RMIT Architecture - Sem 2 2011 Major Project Exhibition Catalogue

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RMIT University School of Architecture and Design Melbourne, Victoria Professor of Architecture Leon van Schaik Associate Professor Architecture Program Director Major Project Coordinator Melanie Dodd Associate Professor Major Project Coordinator Paul Minifie Major Project Committee Phil Burns Helen Walter Clementine Leigh Holly Au Catalogue Design Lily McBride-Stephens Danielle Peck Helen Walter Printing Dawn Press

Major Project at RMIT is the culminating design exploration of students of Architecture.

We expect this project to be adventurous and ambitious. It embodies all the energy and excitement about architecture that is needed to sustain creative practice for the ten years following graduation. The decade in which practice commences is an intense period in which learning how to create and or navigate practice tends to dominate thinking. Through this period the Major Project beams a light suffused with the joys of architecture and what it can and should give to our communities.

We celebrate this by awarding three awards to exemplars of this ambition: the Anne Butler Memorial Medal, the Antonia Bruns Medal, and the Leon van Schaik 25th Anniversary Peer Assessed Major Project Award.

The Anne Butler Memorial Medal, endowed in honour of an outstanding emerging practitioner, is awarded to a Major Project that exemplifies the goals of Major Project; the Antonia Bruns Medal, endowed to recall Antonia’s interest in the relation between film and architecture, is awarded to a Major Project that investigates the relationship between architectural representation, association and perception.

The Leon van Schaik 25th Anniversary Peer Assessed Major Project Award is a new bestowal. It celebrates my appointment as Head of Architecture at RMIT 25 years ago this October. It is decided by all Major Project students voting for what they view as the most adventurous and future-embracing project of the semester.

Leon van Schaik AO Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) Member of Major Project Moderation panel Chair of medal awarding panel (in absentia)

The Architecture Program at RMIT recognises that the successful practice of architecture has, as one pillar, the notion of craft, an accumulation of skills over time, gained under the guidance of those already recognised. It is a deep knowledge, accumulated by iteration and refinement, an incremental neuronal alignment of eye, hand and mind. The major project - an RMIT student's tenth such design project represents a meesterstuk, masterpiece, a work crafted at the highest level by which a student demonstrates their readiness to enter the profession.

It seems fully appropriate to thank the professional practices who have supported this exhibition and let this show be seen as an enterprise of both the profession and the academy. These projects mark an important threshold for an architect, a crossing between student and practitioner. While our students have, through their projects, defined our academy, now they will go on to shape the profession as graduates.

Craft, the well-wrought-ness of a project, is only one of it's key aspects. Another is the set of values, ideas and knowledge that is embodied in the project through it's intelligent and reflective making. At RMIT we ask our students to think of their major projects as the beginning of a mode of practice that will see them through their first decade as architects. These projects, then, are the germinants and precursors of our buildings and cities to come.

Paul Minifie Associate Professor Major Project Coordinator Melanie Dodd Associate Professor Architecture Program Director

This concluding semester of the Masters program – the Major Project – is experienced differently from the preceding years of studying architecture at RMIT: students set their own goals and are expected to be independent and self-directed. This hard-earned freedom allows students to pursue their passions, but it can be a lonely road.

This year sees current Masters students and recent graduates playing a central role in organising the RMIT Architecture Major Project Exhibition. Our aim in this role is to offer collegial support for Major Project students through planning and preparing for their culminating exhibition and accompanying catalogue to be worthy of their enormous efforts.

We hope to create more than an exhibition, but a true celebration in the hope that now and in years to come, we can continue to strengthen the bonds within our student community, its connection to the world of architecture beyond, and express the excitement and energy that the Major Project process generates.

2011 Major Project Committee Phil Burns Helen Walter Clementine Leigh Holly Au

Major Project Students

Khara Abate Aqilah Abd Hafidz Nur Safuraa Abd Razak Afiq Abd Samat Nur Asriah Abdul Talib Loren Adams Nik Aminaldin Sahar Arbab Duangkaew Bangsakun Debora Barton Jonathon Barzel Daniel Bennetts David Brodziak Thomas Caddaye Christopher Camerota Khai Ling Chan Ming How Chan Won Suk Choi David Christiansz Steven Chu Benjamin Clements Kasper Dunn William Golding David Greco John Hajko Zul Hafiz Hamzah Timothy Heron Keryn Herriman Alexandra Hore Takasumi Inoue Patrick Kenny Winnie Lam Luca Lana Jennie Lang Min Zhao Lee Shou Sheng Lee Soon Yee Lee Yi-Ting Lee Stella Lien Chen Liu Joanna Lo

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Major Project Students

Salvador Lopez Emily Lyons Patrick Macasaet Ashley Mackey Mhairi Macleod Ren Hao Mak Lauren Martin Nazo Mastura Lily McBride-Stephens Suraya Md Abdul Azis Jelena Modrinic Nurulain Mohd Noor Marnie-Lee Morieson Muizz Nazmi Aaron Neighbour Hun Lin Neo Vern Hun Ng Jonathan Ormrod Patrick Otares Georgina Prittie Aziana Rosedy Oscar Sainsbury Jian Xiong Seah Henry Sgourakis Margaret Sim Richard Siu Andreas Sivitos Amy Snoekstra Kiang How Tan Ming Vei Tan Fei Teng Emily Wallace Hattie Wang Erin Watson Nicholas Withey Brett Wittingslow Simon Wright Cynthia Yim Fang Yuan Bang Zhao

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The Beaumaris Bluff Advisors: Ed Carter + John Doyle

KHARA ABATE Beaumaris is, like many Melbourne suburbs facing the realities of change, a place of conflict. The dialogue between the opportunities and constraints of economic development, preservation, and public space, manifests itself in the bay where the historical narrative of event and place has made way for the privatised Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron. The architectural debate is stalled: a stand-off between local residents wanting recognition of their heritage and a contribution to their communal future, and the necessity for development.

subversive) concealing and exposure of building and landscape, and an uncovering and reinterpreting of old stories as new. The Beaumaris Bluff then becomes a building aggressively dug into its siteand one that allows both public space and privatised program to exist harmoniously side by side.

Mapping of views to the bay becomes a generator for the concealing and exposing of the project: historical assets re-translated are made clearly visible, whilst commercially orientated function is deliberately hidden.

This project explores the nature of this debate by suggesting that at its nexus lies the conjoining of public and private program, a selective (and

This decisively erosive architecture is ultimately a civic gesture and one that seeks a shared future of social prosperity.

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Home-ground Advisor: Paul Dash

AQILAH ABD HAFIDZ A site in West Footscray is the location for the proposal for supportive housing for the homeless, in a mixed-use development with commercial apartment accommodation and public facilities. The project’s siting, beside the Club facilities and ground for AFL team Western Bulldogs creates opportunities for the homeless to connect with the community.

The array of public programs are strategically designed to engage the homeless residents with the community as well as give them opportunities for activities to happen while they are in the process of making their life stable.

GORDON ST.

HOCKING ST.

Expanding on the existing program of the site, where sports education and the footy club facilities combine to activate the community, new programs are inserted into the site with high density residential towers for supportive youth housing and student accommodation, with other public facilities on the lower part. These facilities include an indoor

sports hall ,Victoria University Sport Science faculty, a new high school serving the expanding local population, a library, a small medical centre, parking and associated retail and commercial space. A small proportion of private apartments and office space are also allocated as part of the tower.

CROSS ST.

SITEPLAN/GROUNDPLAN

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WEST FOOTSCRAY TRAIN STATION

Mediating Conditions Advisors: Martyn Hook + Sam Rice

NUR SAFURAA ABD RAZAK This project questions the relationship between globalisation and local culture through the prism of urban development. Can urbanisation advance traditionally?

The relationship is tested on a site in Kuala Lumpur, on government-owned land in Kampong Bharu an inner-city area which retains, by choice, the grain and nature of a traditional rural Malay village.

Its proximity to the highly developed KL CBD, a zone of imported, blandly regionally nonspecific standard urban development, has put development pressure on the area, and there is a current proposal for a standard mall and office, podium and tower development on the site.

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The project considers how to embrace development while retaining existing culture, grain and use patterns. It seeks to find a place for the local within modernity. It seeks to maintain a diverse environment and society by forming spaces which mediate between village and urban behaviours. By understanding the relationship between formal and informal patterns of use, it brings the functional and cultural qualities of a traditional village and house designs into a modern, developed urban context.

Green Link Advisor: Mauro Baracco

AFIQ ABD SAMAT ‘Green Link’ is about the preservation of nature, rehabilitation of open spaces and densification of urban centers. Located in Epping Plaza, 4.5 km east of Merri Creek, this project includes a new park, additional commercial spaces, new residential blocks and multi-storey car parks.

It is a response to the rapid expansion of Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) that disregards the quality of urban open spaces. As of 2010, parts of the Green Wedge covering most of Merri Creek Catchment were cut for UGB expansion.

As an alternative design model, some design interventions are proposed across a range of scale.

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At a larger scale, the project includes landscape visions for the rehabilitation of native grasslands, the transformation of excavated quarry sites into filter ponds, and the densification of vegetation for buffer zones around the new Melbourne Market.

At a smaller scale, people and spaces become more interconnected. Epping Plaza carpark is turned into a park that links different parts of Epping. New flexible commercial spaces, multi-storey carparks and residential blocks for various household types are proposed along the edges of the existing mall, effectively transforming its blank walls and the backs of some nearby light industrial shops into an active frontage related to the park.

The Tamed Giant of Kuala Lumpur Advisor: Neil Masterton

NUR ASRIAH ABDUL TALIB This project is a polemical response to the Malaysian Government’s proposal to build yet another mega tower as a landmark for Kuala Lumpur in the Petronas Twin Tower tradition. The proposition responds to significant public disproval by providing an alternative design to the existing 100-storey mega tower proposal, and in turn seeks to answer whether built form, other than a high rise tower can become a landmark for a city or region?

A further insight is possible...imagine this...the mighty tower now lies prostrate. It is reclaimed by Kampung Baru, the last remaining urban village in KL. It is as if the tall, proud capitalist giant has humbled itself to the low, almost slum like urban nature of the traditional village. Between then and now the traditional village has reclaimed the tower for its own. Big and little, Rich and Poor dwell together.

The critical architectural act is defined by a simple and vernacular process of ‘braiding’. In this case the two separate towers of a Petronas Complex are ‘braided into one’. The two are bonded, separate things united, unity suggested. This is envisaged as an appropriate landmark metaphor for a multi-racial country.

“The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them.” Isaiah 11.6

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And the outcome? A tamed giant, a 12 storey, strangely familiar built form nesting into the medium rise zone on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.

An Archipelago: Experiments with Other Bodies in Architecture Advisors: Hélène Frichot + Michael Spooner

LOREN ADAMS To suggest that architecture has a vested interest in the body is neither new nor ground-breaking; but for what bodies does our architecture cater?

