodanthonia caespitosa Austrostipa bigeniculata Austrostipa mollis
Bulbine bulbosa Carex breviculmis Dianella spp. Diuris spp.
Lomandra filiformis Microlaena stipoides var. Microtis spp. Poa labillardierei var.
Poa sieberiana Thelymitra spp. Themeda triandra