PROJECTS | a collection of architecture, art and design proposals
NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA’S MELBOURNE DESIGN WEEK 2020
‘THE CITY SHAPED: MELBOURNE’
The City Shaped: Melbourne, explores the idea of the city as a machine for cultural production through a series of images and sculptural objects. This exploration examines the relationship between human activity and the spaces of the city: the way in which human activity shapes the form of the city and, in turn, is shaped by it. Taking Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid as a testing ground, an analysis of each city block reveals individual spatio-cultural characteristics, which are reinterpreted in the form of sculptural objects.
A collaboration with Eva Florindo and Conor Todd
SLV ALCHEMY
‘A BOOK EXCHANGE’
A proposal for the re-activation of Hansen Hall, State Library Victoria
The proposal is to provide one of the largest physical book exchange programs in Australia at State Library Victoria. The book exchange is proposed for Hansen Hall and would contain second-hand books donated by local organisations, functioning as a take-one leave-one service, whilst promoting the up-cycling of second-hand books.
The book exchange would fundamentally strive to promote reading to disadvantaged, ESL and low literacy individuals within the community, while also providing a valuable book exchange service to all. Upon entry users would be immersed in a highly playful and adaptable space, sparking curiosity and encouraging individuals to pick up a book and read it. The space would allow for small and large gatherings, individual and group seating and ‘safe reading’ areas. The book exchange would act as a catalyst to raise awareness of the importance of literacy while striving to increase literacy levels through a series of scheduled programs.
‘THE STAIR AND THE LABYRINTH’
Finding solutions to Tokyo’s ageing population
TOKYO MAUSOLEUM
The Shinjuku Cemetery Tower is a final resting place for 50,000 of Tokyo’s residents, within the heart of the city. Watching stationary above an ever pulsing Shinjuku below, the tower stands motionless through time. Yet the building is not silent; it speaks enchantingly of the possibility of a collective memory. The Project takes as its archetypes the labyrinth and the stair, whose forms appear everywhere in the architecture of memory; from the pyramids of Egypt and the Catacombs of Rome, to the hills of Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari-Taisha.
These archetypes form the central conceptual elements of the project; combined in unlikely ways, the resulting spaces becomes animated with formal and metaphoric associations both historical and new. The folded, stepping form is in turns monumental and elegant, archaic and refined, reflective and expressive. As still as the tower remains against the hyper-speed city beneath, this is an animated architecture - a monument to living memory.
The site for this building is located on St Kilda Road, Melbourne - positioned in front of the former Victorian Asylum and School for the Blind. Institutions such as those for the blind were once a positive thing in that they provided essential facilities for society. However, the architectural typology of institutions was also based on control, surveillance and segregation of individuals.
This building looks to adopt and re-appropriate certain architectural elements from institutional typology, while at the same time it reacts against the institution as being a tool for ordering, classifying, and segregating portions of society. Instead this project to produce an architecture which is social, outward looking, and unconfined – and which promotes integration and interaction within society.
‘ARTS & RECREATION CENTRE FOR THE BLIND’
Supervisor: Amy Muir
RMIT THESIS