Despite an increasing shift away from the universal metanarratives of modernism and towards an architecture of heterogeneity, our representation of the body in architecture remains conspicuously homogenous. The dominant architectural body – the favoured body – is a healthy body; a productive body; an obedient body; a tranquil(ised) body.

But, are there not other valid bodies?

This project calls for a momentary lapse in our collective allegiance to this singular, modernist body. It is an experiment; a hopeful speculation about the possibility of an architecture that resists

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the dominant paradigm of corporeality and strives to make space for other bodies.

It is a factory for the post-industrial nomad; the resort that we resort to – an inquiry into the nature of desire and productivity.

It is a critique of ergonomics; of our endless pursuit of an invisible body.

It is an urban island; a heterotopia; the simultaneous occupation of inside and outside.

It is a social condenser; a Lo-ren Koolhaas – the uncompromising fusion; abutment; overlapping of contradictory programs; of contradictory bodies.

It is Lyotard in a leotard.

An archipelago.

Agricultural Training Centre in Mitre Advisors: Mauro Baracco + Martin Musiatowicz

NIK AMINALDIN This project proposes a new life for Mitre, Victoria, a rural town in area of low agriculture quality land with a number of residential dwellings and a grain storage facility outside Horsham. The project aims to build links between new and established communities, to promote the interaction between locals and a new population of agriculture students in Mitre. The scheme proposes several distinct but connected elements which form the new agricultural training centre, a new student residential village and a communal space that extends from the existing but now disused, town church.

The agriculture training centre aims to create a new public architecture, a symbol for the town which is

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clearly distinct from its surroundings yet responds to the existing buildings and landscape. The student residential village is dispersed behind existing properties, with this intervention providing benefits for both the residents and the students. The existing abandoned church is reconfigured as a communal space for use by the students and as a community facility for the local community.

The project is intent on embracing its context and at the same time paving a new era, identity and bringing new opportunities to a dwindling country town.

Picturesque: Docklands Hybrid Advisor: Paul Minifie

SAHAR ARBAB If the Picturesque landscape might be described as the contrivance of pleasing informal vistas by arranging diverse and richly associative elements within a landscape setting, what might be meant by an urban Picturesque? Could we think of buildings functioning as if they were associative elements to be read together in some kind of overall composition?

The west end of town, from Spencer street to the water is the land of the giants. Huge floor plated monoculture of office buildings. While the tower

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form of the old city is unambiguously urban – it’s form factor is unique to itself - these newer office types share their scale and proportions with various natural and geological structures.

Perhaps, just by taking the wave formed roof of the station literally, the buildings surrounding it can be recast as informal compositional elements, that is, as a kind of contrived nature. With cities increasingly described as being artefacts of the pseudo-natural functioning of markets and economies, seeing a city as a kind of post-natural picturesque seems apt.

The Extension Advisors: Ed Carter + John Doyle

DUANGKAEW BANGSAKUN As international travel increases, airports frequently form a more prominent, or even exclusive, gateway to a city, state or country. Yet they remain ultimately architecturally generic, characterless, and non-site specific. Herein lies an opportunity to consider airports as being symbiotic in their relationship to their host city.

The Extension explores methodologies of mapping and sampling in order to architecturally inform and articulate, and to spatially translate and communicate. Manifested as an extension of the new Bangkok airport, but with the implication of deployment further afield, a number of key districts were investigated in Bangkok proper. Key spatial

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100 200

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500

assets of these spaces, such as colour, proportion, light, texture and mass, were measured and subsequently qualified as architectural element.

Paired with the specific program and functional specificity that an airport demands, these elements become the generator for all facets of the project.

This technique does not serve to suggest mimicry is the desired outcome: in fact it is deliberately discouraged. Instead, what does emerge is truly symbiotic insofar as that whilst it retains a number of traits of its twin, they are implicative only, and the outcome remains individual, unique, and curiously specific.

from space to place Advisor: Paul Dash

DEBORA BARTON from space to place is a response to the pressures of densification in the middle ring suburbs of melbourne, tested through a site chosen in Reservoir, 12km from the CBD the current conditions of the underutilised summerhill shopping centre site, a typical suburban problem, is defined by asphalt parking and major roads

retrofitting the old supermarket big-box shell, which has been empty for 2 years the project is anchored by a landscape plan which converts some of the parking into pedestrian space for markets and events connecting the adjacent darebin parklands with the site After all, suburbia is where nature meets built form

the project proposes in its first stage a work-live-play model, which helps activate the site and re- connect it with its surroundings locally and regionally

small businesses reinforce the local economy, and the preston-reservoir area offers great potential for start-up businesses priced out of the inner suburbs

the program offers a regional hub with small conference centre, apartment and hotel tower, a new medium density housing typology offering work-live opportunities, and a business incubator

the architecture is inspired by the history of the site as a former quarry and reflects this ambition of nurturing creativity and entrepreneurship

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This is Density Advisor: Martyn Hook + Sand Helsel

JONATHON BARZEL Our contemporary urban environments are being shaped by an agenda of sustainable development and steered by a language of resilience. This is an astonishing shift from the post war industrialized narratives that forged the types of buildings and settlement patterns that are evident in Richmond today. To meet the challenges of population growth in a new era of climate change and ecological limits cities are required not only to encourage new development approaches but also to undergo physical transformation of established urban typologies. This infill project (parallel to Swan street), is an addition built above the residual land used by Melbourne’s metropolitan train network.

It is a response to the current population growth

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and related housing and transport pressures as predicted by Melbourne 2030 report. As a model, the project explores the opportunity for higher density integrated residential development and amenity which can be replicated on similar sites.

This will benefit the population by making use of the site’s most attractive selling point – position and proximity – to the Melbourne CBD. Furthermore, this proposal can not only optimise land use but also have a positive impact on the public transport network by reducing the need to travel, making public transportation more profitable and creating urban activity that favours trading and cultural exchanges.

A Community Hub for Portarlington Advisor: Martin Musiatowicz

DANIEL BENNETTS Exploring the importance and role of architecture, landscape and the built environment within a growing township, the project proposes a community hub for Portarlington. The underlying strategy is one of building the foundations for a socially sustainable community. Located on the Bellarine Peninsula, the project responds to social issues, extreme population fluctuations and the diverse population groups that inhabit this small coastal town throughout the year. Acknowledging the local, the weekender and the tourist this proposition endeavours to create a medium through which to promote cultural exchanges, informal social interactions and a celebration of everyday activities amongst these diverse groups. Sited on

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under utilised crown land, along the town’s main street, a sequence of spaces, elements and devices have been developed which incorporate a tourist information centre, community facility buildings and event spaces. The planning and tectonics respond to the existing identity and character of the town. Characterising coastal holiday towns that line Port Phillip Bay, the peninsulas and coasts of Victoria this framework and design methodology could be applied in varied context, landscapes and communities.

Metropolitan Small Space Register: The Architecture of Occupation Advisor: John Cherrey + Anna Johnson

DAVID BRODZIAK “Our cities wear the scars of memory and of narratives long forgotten: as footsteps fade into the pavement, we die over and again, leaving behind our empires as another story takes our place.”

intimate knowledge of their availability, scale, adjacencies, and environmental qualities, and are then applied for by potential occupants in relation to their specific needs, appropriate timeframe and budget.

The Metropolitan Small Space Register is an international organisation which locates, classifies and manages the use of small scale forgotten space within built environments, making it available for occupation by individuals, companies, organisations and the public. The MSSR works within relevant local frameworks of planning policy, permit requirements and building code, offering varying opportunities of scale, life-cycle and ownership for the appropriation of urban space.

The benefits of the MSSR range broadly from the creation of commercial revenue, housing solutions, art infrastructure, workspace, artist studios and public amenities, to developing urban character through the enrichment, regeneration and densification of forgotten space.

Spaces are catalogued by the MSSR, creating an

APARTMENTiny Electric Place, Melbourne

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2200

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The architectural response reconciles very large and very small ideas, where form and materiality become by-products of both place-making and the functional arrangement of space as a direct result of its occupation, typology and life-span.

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2700

3200

820

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450

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SITE 1:10,000

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AXONOMETRIC, ELEVATIONS, PLAN 1:100

Civic Light Rail Terminal – Canberra Advisor: Richard Black

THOMAS CADDAYE This project examines architectural opportunities offered by introducing light rail infrastructure into Canberra’s civic precinct. It responds to the dual problems of the civic centre’s incomplete urban plan and its poor traffic and pedestrian interactions.

opportunities that a new infrastructure building might provide towards completing and resolving this urban zone. A primary objective in the design is to avoid the common situation of infrastructure becoming a barrier.

Presently an unfinished group of existing buildings responding to the rigid geometry of the city’s layout creates awkward and wasted residual space, while a major road cuts through the city centre north to south. These factors combine and result in disjointed urban zones.

In a key architectural move, a landscaped bridge brings all edges of the site into relationship while linking the main pedestrian mall with City Hill Park.

Further strategies are aimed towards the dissolving of boundaries, integration into the existing urban landscape and an approach of porosity. Through these strategies this thesis proposes a building typology for both transport architecture and for Canberra’s civic precinct that resolves wasted residual space and links urban areas.

A series of large infrastructural scale interventions accompanied by smaller architectural scale propositions explore the implications and

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Cultural Infrastructure: NGV Indigenous Art Gallery Advisor: Brent Allpress

CHRISTOPHER CAMEROTA With an Indigenous Art Gallery as the brief, and a thin parcel of land located adjacent to Federation Square on the back edge of Birrarung marr park as the site, this project mediates key cultural, contextual and programmatic relationships. The Yarra River and park frontage, the railway corridor, and the pedestrian promenade access from Federation Square to Batman Avenue and the sports precinct beyond, provide contested constraints and orientations.

The project consists of a series of infrastructural and landscape scale gestures. The gallery building is orientated towards the river by cantilevering over the park, contrasting with the orientation of Federation Square. The visual prominence of the building reflects the significance of the cultural works. Internal circulation and car access is zoned along the edge aligned with the train corridor.

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The Indigenous Gallery provides an infrastructural framework for viewing and experiencing major works of indigenous art. This distinct gallery building doesn’t subsume the works within NGV Australia.

A range of scales of space house a diverse range of works and artefacts. A series of stacked volumes and void spaces are nested within a permeable lattice screen to provide a rich material and spatial experience through modest means. This sets up a singular scale of form and a differentiated depth of surface that can both match and contrast with the scale and surface treatment of Federation Square.

The large stored collection of Indigenous artworks that are currently warehoused in the suburbs, are colocated in the basement to enhance access and give presence to the cultural value of the collection.

