SECTIONS2

WORDS THANDI LANE

Welcome to Sections2, where we highlight the very best section drawings from architecture and design students from our many universities

OPPOSITE ‘1:25 Section’. BELOW ‘A Letter from a Friend’.

THE SONGENSHI RELIQUARY: A COLLOTYPE MEMORIAM FOR THE LONELY

Definitions: 1. The Japanese word Songenshi loosely translates to the phrase ‘Death With Dignity’. 2. The term Collotype refers to a printing method which began in the mid 19th century, a process capable of producing high quality continuous-tone photographs using negatives which are exposed onto gelatin sheets and then pressed with pigment inks. This project acknowledges Kodokushi, the Japanese phenomenon in which the elderly population are increasingly dying lonely deaths, remaining undiscovered for extended periods of time.

The Songenshi Reliquary gently redresses this experience within the enclave’s studioapartment, artisan-maker studios, semi-public memoriam and elective dying facility. Elderly guests exchange sovereignty over their final days through developing funeral portraits of the person that came before them, bearing witness to these photographs being committed to paper through the collotype printing process. This subtle intimacy promotes a sense of community through death, and offers each guest in turn a particular solace and purpose.

Nestled within an intimate urban block the Reliquary presents a strong interplay between built form and landscape. The formal arrangement of the two large roof structures suggest a building of quiet introspection, a gesture broken by the dynamic and yet ghostly centralised gabion spine which is home to a garden of dense bamboo, giving definition and life to an otherwise modest structure.

Its architecture and programme crucially eschew alienation and redundancy while evidencing a quiet tension wrought by diametrically opposing conditions: control and vulnerability, autonomy and intimacy.

THANDI LANE is a quietly passionate Master of Architecture student at the Melbourne School of Design, having first fulfilled her Bachelor of Architectural Design through the University of Queensland.

She prizes architecture as a vehicle for narrative, inspiration and care and sees endless possibilities for the interweaving of architecture within a rich tapestry of creative expression, earnestly pursuing these avenues of communication and storytelling within everything she does. This project is the culmination of a considered and purposeful approach to visual representation within her work, which speaks to the passage of time and mechanical processes, key themes addressed in the project’s programme and architectural expression. For many, plotter rendered drawing may be understood as a redundant form. Just as the elderly guests repudiate their redundancy through the various processes of the building however, so too was Thandi able to eschew that same redundancy through her illustrative process.