LISTENING

LISTENING

BEING PRESENT ON COUNTRY

The idea of Country lies at the heart of many contributions to the Open Archive. Country is an expansive and deep First Nations concept that underpins cultural identity, in addition to being the original source of sustenance, shelter, and meaning. Country encompasses lands, waters, and sky; the living and non living; law and ancestral knowledge1.

A practice of listening to, respecting, learning about and understanding Country is an important part of a decolonising practice of architecture. However with a concept that is simultaneously so wide-ranging and so specific to place, gaining such understanding is difficult. Many tactics advocate a shifting of perspective, seeking to render visible or tangible things unnoticed, hidden or repressed, or alternatively register the presence of silence and absence. Reckoning with the violence and trauma of colonial-era and ongoing dispossession is an inescapable part of this.

Attunement to the patterns, rhythms, and voices of the environment, such as flows of subterranean water or the traces of historical occupations in the material fabric of sites, can be seen as part of a conscious reorientation towards County. This describes a distinct mode of attention, identified in several tactics as deep listening1. A range of embodied techniques and technologies are described to capture and communicate this attention, including drawing, videography, augmented reality, and dance. The shift in metaphorical emphasis from the retinal to the auditory register in apprehending environments and buildings is a simple yet profound move. This opens up intersectional and emotional layers of experience, carrying significant consequences for design.

Listening also names an ethics of relation, particularly to those whose voices have gone unheard. Privileging the voices of First Peoples is central in contexts of decolonisation, but in the broader sense the principle extends to the inclusion of all who are marginalised. Listening has a critical capacity, as it grasps how a dominant culture naturalises its curtailments on the agency of those deemed as Others. This also extends to non-human entities – animals, plants, natural presences such as rivers and mountains – the fundamental rights of the planet.

1 Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann has been an important voice in articulating the concept of deep listening or dadirri.

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ARCHAEOLOGY AS DESIGN INSPIRATION

ARCHAEOLOGY AS DESIGN INSPIRATION

A CULTURAL MATERIAL REPOSITORY EXPLORING ARCHAEOLOGICAL FORM

Phillips/Pilkington Architects

LOCATION
VIC
Breakaway Creek
Gunditjmara Country

This project redresses colonial development by re- homing ‘stolen’ Gunditjmara artefacts and supporting an economic future for the Gunditjmara. Gunditjmara have occupied the area around Tae Rak for millennia with many ‘re-homed’ in the former Lake Condah Mission. Archaeological research and investigations underpinned our design.

An archaeological dig was undertaken to assist in the location of the building, avoiding disturbance of any pre- contact or mission remains, with the preservation of both vital. We reviewed a significant body of archaeological and historical research. Dr Paul Memmott’s book, Gunyah Goondie + Wurley (UQP, 2007) was an inspiration, with an 1840 drawing of a Gunditjmara village and conjectural sketches of dwellings based on remnant circular walls found in archaeological excavations, led by Dr Heather Builth.

These traditional Gunditjmara dwellings are located on the Budj Bim lava flow, which occurred around 30,000 years ago. The circular Keeping Place with a base constructed of volcanic field stone and domed timber roof form evokes these traditional walls, repudiating the notion that Australia’s First Peoples did not build lasting structures.

phillipspilkington.com.au/projects/cultural/

gunditjmirring.com

CLIENT
Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation Inc. RNTBC

ARCHITECT
Phillips/Pilkington Architects

ENGINEERS
PM Design (all disciplines)

QUANTITY SURVEYOR
Heinrich Consulting

LANDSCAPE DESIGN
Viesturs Cielens design

CULTURAL HERITAGE MANAGEMENT PLAN
Context in Association with Extent Heritage Advisors

BUILDER
AW Nicholson

PHOTOGRAPHER
Terry Hope Photography

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Shrinking Yourself to Make Yourself Larger

SHRINKING YOURSELF TO MAKE YOURSELF LARGER

REFLECTIONS FOR ARCHITECTS ON THE EXPANSION OF OUR FIELD

Blaklash Creative, Deicke Richards, Genevieve Quinn

LOCATION
QLD
We thank all the people on whose land and waters we live and work. These are, the Barada Barna, Danggan Balum, Darambal, Gubbi Gabbi, Jagera, Kombumerri, Quandamooka, Turrbal, and Yugambeh people. We would also like to thank all First Nations people we have worked with, connecting to all parts of the Country. Without your trust, perspective, knowledge, and custodianship, we could not learn these lessons and better our practice and industry.