Mediatheque Connector Advisor: Gretchen Wilkins

KHAI LING CHAN This project proposes to establish a series of architectural and urban links through the design of a mediatheque building on the edge of Melbourne’s CBD. Sited on the empty lot between Federation Square and Batman Avenue, and adjacent to Birrarung Marr, the Yarra River and the MCG, the building aims to link design and media-based programs with existing urban activities and patterns of use. Internal connections are provided through a mixture of flexible and fixed spaces, including a market, library, design research lab and workshop facilities. These are placed at key locations within an

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extended, infrastructural floor plate connected to the existing car park. While much of the building’s structure is left open to ad hoc uses or future development, the primary program is defined through three major connectors: the existing car park, the Birrarung Marr landscape, and the shared internal courtyard.

Conviction Square Advisors: Michael Spooner + Peter Knight

MING HOW CHAN Conviction Square is a project that re-instills the model of the prison back into the city, through the appropriation of the CUB site.

Department of Justice, Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International along with the DRI Hub, can be observed around the central civic area.

The project is a prison in the city; however, the size of the site (a city block) allows for an urban gesture that could facilitate the expectations of the public.

In reaction to the success of Federation Square, Conviction Square is made available as the city’s newest civic space.

Whilst Federation Square celebrates a particular aspect of Australian history, Conviction Square concedes to Australia’s convict heritage. The project bookends the Swanston Street spine that runs from Federation Square, newly informing a linear protest route across notable areas of resistance such as City Square and the State Library Forecourt.

Michel Foucault depicts the Prison as the archetype of the disciplinary society; a control that invades our everyday life through the ever present threat of punishment. Consequently, office spaces for the

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Leisure Island Advisor: Graham Crist

WON SUK CHOI The project begins with a proposition for floating buildings in the Docklands’ Victoria harbour. These buildings become a strategy to infill in the middle of the space of Docklands (its body of water), connect the two peninsulas of its development, North Wharf and New Quay, and introduce mobile and short term programs to enliven the precinct.

The project includes: A small bridge joining the harbour at its narrow point- that bridge includes shops and connection to the floating elements. It

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includes a local ferry terminal – imagining water transport becoming a bigger part of Melbourne’s infrastructure. It includes an open park and swimming pools floating on the harbour, as well as a floating theatre.

The architectural proposition hovers between infrastructure to be filled in, and the waterfront fun park. It regards the floating building as both a serious question about the future of sea level, and an opportunity for casual urban leisure.

Virtually Integrated Advisor: Gretchen Wilkins

DAVID CHRISTIANSZ Looking at a site from Google maps, we see the streets highlighted in yellow. When we select the person to view Street View, the accessible roads highlight in blue indicating a pathway. When the blue lines enter a building, where will they end?

Roads dictate the pathway to navigate street view, but what dictates the pathways within the architecture? If “Architecture View� were to further enter this public digital interface, what design issues arise for architects?

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Virtually Integrated is a proposal for a limitless experience. Two experiences of architecture, one physical and the other virtual, adhere to different rules and expectations. The physical environment is of a human scale, perception and perspective, while the virtual environment is scaleless, haptic, and multi-dimensional. Ultimately the project has two aims, to speculate on architectural design process in light of virtual accessibility, and to test this process through the design of an integrated building.

World Unveiled Advisor: Peter Corrigan

STEVEN CHU

600,000,000

In 2010, The City of Melbourne was chosen to be the worldwide headquarters of the United Nations for its corporate social responsibility program and is given time to prove it can be viable.

Located on the edge of a region with widespread poverty, World Unveiled aspires to reinforce this new Melbourne identity and to create a place for the pursuit of truth and human rights.

We are going to imagine a Global Institute of Truth that unveils all forms of knowledge that was denied us in the past; a veil that allowed human right abuses and corporate malpractices to continue to harm our environment and mock our collective rights to humanity.

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The Institute shall be an unprecedented arm of the United Nations that will research, investigate and publicly disclose truthful information on human rights abuses, forced and compulsory labour, child labour, discrimination in employment and occupation, corruption, extortion and bribery within the region.

The language of the veil strongly informs my architecture in creating a communal place including open plan offices for NGOs, educational facilities, and an auditorium for United Nations delegates, NGOs, corporations and the public to congregate. We must disenthrall ourselves of old political models and rise with the emerging cultures of public participation and address the growing disengagement between humanity and its governing bodies.

Women WORK

2/3 of the world’s working hours, 1/2

PRODUCE of the world’s food, and yet EARN

10% of the world’s income and OWN LESS THAN of the world’s property6

1%

Women constitute

70%

of the estimated

1,300,000,000

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At least

3,000,000 Western Europeans are homeless each winter.5

2/3 of the 110 million children not in school are girls.7

2,000,000

At least Europeans live in mobile, semipermanent, or other premises not fit for human habitation.2

100,000,000

An estimated children live and work on the streets in the developing world; 40 million in Latin America.4

1 in 6

Between

people live in slums, or “contiguous settlements where inhabitants are characterized as having inadequate housing and basic services,” but if no action is taken, that number could grow to

40 - 60% of sexual assaults are committed against girls younger than 16.8

The World We Live In

1 in 3 by the 3year 2020

people living in absolute poverty.9

ach time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.’

Robert Kennedy Cape Town, 7 June 1966 ‘A tiny ripple of hope’

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urban dwellers and 1,000,000,000 people in rural areas live in overcrowded and poor-quality housing -- slums and squatter settlements, old buses, shipping containers, and railway platforms.1

There are

275,000,000 children never attend or complete primary school education

870,000,000 of the world’s adults are illiterate.10

103,000,000 57%

out-of-school children; are girls.

Three-quarters are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia.11

“Everybody wants the same thing, rich or poor...not only a warm, dry room, but a shelter for the soul.”12 Samuel Mockbee, architect

1 - G. McGranahan and D. Satterthawaite, ‘Urban Centers: An Assessment of Sustainability,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Nov. 2003 2, 3 - “Report on Housing Exclusion and Homelessness,” Council of Europe 4 - “Street Children and Homelessness,” International Child and Youth Care Network, Sept. 2004 5 - Homeless in Europe,” Time, Feb. 10, 2003 6, 7, 9 - W. Kalin et al., eds., The Face of Human Rights, Baden: Lars Muller, 2004 8 - “Prevention and response to sexual and gender-based violence in refugee situations”, UNHCR 10 - Thomas Kostigen, “Rich-Poor Gulf Widens; ‘Inequality Matters’ Conference Puts Nations on Alert,” CBS News Marketwatch, June 14, 2005 11 - Towards EFA: The Quality Imperative,” EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005 12 - Architecture for Humanity, Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises, Thames & Hudson

Rail-ville Shopping Advisor: Graham Crist

BENJAMIN CLEMENTS Rail-ville Shopping hybridises two urban types; metropolitan train stations with suburban shopping centres. Both urban models are typically inwardfocussed; both have limited functionality beyond their intended purposes. Splicing these together into a single, continuous space aims to enhance the experience of each. The question is simple: can suburban train lines terminate in the middle of shopping malls, or can the secondary retail programs of train stations reach a critical mass and take over the spatial experience?

I explored the physical space between the train platform and the retail circulation, trying to blur the boundaries where one ceases and the next begins.

Sometimes the separation is no more than a sheet

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of glass, at other points, it is an open void which provides views of the train from above, below and at concourse level.

This ‘shopping station’ site is the proposed location of a future Rowville train station, at the eastern edge of Melbourne. The building’s edge is a transition zone rather than a single boundary; allowing elements of the exterior to penetrate the enclosure.

Native planting roughens the built edge, while large timber decks form an outdoor recreational landscape.

These outcomes could be a design model for suburban train stops.

Fair Field Siding Advisors: Marika Neustupny + Laura Harper

KASPER DUNN Housing densification is placing pressure on any potential sites within middle ring suburbs of Melbourne. This project investigates the potential for regenerating and reactivating a former railway in Fairfield, ‘brown land’ whose original purpose has become redundant, causing it to be abandoned and marginalised while the surrounding suburban development continues unabated.

The design responds to both present and future issues; focusing on knitting into the current site condition while providing facilities which will benefit both the buoyant Fairfield shopping strip along Station St and the future large-scale housing project which is planned for the AMCOR Factory

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site which the railway once served. Areas of the landscape are left ‘wild’, while other areas are converted to private, semi-private or community gardens. Inherent questions about the formal relationship between the major street grid and the interrupting diagonal cut of the defunct railway are explored through the process of design. The built form serves to integrate the site into the local community; housing, childcare and community program are inserted into the site, all of which have a constant relationship with site’s valuable open space.

Advisors: Ed Carter + John Doyle

WILLIAM GOLDING

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Urban Infrastructure: Deakin University Dandenong Campus: Schools of Advanced Manufacturing, Engineering, Art and Design Advisor: Brent Allpress

DAVID GRECO

Dandenong is an urban centre that is primarily suburban and horizontal in its scale and orientation, with a prominent light industrial context that is being superseded by new key ‘civic’ developments as part of the ‘Revitalising Central Dandenong’ master plan. This proposal for a specialist Deakin University campus in the block opposite the new Drum Theatre complements these new developments. Selective existing buildings are retained and new buildings draw on the industrial typologies of the area to alter and extend this existing character rather than erasing it.

The project engages with a range of internal and external scale shifts of speed, space and view that influence the site. The street has been folded into the block, allowing the main street to remain operating as a generous boulevard with car access while the rear laneway is transformed into a more intensive pedestrian environment.

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The forms of new buildings are manipulated through a non-idealised picturesque strategy, framing and curating a series of horizontal, oblique urban vistas. The warehouse type is co-opted, adapted and displaced internally and externally to respond to specific orientations, scales and intensities of activity. A direct connection between internal and external spaces is maintained at ground level, with layered screen surfaces above creating a grain of intriguing background conditions.

Dandenong is a socio-economically depressed city that once had a large manufacturing sector. This campus has a mix of advanced manufacturing, engineering and art and design faculties focused on the development and application of new technologies in manufacturing and making, acting as a catalyst for economic renewal through investment in intellectual and cultural capital.

Wesley Church Complex Advisor: Brendan Jones

JOHN HAJKO The project takes place on a dormant historic site laden with ecclesiastical gothic buildings that collect around a monumental church. Located between Lonsdale Street and Little Lonsdale Street extending a city block, the site stands as a moment of relief within its context. The complex has a long history of social service.

The proposal seeks to reconfigure the site, proposing a longitudinal building of abstract vertical composition including community infrastructure and commercial forces. It focuses on the social responsibilities inherent in the site and interweaves these together and the existing complex into the modern city.

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This composition is the critique of a series of axial trajectories that cut the city grid south of the site and present conditions that inform the development of the site as a civic space. Pushing the boundaries of vertical public trajectory and overlapping programming.

An alternative typology emerges with the atmosphere of the street and possibilities of the proposed workshop. An incubator for working, learning and recreation, created with the necessity of building slabs and columns, a series of moments and objects emerge with the underlying notion of habitation. The planning allows for aleatory change with the intention of long term building sustainability.

