RMIT UNIVERSITY
Singapore Art Space: Site for cultural production, Site for cultural experience
Project Statement
The future meaning of what it is to be Singaporean is most clearly seen in the arts, where multiculturalism is most influential. The agenda is to address these issues and in turn to provide for an otherwise culturally inauthentic Singapore with a new creative and participatory spatial environment. The spatial model of Singapore has been of such a nature that ground level activities and events are driven by what is above and at subterranean level due to scarcity of land. The difference between above or underground is no longer relevant where there is only simultaneity. The proposition is to engage with the more anonymous zones of interstitiality by making imaginative explorations of different levels of territories. The proposed experimental centre for the visual arts is envisioned as a decentralised production; local, communal in its focus and highly important in terms of Singapore life creating an architecture of harmony and equity.
Jury Comments
This scheme was distinguished by a particularly principled mission statement which established reassuring objectives. The challenge as identified by the student is to create meaningful and moral public spaces in a city that is presently spiralling into over-development. It is an even handed presentation involving both thorough primary analysis of the existing Singaporean conditions and an elegant proposal to reinforce the cultural life of the city. It provides an alternative to the contemporary single icon building solution, as it creates an urban platform for Singaporean life. The presentation was enhanced by the analysis of a built model and whimsical collages.
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
An Architectural Assemblage
Project Statement
This project proposes an Advanced Technology Precinct to be located in Southbank, Melbourne. The precinct consists of a number of research modules, containing laboratories and office spaces, and a museum that serves to educate and entertain the public about research taking place within the site. The ambition of this project is to engage with the theory of assemblage within architecture. This includes considerations such as how ideas can be tied together, how different aesthetics can be composed, how spaces can be arranged and also how building components can be assembled.
Jury Comments
A high level of resolution and a systematic architectural thought process are evident in this scheme. The presentation convincingly portrays a variety of scales and spaces, from the broad contextual presence within otherwise marginal urban spaces, to the intimate detail of the working laboratory. The scheme offers a public campus during the day, and at night a communicating graphic within the city. This scheme reflects independent thought.
DEAKIN UNIVERSITY
Interfacing the Palimpsest
Project Statement
The project elevates the initial brief of the Digiport, (commercial, tertiary education, apartments and hotels), with an urban overlay of a senior secondary school, and further civic apparatus. The site becomes a connection between education, information and commercial production. The promenade is rerouted creating Docklands' civic heart. The New-Quay promenade is extended through the site to the Docklands Stadium, ramping up to create an urban plaza, with access to three great urban rooms; library, gallery and cinema. The docks reprise their role in cultural exchange. The project provides contemporary urban spaces resonating with the spatial typologies that form Melbourne.
Jury Comments
This scheme is grand in terms of its master plan and typologies. It creates an evocative urban landscape within the docklands wilderness, providing a framework and model for future development. This arresting presentation carries its own authority. The scale and power of the architectural world proposed in the presentation alludes to the optimisms of modernity.
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
R.E.D. Termite
Project Statement
[Red Termite] – narrative derived from the ambiguous role of termites in Redfern station, an urban zone associated with conflicts + uneasiness, yet also a natural bridging land that links up different ethnic groups, arteries and social interactions in tension. Project’s major intervention includes a steel frame station plaza, along with a masterplan which suggests different layers of activities in the surrounding area.
Jury Comments
This scheme addresses a pressing social agenda common to a large number of Australian cities. The jury felt that the quality of animism was a departure point, but requires further development. The scheme has strong references to the natural landscape, with an overarching canopy with the quality of metaphor.
RMIT UNIVERSITY
Queensland Gallery of Modern Art
Project Statement
Queensland Gallery of Modern Art will be the largest modern art gallery in Australia, to enhance Queensland's position as a centre for visual art.
It’s an intervention to the Brisbane Art Precinct that already houses a number of institutions (Queensland State Library, Queensland Art Gallery, Museum, and Performing Art Centre). Situated at Kurilpa Point on the south bank of the Brisbane River, QGMA will provide an identifiable loop back towards the precinct providing sequence of venue for the exhibitions, research and interpretation of art, cinema, video and multi-media.
The objective is to stretch distinct layers of promenades (pedestrian bridge, gallery plaza, and boardwalk) across the art precinct into the new gallery site. The new gallery provides an identifiable loop back towards the precinct while providing a sequence of art display spaces inviting local identities (site, people and history) to interfere positively with the introduced program.
Jury Comments
This student attempted to resolve a particularly difficult competition program, and did so with considerable aplomb. The presentation was notable for its clarity and conviction. The scheme presents a set of playful and intriguing spaces, but there was some hesitation from the jury regarding the constructional resolution of the scheme.
RMIT UNIVERSITY
Transit Republic
Project Statement
Transit Republic is a trans-territorial global archipelago of airport transit zones, loosely controlled by governing bodies of each transit space’s host and collectively overseen by the UN.