Shrinking Yourself is about removing ego, letting go
of authority and forgetting the timelines. It is about embracing fluidity and being uncomfortable when we have been trained to be linear and assured. Our design is ‘blurred’ because it is irrelevant. The accomplishment of this project is not visible in plan. It lies in the rejection of production-based and time-driven architecture, and the acceptance of uncertainty. The extended timeline prioritised listening and empathising (without a pen in hand), and conceded our design authority and sense of ‘expertise’. The removal of us as ‘designer’ allowed for the process, site and community to be the designers.
We became documenters and illustrators. Some of the armour that protects us as architects (Gant charts, resourcing and budget) was shed, yet our design time remained the same. Months were spent talking, gaining trust, listening, and learning. Shrinking ourselves drove us into a larger profession of compassion and community. This is a small step in decolonisation. We are a small part of the process. This tactic is not a small task.

shrinkyourselftomakeyourselflarger.com

ENGAGEMENT AND DESIGN TEAM
Blaklash Creative & Deicke Richards

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CULTIVATING QUIET

CULTIVATING QUIET

INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REFRAMING ENCOUNTER

Thomas Capogreco, Richard Le Messurier

LOCATION
TAS
Queenstown
timkarik, lutruwita

This tactic seeks to unsettle accepted spatial boundaries within Queenstown, by siting inventive fine-grain architectural elements and furniture at the threshold of private and public space. The proposed détournement of outdoor inhabitation aims to de-escalate the stakes of this legal (read: colonial) categorization, via an encounter with the work of acoustic ecologist, Gordon Hempton, who foregrounds the primacy of listening over seeing, and whose reconception of quiet unearths a deeply rooted font of colonial hubris. For Hempton, quiet is an affective energy which emanates positively through the eco-cultural fabric of a space.

This project does not seek to instantiate quiet via physical barriers, nor via the means of direct antagonism. Rather, this gesture seeks to cultivate a silence that emanates, in service of incidental eco-social encounters and thoughtful deliberations. Abundant in unrealized eco-acoustic affordances and highly exposed to public activity, this site possesses high potential for the subversion of everyday life. In this way, the maneuver aims to reshape social relations by providing physical frameworks by which quiet can emanate.

TACTIC CONCEPT AND WRITING
Richard Le Messurier
Thomas Capogreco

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LINGUISTIC TRUTH

LINGUISTIC TRUTH

PLACE NAMING AND LANGUAGE

Tanner Kibble Denton Architects

LOCATION
NSW
Alexandria
Gadigal / Cadigal Land

Alexandria Park Community School is on Gadigal Land and is a fully connected learning precinct for over 2,000 children between the ages of 4 to 18 years.

Framed around the idea of ‘Clouds’, the project is a community-focused precinct that means different things to different people. Blurring the perception of the site boundary and merging the outdoor play areas of the school with the adjacent public park, the project sought to decolonize the approach to enclosure.

A key tactic of dual language place naming and wayfinding was used by the project team to embed a positive approach to social inclusion, decolonizing the institutional nature of schools. Working with our cultural mentor and linguistic advisor, the project team developed inspiring concepts for naming gathering spaces, administration, the library, and sporting zones, reimagining the way these parts of a school should be named that together created a narrative for the school that was deeply rooted in the place.

Building upon the graphic concepts of artist Tony Albert in the 2016 book “Alexandria Park Community School is Gadigal Land,” the design and graphic realization of language is the result of real community engagement.

CLIENT
Department of Education / School
Infrastructure NSW


ABORIGINAL CULTURAL
REPRESENTATIVES
Uncle Terry Denzil,
Aunty Deborah Daley


CULTURAL MENTOR AND
LINGUISTIC ADVISOR
Shayne Beckham


SCHOOL PRINCIPAL
Diane Fetherston


ARCHITECT
Tanner Kibble Denton Architects
ARTIST
Tony Albert


GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Leading Hand Design


LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
Context Landscape Architecture


PROJECT MANAGER
Savills


CONTRACTOR
Richard Crookes Constructions

CO-CURATION

CO-CURATION

REALMstudios

LOCATION
VIC
East Melbourne
Wurundjeri

Instead of solely human-led authorship, the project eventually allows a vast range of endemic agency in the re-occupation and reimagination of the site. Curators include animals, plants, local kids, the wind and the creek itself.

realmstudios.com/channel-naturalisation

PROJECT TEAM
REALMstudios, Alluvium Consulting, E2DesignLab

CLIENT
Melbourne Water

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In Absence

IN ABSENCE

Edition Office and Yhonnie Scarce

LOCATION
VIC
Melbourne
Naarm, Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung Country / Kulin Nation

Located on Naarm, the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation, ‘In Absence’, the fifth annual National Gallery of Victoria Architecture Commission, invited audiences to better understand the fallacy and ongoing legacy of the colonial premise of Terra Nullius, which declared Australia as an emptiness awaiting ownership, by revealing and celebrating over 3000 generations of Indigenous design, industry and agriculture.

Within the context of the NGV garden site, the elemental cylindrical form of the project stands tall and proud, exerting a tangible presence upon the National Gallery of Victoria and to the people venturing within it.