Bridging The Gap Advisors: Peter Brew + Somone Koch

ZUL HAFIZ HAMZAH This project proposes to bridge the gap between different socio-economic layers and explores the creation of a more cohesive living in North Melbourne. The site in its existing condition houses an active social housing complex which is over thirty years old and was built to meet the needs of a community that has changed. The scheme proposes to retain the existing residential complex and give it the extensive maintenance and refurbishment it needs while redeveloping the 10,000 sqm site which has eroded internally over time. The masterplan is a mix of social, private affordable and student housing over six schemes with community garden and park spaces linking the community together.

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Mitre flower farm and accommodation Advisor: Mauro Baracco

TIMOTHY HERON Mitre is a town 350 km west of Melbourne. Since settlement Mitre has almost exclusively relied on intensive farming.

Territorially the flower farm adds to Greening Australia’s properties in the region relinking vegetation along a disused railway.

Farming methods have improved to the point that large farms can be run with minimal staff which has seen people move to larger regional centres like Horsham for work and services.

Within Mitre the flower farm infrastructure provides a new edge by adding more sporadically spread sheds but in different colours. A housing module has been developed that adapts to different site conditions and provides existing landowners the opportunity to subdivide their large blocks. The old grain infrastructure is renovated to provide tourist accommodation, bird observatory and new public space for Mitre.

Greening Australia has implemented the Habitat 141 initiative which will see remnant vegetation relinked over the next 50 years. Mitre is located within the Habitat 141 region of vegetation change between low arid mallee scrub to denser forests.

This project investigates how Mitre may take advantage of this landscape renewal and start to enhance eco-tourism opportunities for this region.

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Together these interventions will see the renewed landscape managed, researched and enjoyed.

Garden Hub Advisor: Mauro Baracco

KERYN HERRIMAN Architecture has a key role in improving sustainability by encouraging integration between services and living, working and recreational spaces.

Northcote, a developing inner city suburb with trendy niche shops, artistic culture, cafes and bars, is tested as an appropriate case-study.

Looking at the block on the corner of Separation and High streets which currently separates the main shopping strip from the parklands behind it, this project seeks to link the two by drawing circulation through pedestrian laneways and courtyards within specialty shops, galleries and cafes on the ground floor.

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Whilst giving the opportunity for revegetation along these pathways, this green link is further intensified by a secondary landscape layer for residential use on top of the retail, where private and public spaces are kept separate through the use of vegetation.

Small houses ranging from studios through to 4 bedroom homes are scattered throughout the vegetation, whilst 10 apartment towers along the street edges respond to the more urban character of High and Separation streets. Residents can live, create, work and play within a community of people involved in various disciplines, enjoying a landscape of native vegetation in close proximity to all the transport and services that are provided in Northcote.

Waiting for Melnikov: An Urban Foyer for a University Campus Advisors: Michael Spooner + Hélène Frichot

ALEXANDRA HORE ‘Waiting for Melnikov’ is an urban foyer and public gateway for RMIT University’s city campus, contained inside the empty walls of the Alumni Court, adjacent to the Old Melbourne Goal.

The site is traversed by a meandering ramp, continuing Edmond and Corrigan’s Building Eight ramp and foyer as a rich precedent. A forum, conference rooms, salon and bar operate within the blue stone walls across a diverse number of levels that expand the almost medieval treatment of the site.

The architecture of ‘Waiting for Melnikov’ is understood through the transformations of Konstantin Melnikov’s house for himself, completed

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in 1929. Melnikov’s house is a freestanding residence that both exclaims his title as Architect, and marks his exclusion from the profession during Russia’s period of political tyranny. Since his death the house has been split in two by his duelling heirs.

Consequently, Melnikov’s house has become a site for an international discussion on the early 20th Century convergence of political, social and economic ideas within literature, art, theatre and architecture, with an emphasis on the preservation of the era’s built legacy.

The foyer and the forum are seen as the architectural preconditions by which the university might continue as site for the crafting of difficult ideas.

Down Town Advisors: Ed Carter + John Doyle

TAKASUMI INOUE This project responds to the existing condition of highly utilized existing underground spaces around Tokyo’s urban centres, and speculates on how the historical process that have shaped the city can be co-opted to consolidate space around its major urban centres.

The project site around Shibuya Station currently possesses only two storeys above and more than five storeys below ground and is connected directly to the basements of surrounding privately owned buildings. The project proposes to extend this process of connection and infill that has occurred organically, and deploy it as a generative process for the creation of a densely inhabited underground

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architectural network that links existing occupied underground spaces.

The outcome of this is a public concourse that that operates as an urban distributor linking the station with the street level and the surrounding underground program that currently exists. Large voids are cut through the concourse, bringing light and ventilation to the lower basement levels.

Displacing the programmatic mix of above ground Shibuya, the project erodes the ground plane of the city, creating a fluid three dimensional environment that extends the urban life of Tokyo to the space below its surface.

Advisor: Graham Crist

PATRICK KENNY

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The Cloister Mall Advisor: Graham Crist

WINNIE LAM Shopping centres are a hybrid civic space where more than shopping can happen; they are the core of a suburban village. This project explores the possibilities of remodeling the Bell Street Mall in Melbourne’s Heidelberg West. The objective is to transform and aging strip mall into a space which is merged with other activities and to restore a connection with its neighborhood.

The central idea is to create a complex hierarchy of indoor and outdoor transition spaces through a courtyard labyrinth and so revive the suburban outdoor court mall. The design operation applies the plan of Meenakshi Temple onto the site while retaining part of the existing retail and populating

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diverse new functions to spaces. In the cloister/ courtyard design, inhabitants circulate through colonnaded space, open, and roofed space. The most permeable side contains a market hall with library, with rigid perimeter walls containing housing on the other three sides reinforcing the sense of enclosure. Courtyards around the housing connect to the plaza for outdoor market. Sport spaces and a pool provide visual connection between market, retail and housing. An outdoor restaurant court with a stepped stage is the innermost layer.

City Station Advisor: Simon Whibley

LUCA LANA A history of demolished buildings, monuments to lost patrons and host to the immortalisation of rock stars, the moments and misadventures of City Square have been woven into Melbourne’s fabric.

A proposal for a new underground train station prompts a re-evaluation of the City Square as well as a response to the increasingly undemocratic character of public space and architecture.

Like any train station, the design provides a transition point, and a gateway, but also draws on visual metaphors for a Jules Verne-like journey underground. There is a rupture in city square resembling a sink hole, a cave beneath it allowing the natural elements to penetrate down to the train terminal.

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A huge public stair; Melbourne’s own Piazza di Spangna is the civic face of the square and the first transition point from ground level. Flanked by 3 levels of bare concrete foundations on one side and rough-hewn earth on the other, the square allows a porous interaction with the unique archaeological conditions and the new network of tunnels.

Finally as an offering of redemption or an acknowledgement of the limitations of City Square, there is a direct connection to Melbourne’s newest square. A completed shard, which welcomes strangers to the visitor centre, provides a vantage point between the old, new and imagined of the city and its underground.

A Vision for a Northern Greenway Advisor: Mauro Baracco

JENNIE LANG This Major Project is a vision for Kalkallo, a small town on the northern fringe of Melbourne that is on the cusp of urban conversion. The project proposes the creation of a greenway, an interconnected system of green spaces that precedes any additional development in the town and effectively gives form to it. Through a series of re-adjustments, re-definitions and landscape and architectural insertions the project posits an alternative approach to peri-urban subdivision that foregrounds existing environmental systems and designs simple architectural models for living in the landscape.

Due to Kalkallo’s basalt plains setting and lack of settlement the area is dominated by a sense

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of horizontality and a sense of exposure to the elements. The proposed housing strategies respond to these conditions by adopting a kind of built ‘squatness’ and by using the ‘roof,’ the ‘wall’ and the ‘fence’ as key design elements. Taking cues from the existing scattered buildings, physical and visual connections to the public and private landscape are created by arranging the residential programs in tightly arranged but dispersed clusters.

As Melbourne grapples with issues around environmental sustainability and urban sprawl the manner in which peri-urban towns are developed is particularly relevant. Kalkallo serves as a valuable case study.

Docklands Activity Centre Advisor: Vivian Mistogianni

MIN ZHAO LEE Since the inception of Melbourne’s Docklands the developments in the precinct, led primarily by private developers, have resulted in isolated buildings and programs. The sense of disconnection is currently compounded due to the increasing of commercial and residential developments and the lack of implementation of public and communal amenities. This project proposes a mixed-use development in Docklands, at the vibrant junction where the site is connected to the city on the East, and the rest of Docklands on the North and South. The program for the Docklands

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Activity Centre includes a library, public spaces, sports and communal facilities. The project seeks to investigate the discovery of new spatial and programmatic adjacencies and the establishment of relationships between these spaces. The notion of seed dispersal is used to generate the dispersal of the diversified programs. A series of continuous roofscapes enhance the continuity of spaces from roof to ground and from inside to the outside. The outcomes sought to foster connections between people and spaces, and to increase interstitial and social spaces that activate interaction.

Advisor: Louis Sauer

SHOU SHENG LEE Society in this day and age is struggling to exist on a balanced platform of interaction. Isolation as well as the lacking levels of participation between communities, residents and family members is an issue that should no longer be dismissed as social relationships are essential to a healthy community.

My interest lies in the relationship between built form and the lifestyle of its inhabitants. Thus, this project attempts to engage how housing structures can be designed to mediate and provide opportunities to bridge this isolation gap between communities, residents and family by way of facilitating a rich network of interactions across 3 scales – precinct, housing clusters and the individual family units.

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With given the chosen site in Brunswick, the scheme looks at reemphasizing the approach leading towards the Safeway supermarket. This strengthens the public social element of the project while at the same time providing a space for public gatherings which are lacking in the larger Brunswick context.

A variety of unit types were incorporated in the scheme to provide for a variety of social groups and lifestyles.

MIX Advisor: Emma Jackson

SOON YEE LEE of the horizontal suburb into the vertical tower.

The site chosen was in the Governments proposed development for Fisherman’s bend.

The program of the primary school was chosen in response to the shortage of Primary schools in the inner city area due to unanticipated amount of families’ choosing to remain in the inner city area.

Having a number of different programs within the one building, begs the question; what should the building look like? Should the Primary School, or any of the other programs be typologically recognizable within the façade of the Residential Tower?

The high value of land in that area may not allow for the conventional flat school with abundant outdoor space and sporting grounds and may force the hand of some interesting programmatic combinations.

It was the intent to insert the Primary School into a Residential Tower. In addition to these, a supermarket, small office space, and retail were also combined to initiate some of the ‘neighborhood’ feel

The device of myriorama was used to blur the delineations of typologies within the one façade.

The desired endpoint was a uniform collage of the various programmatic and architectural elements.

The intent was that the resulting elevations, while uniform in 2D, have a non-uniform complexity in 3D that respond to the intricacies of the spaces within.