The vehicle for this proposition is an airport satellite terminal situated within the airside of the southern apron at Tullamarine Airport, Melbourne.
Key programs are asylum processing centres, diplomatic missions, clinics and schools.
The architectural objective is to weave culturally conflicting activities, in an attempt to stimulate intimacy and interaction between them.
This transit city is also designed in modules and clusters to humanise the scale and maximise efficiency in its assembly.
Jury Comments
This is a utopian project, with the difficulties that this implies. Nevertheless the humanist ambitions to address the global scaled tragedy of displaced persons are laudable. The scheme is notable for its pattern making and analysis of systems. It reflects a serious and well considered theoretical position, producing a fine set of drawings.
RMIT UNIVERSITY
Bahgdad Studio
Project Statement
The Rebuilding Baghdad project consisted of developing housing in a socially sustainable way. The site was the old military parade grounds on the south bank in Baghdad. There was no client allocated, so my design is aimed at ordinary citizens.
The brief was not prescribed, so I chose a housing development with the idea that following a conflict there tends to be an influx of people back into the city.
My goal was to create a development that would become a healthy and permanent community. I also wanted to respond to the injustices I saw in the recent conflict.
Jury Comments
This scheme addresses an issue of international significance and concern. While the scheme does not provide a great deal of resolution, it nevertheless suggests how architecture might contribute. A comparison is drawn between two international cities, Melbourne and Bagdad, and through this comparison, housing solutions are generated. The polemical nature of the presentation is a daring departure.
UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE
University Library - Split, Croatia
Project Statement
The new University Library is located in Split, a city that is 1700 years old, and is the second biggest centre in Croatia after the capital city of Zagreb. The client for the project is the University of Split together with the city of Split.
On the site of rectangular shape with an overall area of 4030 square metres, buildings were to be no more than 10 000 square metres in size and no more than four stories high.
The program of the new University Library was to be broken up into two major functional components, Multifunctional areas and Library areas. Materials like concrete (main structural component), glass, timber and Tombasil were carefully selected to ensure that the exterior of the building blends into the surroundings.
Two main design objectives that the University Library has to address are:
the Library’s role as the central library of the University of Split and the role as the main public library of the city of Split.
Jury Comments
It was refreshing to receive a hand drawn presentation involving subtle colour and handsome chiaroscuro. The library as a building type is increasingly ephemeral. It was therefore reassuring to view a proposal with such a strong sense of literary culture and materiality. This is clearly a scheme for a distinguished public building.
QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
Docking Station 1: An institutional building for a mobile society
Project Statement
Design objective: to transform the metaphor of the Student Common / shared resources into flexible and comfortable working spaces, in order to respond to federal educational funding cuts and spatial expansion limitations.
Jury Comments
The challenge of providing flexible spaces to meet contemporary student needs was pertinent, and is a situation that is faced by many university campuses. There is an exciting structural bravado suggested by the drawings. The quality of the components, however, did not fully reflect the innovative opportunities of the program.
RMIT UNIVERSITY
Ghosted Civic Precinct
Project Statement
The project proposes a ‘Ghosted Civic Precinct’, on the Richmond Town Hall block. It has been designed for the local council, and incorporates existing public buildings currently on the site into the new design. The aim is to allow the history of the site to inform the new design, where the ‘ghostings’ in plan form the footprints of the new buildings. The old and new blur together to create architecture that reflects Richmond’s history, while adding new modern spaces.
Jury Comments
This suburban scaled proposal is notable for its sensitive response to pre-existing site conditions, including a 19th century town hall. The intimation of memory and the ghost like transparency of the scheme in part reflect the author's theoretical proposition. The modesty of scale and the limited palette of the presentation distinguishes this submission.
University of Queensland
The Labyrinth and the Aedicule - West End Urban Interventions
Project Statement
The inner city village of West End is entering a phase of rapid growth and demographic change raising the question of emerging urban frameworks and their architectural transformation.
The brief proposes an inter-related urban and mixed-use architectural project where research based tactics and strategies interact with and extend the qualities of ‘surrounding pre-existences’.
Close observation, recording the storytelling of residents and cognitive maps of community life contributed to the formulation of a working manifesto. The intention was to explore a sustainable contemporary architecture that can create a ladder of relationships between past, present and future – between the broad urban landscape and intimate interstitial spaces.
The scheme proposes an urban-based architecture where emphatic imagination informs the making of places for free association (labyrinth) and for refuge and retreat (aedicule). Working within a Benjaminian framework redemptive qualities are found within objects and events that are at the point of disappearance and are given an ‘after-life’ that is expressed in architectural form.
Jury Comments
This attempt to stitch together an existing urban fabric is ambitious, but suffers from a lack of pictorial focus. There are moments that suggest spaces, both internal and external, that demonstrate a powerful presence. The proposal displays a strong contextual sensitivity and a commendable level of social awareness.
