Reciprocity
LOWER POOL DESIGN STUDIO SEMESTER 2 2009
“Reciprocity often depends on architecture that is made up of, or broken down into, multiple elements. This combination of fragmentation and multiplicity serves to open the architectural work in such a way as to be able to engage the landscape not as opposite but as elements of connection and use, similar in kind to elements of architecture”. Anita Berrizbetita & Linda Pollak, Inside and Outside: Between Landscape & Architecture Our site is the unique urban system of the Abbotsford Convent complex and its immediate and adjacent context: the natural landscape of the Yarra river floodplain with its remnant pre-colonial qualities; the Collingwood Children’s’ farm, a working and educational farm; and the Convent now partially re-occupied and restablished as an arts precinct. One of the key concerns of the studio is an idea of sustainability that is informed by the principal of causal relationality –the bringing of things and systems into interconnected relationship - rather than the normative condition of alienation. The recent reopening of the convent, which is the dominant complex of buildings, and the diverse scope of cultural activity that it contains, reframes the existing fragmented and disassociated relationships across the site. New opportunities for exchange present themselves. Site and it’s relationship to the undertaking of architecture are the concern of this studio. Our conception of place is one that accounts for, and interrogates, the existing narratives, systems, patterns, assumptions and substance of occupation, activity and space. This includes the nature and status of the built environment, the river ecology, the ephemeral condition and the strata of history and memory – both extant and occluded. A range of analytical and design operations derived from the categories of threshold, reciprocity, passage and insertion is employed. The studio participants undertake a semester long act of knowing through repeated strategic design interventions via the mechanisms of drawing and making across a range of scales. This cultivates an immersive and subjective relationship with the multivalencies of place over time which effects new ways of seeing and thinking and hence conceptualisation and making. Reciprocity. Anna Johnson Damien Thackray