Entranc e Retail Apart me Recept nt ion

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Up to cla Childca ssroom / re Cent re Childca Centre re

Vet Cl

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Main En to Scho trance ol

Playgro und

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Sport

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Hall

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7/11 City Advisors: Peter Brew + Simone Koch

YI-TING LEE The famous night market in bustling and congested Shihlin, Taipei, is one of the most popular places to visit in Taiwan. However, the intention of the government is to demolish the existing night market and replace it with a new performing arts centre. The project aims to preserve the existing quality of night market and at the same time conforms to the requirement of the government’s brief, merging these two together and creating a hybrid architecture of night market and performing arts centre. I split the single big mass of the theatre into three medium sizes of auditoria, and

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introduce the architectural gesture by placing the auditoria floating, sunken and on the ground, to enhance the spatial interaction of theatre people, public, performers and night market. This project emphasizes the multiple roles of architecture in the creation of poetic sense of landscape, and functional theatre spaces, also as an interface with urban spaces. We can enjoy variety of Taiwanese food and see architecture engaging Taipei, an architecture which refuses to sleep, just like a 7-11 city which it provides different services and embraces the community 24 hours.

Housing Complexity Advisors: Ed Carter + John Doyle

STELLA LIEN Lack of compromise in urban renewal strategies proposed for the Taipei metro system forces residents to relocate to inconvenient suburbs or accept the current mode of public housing, which does not respond to their particular requirements.

Little consideration is given to their needs for maintaining the same quality of life. This project seeks to synthesize such extant ways of living with the demands of rapid development. The design of customized behavioral modules preserves these traditional ways of living, while at the same time maximizing space.

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The assembly of these diverse units gives rise to interstitial buffer spaces for the community, freely used and adapted by the residents. The bustle of traditional practices carried out in public areas is preserved without interference with the existing public space; internal ”streets” become the threshold between public and private life. The complex will evolve parasitically, latching onto the sites of each new MRT station. The site for this project is Zhongxiao Fuxing Station – a location that presents the scheme against a new MRT station, as well as high yield retail and luxury accommodation.

Lost in Beijing Advisors: Peter Brew + Simone Koch

CHEN LIU Beijing is becoming more international with China’s development in global politics and economics. With internationalization comes the inevitable urban problem of replacing historic with commercial precincts. The loss of cultural history and breakdown of local communities is a significant problem that affects the city. The Longfusi District was renowned for its snack street and temple fair. It survived two fires but was demolished for development as a commercial zone in the 1990s. The district remains as a historic district without the historic buildings that contained the local communal memories.

From the government’s brief, Longfu district will be redefined as an art and culture district.

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The project proposes a medium density art and cultural complex. It aims at reviving the Long Fu District, with its local culture, from being eroded by monotonous large commercial developments. The design is inspired by the life in Hutong and Siheyuan (courtyard house) and translates the traditional elements into a contemporary form, blending into the urban texture of Beijing.

The conviction behind the project is the uncertainty, the uncertainty which can bring out unexpected properties. The project is not aiming at bringing another iconic block to Beijing but provides Beijing a public place with local spirit.

Brunswick Performing Arts and Cultural Centre Advisor: Martin Musiatowicz

JOANNA LO

The project proposes a Performing Arts and Cultural Centre in Brunswick. The project begins its exploration through a study and observation of the urban character, streetscape and context of Brunswick, focusing on the site located along Dawson Street, in between the Upfield Railway and Sydney Road. The architectural language which emerges, responds to the context of the site and the character and energy of Brunswick’s streetscape. In response to the existing tight street edge of civic and commercial buildings along Dawson Street, the mass of the building is pulled away from the street mediating the space between street and entry – creating a new urban plaza.

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Driven by the concept of drawing and extending the street into the building and onto the ascending stepped form of the theatre, the façade is layered with a stepped plaza providing vertical access to the upper levels, blurring the relationship between the street and the building’s boundary. The main proposition is to increase interaction between inside and outside, avoiding a monolithic and enclosed cultural centre by allowing the interior to be exposed to the outside by activating the roller shutters. Programmatically, this project goes beyond the traditional theatre form, offering flexibility through versatile theatre configurations.

Functional exuberance (An Institute of Advanced Innovation) Advisors: Martyn Hook + Greg More

SALVADOR LOPEZ How will advancements in technology alter our future knowledge spaces? This project presents a future educational institution that conceptually uses futurist Ray Kurzweil’s idea of the technological singularity, where he states that at in the year 2045, through the exponential evolution of technologies, humans will transcend biology. Here performance, genetics, robotics and nanotechnology labs are juxtaposed to present a new hybrid academic institution for the scientific analysis of the creative process.

Singularity (transcendence) + cyber baroque (theatrical tectonics) = functional exuberance.

This project speculates about the idea of

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architectural Transcendence, through the morphing of classical�digital architectural semantics into playful theatrical typologies. Formally the architecture is the result of a series of experiments using exuberance as the main driver behind them.

Architecturally it creates a space where exponential innovation will take place through enhanced collaboration and the unexpected and constant overlapping of ideas from the different academic branches inhabiting the architecture.

Stranger Than Fiction Advisor: Gretchen Wilkins

EMILY LYONS Located in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy and High Street, Kew, Stranger than Fiction is exploration into the spatial and architectural interpretations of narrative and performance.

Beginning with a study of a fictional text by Tim Winton, a sequence of spatial ‘sets’ and storyboards were produced, translating the text-based descriptions of environments into architectural ones. This set the stage for the propositions which followed, a series of “houses” in which factual and fictional programs intersect with domestic and public space.

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These programs included a gallery space, doctor’s surgery, museum, and performance space all with a residential component. The intention of incorporating these programs with a residence is to encourage and to create multiple narratives of living, working and performative or public interaction, wherein the assigned roles necessarily become blurred, distorted or even reversed.

The final project establishes a space where the daily lives of its inhabitants become as engaging as the performance or exhibitions already on display.

You’re My Type Advisor: Vivian Mitsogianni

PATRICK MACASAET This project considers and explores how contaminations of ‘other’ typologies can assist in re-inventing programmatic organisation and spatial arrangements. The project investigates how particular strategies of making, influenced by type, can generate new propositions for learning environments and the library. As a testing ground, a generated “what-if” scenario proposes RMIT’s first civic-academic library and merges the three existing city libraries (Swanston, Carlton and Business Library). The project attempts to emphasise the informal side of academic life, not as residual but as a central feature of universities. It embraces the collaborative and the informal as the heroic spaces for learning – viewing learning as a social

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experience and envisioning a speculative library as a highly charged collaborative and informal learning environment, intensifying its communal and social dimension.

This proposition tested ideas and carried out a series of investigations through both generative and manual processes concentrating on two building types: the stock exchange and the atrium office building. Experiments were choreographed and re-choreographed with minor or major variations in order to open up new possibilities for formal, organisational and spatial strategies for a highly collaborative learning environment.

Inter-mediate Advisor: Susan Massey

ASHLEY MACKEY Inter-mediate anticipates a speculated 10m rise in sea level by the year 2111. Between where the sea is now and eventually will be, is a dynamic threshold that links the aquatic, the terrestrial, and the constructed that requires a spatial and formal response. Located around the perimeter of Port Phillip Bay, the project negotiates between the urban surge of sprawling development and the aqueous surge of the environment by introducing architectural intermediaries that opportunistically navigate and produce new modes of coastal occupation.

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Through the design of an ‘urban pantry’, new forms, programs, and functions are introduced. In a bottom-up and agglomerative approach to design, the relationships created by these constituent elements are prioritised over their individual potentials. Informed by flows, movements, activities and processes, Inter-mediate proposes fluid and locally formed adaptations in response to varied and complex situations around the perimeter of the bay.

Housing the ‘Bend Advisor: Graham Crist

MHAIRI MACLEOD ‘Housing the ‘Bend’ is an affordable alternative to apartments; giving the amenity of a private house on a block of land.

Located on the Fishermans Bend development site, this is a proposition for, low cost, high-density, housing in one, two and three bedroom houses on separate land titles sold for around half the price of similarly sized apartments.

The 200 hectare site is divided into quarter acre (1000m2) blocks, interspersed with shophouses, parks, schools and public transport which provide infrastructure and jobs within a fine-grained urban context.

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Each quarter acre block has twelve strata title dwellings; six two bedroom, four one bedroom, and two three bedroom houses. Each dwelling has a 25m2 private courtyard conected to the living spaces. These in turn access 350m2 of shared garden laundry in the centre of the block.

The blocks have been planned to create an irregular streetscape, within a standardized envelope with different building heights, rooflines and setbacks.

As well as accepting the imperatives of density and component repetition, the project strategy transfers finishing and customisation to the owner. The individual dwellings are sold as a shell with minimal finish and a $200/m2 finishing, allowing the owner to personalise the property over time.

Housework Advisor: Susan Massey

REN HAO MAK Located in Fitzroy, the Housework project proposes a live/work/play residential community for immigrant single-parent families. The project’s programmes— including childcare and commercial laundry service—value the domestic skills brought by the tenants as an opportunity to transition into the local workforce. Even the interior courtyard is designed to double on weekends as hired event space for activities such as wedding banquets, parties, craft market.

The design proposal is not only interested in how to facilitate the complex programmatic relationships present in a live/work/play community, but is also interested in expressing the dynamics of such

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relationships through the architectural articulation of the building. For instance, the street facade has a commercial scale during the day, but at night it dissolves into a residential scale as the windows of individual units become legible. A protective screen—similar in scale and material to chain-link schoolyard fencing—borrows its patterning from the brickwork of the adjacent buildings. And, while the street-facing exterior is robust and stable, the interior courtyard is vulnerable and adaptive.

The Triangle Advisor: Martyn Hook

LAUREN MARTIN The triangle is an island between the upper esplanade and the beach anchored to St Kilda by the cavernous Palais Theatre. It inherits the duality and tension that exists in Melbourne’s playground and this sensuous resort that is St Kilda.

The proposition for the site is developed through a register of present day and historic St Kilda, evoking its binary qualities by creating a series of narrated journeys into and across the site. Complementing the richness of St Kilda and adding to its diversity.

This is represented through the simple geometries of the circle and line. The circle a scaleless geometry embodies the idea of escape in its vast openness.

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The line representing the intensification of night falling, flattens process, structure, and objects into an untaught unity.

The program is a mix of community infrastructure and commercial realities contained under a large habitable public roofscape. Experiential journeys form the interstitial circulation of this abstraction of intersecting spaces and programs. The occupant is subject to perceptual shifts in the unfolding of spaces as diverse as the contextual collage in which they have become embedded.

Serendipitous discovery Advisor: Emma Jackson

NAZO MASTURA From afghan cameleers to richness of Melbourne laneways As early as 1800’s, Muslims have been a part of the Australian culture since the use of Afghan cameleers to find a solution to discover a suitable transportation method to explore and travel within the interior part of Australia.

Recent events have created a gap between the two cultures and mosques in Australia tend to be isolated buildings that only Muslims are likely to approach or inhabit.