The void within the centre of the bifurcated tower, the false absence of a people, contains a twin pair of chambers whose form and material reference historical permanent stone dwellings, charred smoking trees and fish traps. 1600 handmade black glass Murnong which adorn the inner walls reference a staple yam crop of Indigenous communities, managed and harvested for thousands of generations

The mirrored interior speaks to equity of exchange, an intimate resting space to enable deep listening, truth telling, knowledge sharing and connection to country.

edition-office.com/project/in-absence

DESIGN
Kim Bridgland
Aaron Roberts
Yhonnie Scarce

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SITE GEIST I

SITE GEIST I

“KEEP LISTENING UNTIL YOU FIND THE BEAUTY”

Paul Wakelam Architect & Great Southern Dance

LOCATION
TAS
Hunting Ground Jordan River kutalayna | Hobart nipaluna | Port Arthur & Sloping Main premaydena

The visual language and conceptual articulations of this tactic resonate strongly with the Biennale’s overall themes. Site Geist I offers a transdisciplinary reading of the Unsettling Queenstown project’s foci of narrative and temporality and potentially yields correspondingly rich architectural manifestations.

The films revisit journeys of those who came before us through capture of contemporary bodies dancing in historic topography. We move where they once moved in a weaving of two scales of time: the architectural – slow and durable, and the bodily – fluid and mercurial. This linking yields experientially transformative encounters with place and history as, within the frame of the film, ‘then’ and ‘now’ are compressed.

The ‘spirit’ of site resides simultaneously within the dancers’ bodily responses to site and residually, within the architecture itself. We are making single-shot, one-point perspective films capturing nervous systems, 200 years on, dancing within ruins of the machinery of colonization. Can we displace our ‘imperial eye’? Animate and inanimate materiality combine as the remains of extractive settler worlds are tactically intertwined with deeply listening bodies.

paulwakelamarchitect.com/topography-dance

greatsoutherndance.com.au

ARCHITECT
Paul Wakelam

CHOREOGRAPHY
Felicity Bott

FILMMAKER
Nicholas Higgins

COMPOSER
Dean Stephenson

DANCERS
Olivia McPherson
Alya Manzart
Robert Alejandro Tinning Tra Mi Dinh
Gabrielle Martin
Woolf Wakelam

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Site Geist II

SITE GEIST II

“[...+THE BUILDINGS THEY ARE SLEEPING NOW]”

Paul Wakelam Architect & Great Southern Dance

LOCATION
TAS
Cranbrook & Swansea
paredarerme

The visual language and conceptual articulations of this tactic resonate strongly with the Biennale’s overall themes. Site Geist II offers a transdisciplinary reading of relationality as a tactic that potentially yields correspondingly rich architectural manifestations.

Site Geist II prioritises sustained close relationship with site by mapping imagined choreography onto walls of settler buildings using string and dowel. The architect adopts a relational approach by looking for places of instigation from the wall ‘itself’, negotiating ever-changing encounters between constructed artefacts and materials, evoking an archeological dig. The insertion of dowel into extant crevices, avoiding imposition, engenders linework that dances over the wall. These ‘constellations’ of point and line to plane are ephemeral in both appearance and construction.

Site Geist II is part of a larger investigation that faces troubled histories and uncertain futures, unsettling notions of settlement. By opening new terrains of performance and building, we’re asking what shared sovereignty – in the broadest sense; with landscape, bodies, constructed artefacts and multiple species – might look like.

paulwakelamarchitect.com/topography-dance

greatsoutherndance.com.au

ARCHITECT
Paul Wakelam

CHOREOGRAPHER | DANCER
Felicity Bott

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LANDSCAPE-LED DESIGN

LANDSCAPE-LED DESIGN

BIOPHILIC CONNECTION AND INDIGENOUS CULTURE

Lyons with Koning Eizenberg Architecture, NMBW Architecture Studio, Greenaway Architects, Architects EAT, Aspect Studios and Glas Urban

LOCATION
VIC
University of Melbourne Parkville Campus
Woi Wurrung (Wurundjeri) people of the Kulin Nation

Landscape-led design enables primary moves around and through new and existing built form within the Student Precinct to be completely transformed into a place that enables students to reconnect with nature and First Nations cultural engagement.

Key to the connection of land and student experience are cultural connections to artifacts and history – both at a student level (through politics and performing arts) and through living Indigenous culture (through embedded objects). This elevates natural and external space design interventions above built form.

Critical to architectural materiality in the precinct is the provision of resilience to student expression, with new and refurbished fabric expressed as a raw ‘student scaffold’ ready for inhabitation and re-adaptation over time. This empowers new student culture to take over living space more readily than the previously ‘fixed’ colonial exemplars on the site, and encourages ‘experience’ over physical permanence.

lyonsarch.com.au/project/new-student-precinct/

CONTRIBUTORS
Lyons with Koning Eizenberg Architecture
NMBW Architecture Studio Greenaway Architects Architects EAT
Aspect Studios
Glas Urban

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