Upside-down Country

As each year post-settlement in Australia grinds on, how should we conceive of our place in the landscape, of the continent we have claimed as our own: are we custodians, masters, brokers, servants – and what is its place in our world of thought?’

AGENDA: it is these questions and more that frame the agenda of this studio. As architects how should we conceive of our place in the landscape and of the landscape itself? How should we respond to it, represent it and ultimately, what should we make in it – do in the landscape? What attitudes to the landscape do you bring and what new ones can be revealed and discovered? This agenda is positioned against a ubiquitous backdrop of architecture that risks casting questions of landscape as irrelevant. Nature and landscape cannot be background, or other but must be essential to any questions for the future of urban development. For this practice, a buildings capacity to belong to a wider territory, is a given. This can also be considered as a relational condition, extending beyond the built context, to include ecological systems, place, time, culture, nature and the land – a form of urbanism, but one that is free of the conventions of seeing buildings as the only reference point.

PROJECT: this studio explores the reciprocity between architecture and landscape on a site between the embankments of Forest Creek and its urbanised floodplain on Castlemaine’s periphery and in proximity to the nineteenth century goldrush sites of central Victoria. As a backdrop to this context is the campaign to win UNESCO recognition for Victoria’s goldfields: if successful this would see the regions landscapes gain world heritage significance. In response to these issues, the brief calls for a collection of small buildings with larger landscape infrastructure components. Collectively, these are to function as a visitor/orientation/interpretation facilities to the regions UNESCO listed heritage sites. Upside-down country – a term used by the local Dja Dja Wurrung people to describe the environmental degradation unleashed by the goldrush provides a counter reading – one that this studio will explore for its potential to consider broader issues around histories, modes of interpretation and heritage: and ways of acting in the present.

SYLLABUS: a site visit (Monday 24 July and Tuesday 25 July, approx $75) and several esquisses early in the semester to imagine the site and its relationship to the town, past and present, its landscape and territory – and how these are grounded within the architectural issues framing the studio. Secondly, using this site knowledge you are to focus on the major design project responding to the brief and studio agenda - designing a hybrid architecture-landscape. As a way into these issues you will begin the semster working on small scale architectural fragments, making a catalogue of both architectural and landscape fragments sourced from architectural precedent and Castlemaine, and then sited in relationship to local landscape conditions. How can architecture yield to the landscape? What are the opportunities for collaboration between architecture and landscape? At the completion of the semester, you will have a resolved project – one that works poetically to embed and hold complex narratives of place by working through abstract and more literal design methodologies and processes of translation (all embedded within the studio syllabus), but at all costs avoiding the nostalgic. You should expect to imagine the site and its relationship to the town, its landscape and territory as well as opening this to cultural and architectural references – equally immersed in the real and the imaginary.

Richard Black is a registered architect, educator, author and Associate Professor with RMIT. His teaching, design practice and research activities explore overlaps and adjacencies between architecture and landscape. With Anna Johnson he has co-authored several publications, most notably Living in the Landscape, Urban Sanctuary, and Setting Architecture: Neeson Murcutt Neille, all by Thames and Hudson. His design projects, have been exhibited in Europe, at Aedes Berlin, Galerie am Weissenhof Stuttgart, Architektur forum Tyrol, Venice and Rotterdam Architecture Biennales. Richard’s mapping of the Murray River floods, fieldwork and associated projects were exhibited and acquired by the Centre for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, USA.

DESIGN STUDIO: Upside-down Country

STUDIO LEADER: Richard Black

ARIF MOKHTAR, KATHLEEN BAINBRIDGE, ESTELLE ROMAN, KEVIN HUYNH, & GUEST CRITICS