The proposition here is to design a Mosque in Melbourne’s CBD accessible to people of all cultural backgrounds. A vacant site in Lonsdale St was chosen for its proximity to Spencer Street Station to reminisce the Afghan cameleers who had been settling down around the railway station.

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The project was initiated by carving re-interpreted elements from the Blue Mosque in Istanbul from the centre of the office building. The commercial office building was chosen as building type that is ‘expected’ in the city and therefore a perfect companion for this new Mosque.

Although re-interpreted the Mosque has all the required elements and orientations required by the Islamic faith.

There was a deliberate intent not to design the mosque as an autonomous building only visited

by Muslims, but a Mosque opened up, taken apart, and sewn back in through the internal seams of Melbourne’s laneway culture only to be discovered on a meandering shortcut. There are also views down into the mosque from the office building allowing the activities within the Mosque to flow into the work environment.

Conventionally unconventional: Operating on public space within the private domain Advisor: Vivian Mitsogianni

LILY MCBRIDE-STEPHENS This project involves a critique on the shift in public and democratic spaces in today’s day and age, and aims to deal with the growing loss of urban public space due to privatisation. Commercial and civic spaces are morphing into one. By acknowledging this, the project works on how to use this new condition to its advantage. Shifting the examination away from the grand gestures of the main street, city square & plaza, and instead exploring the weaker finer diluted details that build up a much richer grain that relates to our current society, technology, and everyday routines. The shopping mall is the vehicle in which to address these issues that are related to the rest of the city.

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Through a number of strategies the project is aimed at humanising the generic shopping mall and shifting its image away from being a ‘theme park of consumption’. Taking the alienating spaces and turning them into places which can enrich peoples experience within the community. The suburbs become the subject which allows for an examination into the notion of the uncanny; exploring the relationship between the elevated and the commonplace, utility and decoration, and making the generic and the familiar look remarkable by using convention unconventionally.

Advisor: Emma Jackson

SURAYA MD ABDUL AZIS

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Back to the Roots Advisor: Louis Sauer

JELENA MODRINIC The proposed project takes place in Serbia in one dying Serbian village called Dabinovac, located on the disputed border with war torn Kosovo and Metohia.

The aim of this project was to provide the facilities and ideas through architecture needed to sustain a rural agricultural community and reverse the trend of migration from these villages.

No government funding or attention has led to younger generations leaving the villages for the major cities in search for better lives, not realising

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the lost potential in these fertile villages and the demand for organic food production worldwide.

The scheme introduces a mix of affordable and market rate housing as well as the establishment of a village centre aiming at facilitating the development of a close community.

Village centre was needed in order to provide everyday facilities such as a primary school and small shops along with an introduction of a market space in order to bring in economic support for the village.

Merdeka–town Advisors: Marika Neustupny + Laura Harper

NURULAIN MOHD NOOR Malaysian independence from British colonial rule has a symbol in Kuala Lumpur – the Merdeka site. The two stadiums have been declared Heritage buildings, however the site is in disrepair following construction of new stadiums for the Commonwealth Games of 1998, and the memorial park has been completely removed. When we see that despite fencing, recent protests against political corruption took place here, the ability of the tower currently proposed to be able to retain and enhance community might start to be questioned.

The project imagines a low rise, multi-entry, nonhierarchical structure that spreads across the site.

This structure acts in part as a park, with large

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sunken public open spaces accessible from the underground train station as well as the street, multiple pathways through landscaped courtyards, and publically accessible rooftop gardens. It also acts like a commercial building, accessible through multiple cores at ground level.

Referencing adjacent Chinatown, with its rich and diverse street food culture, conditions allowing an informal and ad hoc use of the building’s edges are investigated by activating circulation routes, courtyards, open spaces and entries to stadiums.

An indepth study of Hawker typologies in Malaysia and elsewhere provides a starting point for this experimentation.

The Lines that Bind Advisors: Martin Musiatowicz + Brent Alpress

MARNIE-LEE MORIESON Sited in the heart of the Docklands, this satellite campus for Deakin’s new Business, IT and Graduate Law School draws on the latent architectural identity of the Goods’ Shed, the now defunct building type that once lined the suburbs’ wharves, tying the Docklands together in chains of red brick. With 80% of its ground floor area dedicated to community facilities, the campus is positioned as a piece of community infrastructure that serves to mediate the Docklands’ disparate parties: binding the discrete precincts of the Docklands and reconciling its disparate histories – its maritime history and the associated scale and material palette with its current ‘glass-box business park’ identity. Sited

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centrally to its residential communities and business headquarters, the intention is to draw together the existing business community with the local and greater Melbourne residential community.

The proposal extrapolates and intensifies four principles of the Goods’ Shed typology: repetition and linearity, mass and lightness, indirect/filtered light and an alternating rhythm. These principles are explored across various scales with the intention of reanimating the previous architectural identity of the Docklands in a series of moments across the site, providing diverse learning environments and framing and activating a range of collective spaces.

archipelago Advisor: Martyn Hook + Sand Helsel

MUIZZ NAZMI A counter-proposal to the Malaysian Solution endeavours to construct an emergent public presence for refugees in Kuala Lumpur through the pending realization of the refugee swap deal. In direct response to the different types of interconnected spaces that refugees in urban areas negotiate, the project advocates that any intervention for the protection and assistance of itinerant groups must include an understanding of how refugees interact and relate with local-space through the creative occupation of native terrain and the social constructions of the public within the citizen-itinerant ecologies of Kuala Lumpur.

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Strategies on how such spaces can be socially and physically constructed, connected, excised and imbued with symbolic meaning is explored architecturally through the public potential of the archipelago house-form and its deconstructive abilities to adapt to the new urban and social environments of The City. The architectural proposition reaffirms the notion of hospitality as a humanitarian act shaped by the direct relations between individuals, groups and the nascent forces of unprecedented global mobility, anticipating the transformative ways in which these negotiations of space can influence architecture’s new environments in the live realm.

Windy as Bell Advisors: Stasinos Mantzis + Christine Philliips

AARON NEIGHBOUR ‘Bells’ is much more than a powerful narrative about the world’s longest running board riding event, it is a fundamental part of Australian surfing history.

Visitors of Bells Beach often overlook this history due to the inadequacies of the current facilities. ‘Windy as Bell’ celebrates this past while accommodating the diverse user groups that Bells attracts.

The design draws on the common coastal typologies of the bunker, the pavilion and the tower and how they relate to their environment. These are manipulated and affected by the local wind conditions of the site in a similar manner to how the ocean’s surface reacts to offshore and onshore

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winds. This relationship with the ever-changing conditions of the sea harmoniously ties the building with how surfers engage the water.

The proposal has been considered in both event and non-event mode. In event mode, the design eliminates the need for transportable containers and heavy machinery and instead provides an onsite solution where a system of fibreglass panels manufactured by local surfboard shapers from resin waste can be used to infill permanent framing elements around the site. During non-event times, these spaces frame the natural amphitheatre that is Bells.

Hybrid Translations Advisor: Vivian Mitsogianni

HUN LIN NEO This project, located within the Digital Harbour Precinct in Melbourne’s Docklands, provides a proposition for a new learning environment where an integration of a market hall and a science learning centre takes place.

The project engages with the making of architecture through a morphing process which facilitates the integration of office tower and market typologies and develops new structural and organisational possibilities.

The hybridised building is investigated and used as a strategy to integrate the two distinctive programmes. The inherent qualities of a market space, as a centre of activity compliments the learning environment serving to promote

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interaction. The new building accommodates a variety of learning clusters, ranging from those with a highly permeable relationship to the city to more secluded environments and private learning spaces.

The development of voids, split levels and intersecting programmes in the project creates a distinct division of public and private spaces, yet maintains visual connections to keep a constant flow of knowledge sharing.

Complying with the “Docklands: The Second Decade� Strategic Plan, this project serves to fill the gap for the need for a centralised gathering space in Docklands, and serves as a contrast to the privatised buildings in its surroundings.

Crisis accommodation for women and children escaping domestic violence Advisors: Peter Brew + Simone Koch

VERN HUN NG This project is to design a crisis accommodation for souls escaping domestic violence.

The site is located at Ringwood, Victoria, facing a railway track, a street and adjoining units. The site is sloping, which is challenging for the design of 10 units apartment + administrative building & classrooms.

Before I begin, I have look at a few points of the brief, and I found out that contrast between the 2 words are very strong. The words are: Institutional and Residential, Public and Private, Freedom and Restriction, Soft and Solid, Light and Noise, Internal and External, Dependent and Independent, Landscape and Building.

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Rather than separating them, I have decided to marry them. The marrying of the following words allowing each to infect the other, provide the basis of my design. I have used this concept to apply to the use of material and space. This has enabled me to create new spaces by combining 2 separate spaces. There will be no specific space, every space has joined with each other to create it’s own usable space. These made the whole building an adventurous place for children and adults to explore. The internal space are expandable, allowing different family configurations to occupy comfortably and with dignity.

Agricultural Urbanism in Natimuk Advisor: Mauro Baracco

JONATHON ORMROD During our daily lives, the majority of us are divorced from the source of the things which we need or use on a regular basis. This is particularly true with food.

We don’t think much about the people, processes, packaging or the total environmental footprint involved in bringing the base ingredients of food into the items we place in our shopping baskets. This project aims to introduce a food revolution into the small community conscious town of Natimuk (pop 750), four hours drive west of Melbourne, which addresses all these issues. It highlights the activities and social connections that are brought about by the elements of food production.

The project consists of 6 interventions, each addressing key areas of agricultural urbanism: production, distribution, education, processing, retailing, celebration, infrastructure, and food security. The architecture draws inspiration from the broad roofed homesteads, farms and agricultural buildings seen throughout rural Australia. It provides generous spaces through structures of economy and allows programs to expand and also extend beyond the walls into the spaces beneath the deep eaves of the big roofs, into spaces between buildings, and into landscapes which share symbiotic relationships with the programs and buildings.

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2. Food Processing & accomodation

3. Organic Grocer

4. Organic Restaurant

5. Rail Trail Bike Cafe

6. Education Facilities

‘MADE IN MELBOURNE’: SWAPS – Small Workshop Apartments Advisor: Lindsay Holland

PATRICK OTARES When was the last time you bought something ‘Made In Melbourne’?

This project explores the potential of a traditional one-dimensional aging infrastructure – West Melbourne Railyards – as a site for the development of a hybrid mixed use zone.

Downplaying the orthodoxies of conventional programs or residential and commercial uses this project specifically aims at programs suitable for small business and workshop users who wish to combine living and working to create an environment suitable for a re-emergence of smallscale manufacturing in central Melbourne.

Asian Shop-House typologies are relevant – convenient, dense, efficient and with low energy consumption.

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Avoiding strategies of ‘tabula-rasa’ the project creates a singular key circulation system which unlocks the site’s potential elevated above the existing infrastructure, expressed simply as another elegant layer into an already complex urban condition.

Secondary links act as armatures for new buildings housing SWAP’s, with secondary local urban spaces offering local neighbourhood shared public space The strength of the scheme lies in its retention – indeed celebration of the existing infrastructure as an enduring urban landscape.

Urban ecology studies suggested the creation of a central wetland to manage grey water treatment configured as an urban park for the new precinct linked back to the rejuvenated Moonee Ponds Creek.

Pas de trois Advisor: Martyn Hook

GEORGINA PRITTIE The proposal is a response to missing or lacking vital, and specific, community infrastructure in the Port Philip area; crisis accommodation for women and children, child care and performing arts space.

The project which is situated in St Kilda adjacent to, and behind the home of Australia’s oldest ballet school; the National Theatre, investigates the coexistence of these three separate, but mutually beneficial programs, and what happens when the architecture of the 3 programs collides.

By re-inserting existing physical fractures through the site, and subsequently tensions between the buildings, charged negative spaces are formed.

These fractures culminate in a courtyard, forming

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the social heart for the whole of the community infrastructure.

The project finds its architectural language through an engagement with both the physical nature of, and individual expression of, each of its programs while creating a holistic composition.

As the infrastructure moves towards Barkly Street from Albert Street at the rear of the site, the formal language transforms from a gesture that references the local residential streetscape, into a modernistic, functional expression. The language of this building acts as a metaphor for the advertisement of the important ballet school, juxtaposed with the adjacent 1920’s National Theatre.

Stadia City Advisor: Vivian Mitsogianni

AZIANA ROSEDY This project investigates the possibility of amplified spectatorship threading through multiple programs which raises awareness and perhaps develops an appreciation of the diversity in a multicultural society. The question of national identity in modern Malaysia has been both a concern of this project as well as a tough issue to grasp. This project takes as its point of departure and responds to concerns of racial polarisation in educational institutions and the existence of a digital divide, and aims to explore the possibilities of increasing social exposure in both a collective and individual-focused centre which aspires to attract the wider public regardless of differences in culture, race, religion, gender and age. Located in the developing township of Kota Damansara, 17km away from the centre of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the proposal is for a public

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recreational sports and library facility connecting the site with high-density residential areas and the proposed future MRT network project. Fragments of a stadium were examined to create new compositions of seating, viewing and circulating as well as amplifying the elements of seatings and stage to increase social interactions. A series of iterations involving the manipulation of geometries and scale of a generic stadium were explored through a series of process-based experiments.

Fragments of this series of broken stadia have altered the stadium’s primary geometric nature and the relationship between “audience” and “stage” but not entirely. The hierarchy between them is replaced by openness, informality and possibilities. Spaces are layered in a way that creates opportunities for local social activities and conditions.

Seven schools of Mildura TAFE Advisor: Jan Van Schaik

OSCAR SAINSBURY Public Architecture in regional environments exists within a set of changing circumstances.

Growth and development need to be considered to address issues such as the large amounts of available space and existing unused building stock in the context of limited funds and resources. Also there are the serious demographic challenges of ageing and falling populations, consolidation of regional services and the shift from an agricultural economy towards other economies such as tourism and education.

This project proposes a new TAFE to empower Mildura as a major regional centre for the surrounding region, offering facilities for the local populace and drawing previously untapped populations into its orbit.

This project proposes a series of renovations and alterations to buildings on seven different sites

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located within the CBD of Mildura. Each alteration involves elements of removal and addition that respond to the qualities of the existing buildings and the programmatic requirements.

As opposed to a single institutional building or isolated campus model, this parasitic development is dispersed throughout the existing fabric of the city promoting interaction between the activities of the TAFE and the commerce and community of the rural city.

This project integrates new facilities into the changing environmental and social circumstances of Mildura. The need for re-training and re-education is reflected in the re-use of existing building stock. The consolidation and infill of the CBD also addresses the continued sprawl of Mildura’s township into surrounding productive agricultural areas.

Perdido Street Station Advisor: Paul Minifie

JIAN XIONG SEAH Sean Seah’s research shows Flinders Street Station, already a mysterious and formidable piece of Melbourne’s city fabric, to be but an incomplete fragment of a larger proposal. His project seeks to complete the station, starting by extending the hybrid inhabitable Flinders street building to complete it’s implicit rectangle. What results is a substantial but discrete new domain, only indirectly connected to and fully sequestered from the other Melbourne. It is a walled garden for growing and testing alternate kinds of city.

The proposing of improved urban models as a means to consider anew our evil and ailing cities is no new activity. Cities of the dead, of God, of hope,

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of delirium, of the bucolic idyll are only a few such alternatives. Seah expands the search by noting how cinema is so often premised on an alternative city logics, and that these logics are conveyed affectively through fragmentary views, detail, atmosphere and mise en scene rather than via a plan projecting organisation, mass and morphology.

Seah proposes a kind of city architecture where these affective properties of buildings can be understood as generative and of primary architectural concern rather than mere side effect of other urban actions. Perdido Street Station is a speculation that shows how our cities might be vividly other.

A Panacea for Urban Chaos: Invincibility Centre Advisors: Stasinos Mantzis + Christine Phillips

HENRY SGOURAKIS The turmoil and stress of modern day living has left a profound scar on the human consciousness at large.

As a society we have become desensitized to our primal instincts, relying instead on the conveniences of modern technology, numbing our intuitive senses and leaving little space for progressive evolution. ‘A Panacea for Urban Chaos’ endeavours to provide a break from urban chaos and encourage a reengagement with nature through a secluded sanctuary, a collective retreat from society.

Located in the Victorian alpine region, north east of Melbourne, 1700m above sea level, it offers its inhabitants an environment in which to re-connect the body to the earth vibration frequency.

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The retreat comprises independent sleeping cells, public huts, a collective meals area, amenities, theatre, yoga/recreation space and a vibration hall for meditation. Its tower provides the area with a much needed fire lookout station, plus public amenity, working as a beacon to the wider area and referencing temple architecture.

The siting and planning draws on Vastu planning principles, aligning particular programs with the earth and sun to create harmony. The forms combine interpretations of temple architecture with readings of on-site rock formations.

Richmond Garden State Advisor: John Doyle

MARGARET SIM The site is located in Richmond station, 2km away from the CBD. As a premium station it has a high level of patronage and is at the junction of all Melbourne’s Eastern and South Eastern rail lines.

The sets out with the ambition to deal with the city’s increasing demand for densification through growth along the railway corridor, responding to the Melbourne 2030 report the development is centered around a business and activity district close to transport nodes. At the same time, the project addresses the dwindling stock of public parkland and open space in the city, and seeks to draw on

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potential infrastructural connections to the adjacent Melbourne park sports precinct as an opportunity to graft a new public park to the top deck of the development – linking the Swan St strip to the MCG, Melbourne Park and the Rectangular Stadium.

Melbourne was once known as being part of the “garden state.” While in recent years it has been losing its open spaces under the pressure of densification, this project proposes an approach that aims leveraging large mixed use developments against the provision of parks and open spaces.

Subterranean Convergence Advisor: Graham Crist

RICHARD SIU This project imagines it sits within a country metropolis. The opposing notions of ‘country’ and ‘metropolis’ are considered irrelevant in this convergence of residential, commercial and retail space with metropolitan transport in a rural paddock.

Armstrong Creek is a rapidly urbanising rural territory, situated between Geelong and Torquay.

It consists of wide open spaces of flat farmland. Its proximity to two prominent city centres makes it an ideal location for the development of a ‘city hub’, a convergence point for travellers and locals alike. The concept of local convenience is at the heart of this

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project, creating a development which incorporates transportation, residential, commercial and retail within 6.2 hectares of land.

The development is situated entirely in an earth bermed hill, creating a top lit subterranean environment. This provides a gentle interface between the surrounding buildings and the train station which merge to integrate residential, commercial and retail with public transport. Above the subterranean development is a public park with broad sloping green fields adjoining the natural landscape of Armstrong Creek.

Museum for the Australian border Advisor: Peter Corrigan

ANDREAS SIVITOS The project addresses the quality of thinking behind the control of the Australian frontier over the last century. It consists of a memorial space, the core of knowledge and human thought, and an auditorium of future prosperity and evolution. The museum’s symbolic spaces are laid out in a story telling sequence regarding the past and present policies.

The aim is to trigger a self reflective process and discussion amongst the visitors, regarding issues of ethical progression. The museum is situated at

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Point Nepean, a geographical location significant to Melbourne, were important historic events were held. Its position upon the water extends the physical border creating a new dimension, which gives to the park’s marine environment the protagonist role amongst the rest of the attractions, distorting the previously established program of power, dominance and conflict that the bunkers situated on the land communicate.

Blind Creek Community Infrastructure Advisor: Simon Whibley

AMY SNOEKSTRA My project frames a study of Blind Creek corridor in Melbourne. Currently there is significant investment into sustainable water management. This project investigates the implications of such large scale ecological issues through community based demonstration projects.

This project distributes facilities along this corridor, creating new relationships between the suburban fabric and the ecology of Blind Creek. This strategy embeds the idea of stewardship; hosting participation in the conservation of particular parts of the creek by adjacent communities.

Blind Creek is a naturally occurring waterway and an annex to the surrounding stormwater infrastructure.

The stretch which flows through the suburbs of Knox and Wantirna is highly modified. The corridor encompasses a variety of built and landscape conditions including landfill sites, areas of protected vegetation and wetland as well as park and recreational spaces. These spaces play host to many community groups and activities.

The proposals form three different types of engagement with the Blind Creek Corridor; a community consultation hub, located along the levy wall of Knox Basin; a recreational pavilion located amongst a residential development and thirdly, an ecological research centre and community nursery which doubles as infrastructure for the collection and treatment of storm water.

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Atherton Gardens Re-Commission Advisor: Louis Sauer

KIANG HOW TAN by restructuring of the entire site through the use of new land uses, streets, building typologies and recreation facilities.

This design illustrates a proposal to substantially increase existing public housing densities for a broad demographic population and to provide additional public and private social services and other community facilities while reducing the public’s maintenance costs.

Presently, the entire Atherton Gardens’ 7-hectare territory is a low-income island ghetto within the inner-city neighborhood of Fitzroy. Not only does it cause social exclusion, personal violence and economic dislocation from the neighborhood’s urban fabric, its large open spaces, while a beautiful park-like setting, are expensive to maintain and do not offer needed social amenities to either its existing residents or to the neighborhood at large. This design offers a both an architectural and a social concept that integrates the site with the surrounding neighborhood and provides for a range of public, affordable and market housing

The proposal is based on four principals; 1) Atherton Gardens should be connected to the surrounding fabric through the reintroduction of selected historical streets. 2) Excess land should be sold to private developers within strict housing development policies. 3) With the money generated new community facilities should be built to serve the existing, new and neighborhood residents. 4) The stigma of the public housing buildings should be transformed through the use of color, materials and form.

In addition to this design meeting these principles, it provides a valuable addition to the community of: 450 housing units, 340 new parking places, and 18 113 m2 of community facilities.

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Collections of an Old Town Advisor: Rutger Pasman

MING VEI TAN The old towns of Southeast Asia are in a crisis.

An unseen urge for modernisation has led vast culturally and historically important urban landscapes into a polarisation of disrepair and restoration. This project uses the questions of contemporary life in Ipoh’s labelled civic buildings to rejuvenate the old town urban landscape. Designed as monuments in this landscape, the role of existing civic buildings has deteriorated and a growing disconnection between them and the civil urban life has appeared.

The project is interested in reinstating a more civil role for Ipoh’s public buildings with a strong interest in the civic edge, informal activities, events

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and occupations within the existing urban fabric.

In addition, this fabric of shop houses has been analysed, curated and catalogued to respond to a more contemporary civil urban network.

Threshold and civic informality are used to describe a new institutional hybrid that diffuses the scales and activities of Ipoh’s old town. This is achieved by the containment of intimate space, engaging socially with the urban life and forcing a more dispersed flow of interaction. As such the building is bringing civic and civil together.

Fibre Space Advisor: Leanne Zilka

FEI TENG I am investigating fibre-based composite structures in architecture which includes carbon and glass fibres. These light weight structures have their roots in the aerospace industry where lightness and strength are the focus and when applied to architecture challenge conventional building because they produce structures that are very fine and resemble fabric. I’ve chosen this textile approach for the proposed extension to the east of federation square that will house aboriginal art and artefacts as well as performance and education spaces. The site is occupied by train lines which I have chosen to incorporate into the extension rather than cover as is the case with federation square. The lightweight quality of the fibre based composites

uses layering and density of the fabric-like structure to reveal its location and control the light of the different programs. Using the fine structure to penetrate federation square, the fibre structure begins in the centre of the square, providing a canopy for the crowds. This canopy then weaves through the NGV across Russell Court and into the gallery spaces. Visitors can also enter from Flinders street adjacent to the Batman Avenue overpass and Birranrung Marr. The journey through the building reveals the program while navigating between and around the train lines, forming ramps which lead into the variety of programs.

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High School for Coburg Advisor: Martin Musiatowicz

EMILY WALLACE High School for Coburg presents a proposal for a community high school for 1500 students in the rapidly expanding northern suburb of Coburg.

The project begins by critiquing existing typologies for large Victorian state high schools in order to propose a response which seeks to create an appropriate architecture and landscape that fosters and maintains links within a diverse community such as this.

Careful manipulation of the buildings’ edges creates spaces and implied boundaries, enabling occupants to engage with each other, the built form and landscape.

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The project explores how careful design of thresholds can impact educational spaces and pedagogy, whilst engaging with a broader community. Additionally, landscape and manipulation of the terrain is used to reinforce this

notion and promote learning in the surrounding environment. The project demonstrates a series of thresholds between each of the nine buildings, the school and immediate site, as well as the broader community. How does this spatial environment affect the way in which learning occurs, whilst responding to changing educational priorities?

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Fragmented Revelations – School of Cinematic Arts Advisor: Brent Allpress

HATTIE WANG The Capitol Theatre by the Griffins is a significant modernist complex that became marginalised due to the rise of televisions in the home in the 1960’s. Architecture needs to respond and adapt to survive change due the developing needs of the human society, as technology and social habits advance. There is a need to appreciate what is lost in this process as a starting point to revitalise the expression of an existing context. These ideas inform an alteration and extension of this unique modernist building in a contemporary language, so that it may be understood and utilized in the present to both preserve and enhance its innovative values.

The proposed School of Cinematic Arts alteration and extension to the existing Capitol Theater in Melbourne encourages public and institutional

PROGRAMMATIC COMPONENTS

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activity throughout the building to enliven this neglected hidden treasure. The expedient 1960’s insertion of a commercial retail arcade created dysfunctional circulation issues with weak urban connections and severe internal spatial disjunctions.

This design proposal reintroduces the enticement of journey and discovery, revealing fragmented spaces within spaces and breaking through the existing shell of the Capital theatre to allow visual communication with its surrounding streetscape and laneways. Nested voids and volumes are inserted to discern spatial and functional hierarchies through the visual connection and disconnection of spaces. The interior ornamentation of the Capitol Theatre provokes a series of spatial devices at the scale of screen and volume to frame, connect and differentiate diverse activities.

CIRCULATION

Ebb and flow Advisor: Richard Black

ERIN WATSON The town of Heidelberg has long desired a gallery to house works from the iconic Heidelberg School art movement on home ground. Here an opportunity exists to celebrate a history of creative engagement with the landscape along the Yarra River on the floodplains of Heidelberg, Eaglemont and Bulleen through the design of an art gallery and museum to house the historic Heidelberg School paintings and show contemporary landscape and environmental artworks.

Through the format of a gallery, the project aims to investigate ways in which architecture can start to communicate hidden site conditions; how intangible

and dynamic forces like the process of flood, or layered histories might be evoked and expressed.

A history of flood has seen the town turn its back on the river, moving to higher ground. The gallery will incorporate artists housing and workshops that infiltrate the wet zone. At an urban scale, a network of interventions and infrastructure stitches the fragmented land around the floodplain together to connect the gallery and parkland to the town and nearby Heide MoMA, tracing and reinforcing the transient line between built edge and floodplain.

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Atherton Garden’s Community Centre Advisor: Richard Black

NICHOLAS WITHEY This project is a proposal for a new community centre situated on the northern boundary of the Atherton Gardens Housing Estate in Fitzroy, Victoria. The design of the community centre seeks to investigate and address the existing physical and social disjunction between the estate and the context of the surrounding suburb of Fitzroy.

The proposed community centre aims to provide an occupied boundary that will act as a point of interaction between the residents of the estate and the surrounding community of Fitzroy. The community centre will also provide a built edge to mark the territory of the estate’s central landscape gardens.

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The community centre has a program consisting of a gallery including flexible artist studio spaces, a conference centre housing a 240 seat auditorium, a library and resource centre, child care facilities and community workshop spaces. The amenities of the community centre aim to provide long-term benefits like education, training and employment opportunities for the residents of the estate.

The Black Diamond Advisors: Mel Dodd + Michael Spooner

BRETT WITTINGSLOW The township of Korumburra, located in southeast Victoria, is an endeavour by its people. Dating from its coal mining origins to its present day dairy industry, the town of 4500 people has largely been self supporting. This project aims to provide amenity for the town, but foremost, provide an architecture which will celebrate, critique and exaggerate the idiosyncrasies and latent conditions which make Korumburra so unique.

At the bottom of Main Street, a proposed supermarket, reception centre and cheese tasting room mark entry to the town from Melbourne, whilst at the top end an indigenous arboretum, self-storage facility, and room for listening to giant

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earthworms addresses the point of departure.

The buildings locate themselves within the larger geographical and topographical framework of southeast Victoria since the town is situated between Melbourne and the popular tourist destination of Wilsons Promontory. While addressing the transitory experiences of the passerby, the needs of the locals are also ingrained within the buildings, and this is manifested in conditions which only a local might be aware of.

The ambition is that these buildings will be simultaneously both familiar, yet also provocative and uncomfortably strange.

National Gallery of Indigenous Art (NGIA) Advisor: Enza Angelucci

SIMON WRIGHT This architectural proposition to RE-THINK, RETAIN, RE-USE, RE-MAKE, RE-TAKE is embedded in a proposal to introduce the National Gallery Of Indigenous Art (NGIA) on a large industrial paper mill site in Alphington, which takes advantage of the existing infrastructure and the Yarra River, a traditional water way of the Wurundjeri tribe.

Through maintaining the specificity of the site, the programmatic layer re-takes the infrastructure and re-orientates the site to re-fabricate a new meaning within the existing landscape, allowing a cultural exchange without erasure, keeping fragments of the past whilst expressing the present.

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Through a kaleidoscope of the old and the new, the spatial qualities of the gallery orientates the user, through a series of journeys, that push and pull into varying spatial experiences, whilst maintaining the original industrial qualities of the site and celebrating the beauty of the existing landscape.

The introduction of a new circulation system, whose qualities are embedded in an industrial sensibility, allows the journey to reveal the importance of history and site.

Rural Retirement Living Advisor: Richard Black

CYNTHIA YIM This project aims to shift the current definition of aged living to adapt to an aging population in rural towns, using Castlemaine as a case study.

Castlemaine has one of the highest aged populations in a Victorian rural area over 60, with a large portion being single. The retirement village complex introduces a higher density housing model, integrated public programs such as a cafÊ and art space on the corner to continue residents’ livelihoods, and shared amenities in a site with limited space where an existing building is present.

The proposal comprises of three entities: the existing building, the new volumes, and outdoor space.

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Given the heritage overlay of the town, the proposal aims to be a humble and quiet addition to the streetscape whose heights and volumes correspond to the surrounding transition of civic and residential architecture. The design aims to be read as one collection along the perimeters, with a human-centred approach applied to the interior premises of the site. It also is an evaluation of the existing aged care facilities in Castlemaine that tend to be withdrawn and inward-facing, reversing this relationship by revealing moments of residential life to the exterior.

Urban Node Advisor: Jan Van Schaik

FANG YUAN With the rapid economic development along the Nanjing Yangtze River, commercial buildings, shopping malls and housing estates have mushroomed in the Xia Guan district. Amongst this there is a notable absence of community buildings.

Urban Node seeks to fill this gap providing interactive leisure venues for regional culture exchange.

The project investigates civic architecture as a medium to promote and preserve the historical and cultural context of the site through which it lays claim to improved social and cultural dynamics. By proposing an architecture built from

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local symbolism the scheme attempts to create a vibrant node for tourism that projects a future for tradition and regional culture while at the same time encouraging interaction with, and education of, the inhabitants of the local district.

The new architecture self consciously borrows its design motifs from the immediate context. The built form, facades and materiality are based on the design of the ancient city wall to the east, the temple and palace to the north, the old Nanjing warehouse to the west, and Xiuqiu hill to the south.

Streets in a Building Advisors: Ed Carter + John Doyle

BANG ZHAO The proposed design is for a local library and artisanal workshop complex / community hub in the Southbank Arts Precinct. The design draws on the programmatic diversity and experiential richness of the “shopping street” urban typology that is commonly found in Melbourne and looks for techniques to coil a street like sequence into a single building form.

The formal bi-product of the design is a series of programmatic and spatial adjacencies that begin to emerge when the two competing geometries and functional systems come into contact with each other, as well as a large atrium that is formed in the space around which the two strips spiral - allowing

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light to penetrate deep into the internal spaces of the building. This organizational system provides vertical lines of sight from different areas of the project, offering glimpses of the different activities taking place and contributing to an overall sense of a “metropolitan” experience.

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Angela Knoll Andrew Thompson Joe Norster + student volunteers