THE ADVOCATE

Ben Cottam on 16 May 2023

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THE ADVOCATE

MUIR+OPENWORK

LOCATION
VIC
St Andrews Place, East Melbourne
Wurundjeri Country

The project is an unpicking of a certain kind of State Space. A site that only held the sanctioned voice of “the civic” now makes space for other voices,
Other invitations, and other forms of occupation.
Tactics

A political and societal shift has occurred, signaling a state of regress.  A significant site. Bookending a particular time, a particular place. Adjacency. The Commonwealth. The Fitzroy Gardens. An authoritative voice borrowing the landscaped vistas beyond. Firm. Defiant. Present. Silent.
Purple planting is employed as a signifier of the memorial’s cause. This is not simply a landscape intervention. This is a formal and political intervention.

Family Violence is not ‘concluded’
Acknowledgment of the immeasurable
No names
But individual memories
This is a memorial in motion
A memorial that provides the space for this acknowledgment to occur. Resilient. Silent.

An erosion of colonial cultural heritage
A smudging of the past
In this role, architecture is the advocate for societal change
It is the enabler for education. It is the enabler of many voices.
It listens. It sits. It nurtures. Resilient. Firm.

A collaging of parts to make a whole
These are not singular gestures they are informed gestures
Layered
A slippage of form
Feet touching the ground
A meeting of parts, a meeting of cultures
This is not one voice, this is many

Decolonise

DESIGN TEAM MEMBERS
Alessandro Castiglioni
Amy Muir
Liz Herbert
Marijke Davey
Mark Jacques
Toby McElwaine

INDIGENOUS ADVISOR
Sarah Lyn Rees, JCB

STRUCTURAL ENGINEER
Phil Gardiner, WSP

TRADITIONAL CUSTODIANS AND CULTURAL ADVISORS
Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural
Heritage Aboriginal Corporation
Boon Wurrung Foundation
Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal
Corporation

STAKEHOLDERS AND COLLABORATORS
Department of Premier and Cabinet,
Office for Women
City of Melbourne
Victims Survivors’ Advisory Council
Forced Adoption Practices

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Shrinking Yourself to Make Yourself Larger

Jessie Lewis on 16 May 2023

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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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MONOCULTURE

Jessie Lewis on 16 May 2023

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MONOCULTURE

REALMstudios

LOCATION
VIC
East Melbourne
Wurundjeri

The context, geographical, operational and conceptual, for this project is a series of drainage easements in Melbourne’s east. Once integral parts of the extensive and interconnected network of waterways in the Birrarung (Yarra River) Valley, these creeks were home of the Wurundjeri people of the Yulin Nation. These riparian corridors were travelling routes, settlement sites and food and water sources, especially in times of drought, when humans and animals alike would gather around clearings in the forest along creeks, where vegetation continued to flourish.

The creeks were part of a regional-scaled natural flood management system, fluctuating through drought and inundation. The Wurundjeri have co-existed with this fluid landscape for millennia, as custodians of Country and its ecosystems. The richness of the landscape for which they cared, and their deep knowledge, endure today – this project aims to recover some of this richness, and restore some of this knowledge.

Contemporary management, engineering and hydrological practices had reduced the corridors to monocultures, dedicated only to the efficient conveyance of water through the landscape.

This was our starting point.

realmstudios.com/channel-naturalisation

PROJECT TEAM
REALMstudios, Alluvium Consulting, E2DesignLab

CLIENT
Melbourne Water

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RADICAL CO-EXISTENCE

Jessie Lewis on 16 May 2023

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RADICAL CO_EXISTENCE

REALMstudios

LOCATION
VIC
East Melbourne
Wurundjeri

Having ceded control, unpredictability becomes part of the eventual outcomes. This evolutionary process, in which time is an essential requirement, allows for shifting alignments, unplanned compositions and material transformations. The diagram, like the reimagined creek itself, is an organic and continuously shifting entity, which, aside from showing time, and overlapping ecologies, is engagingly messy.

realmstudios.com/channel-naturalisation

PROJECT TEAM
REALMstudios, Alluvium Consulting, E2DesignLab

CLIENT
Melbourne Water

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SITE GEIST I

Jessie Lewis on 16 May 2023

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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

Jessie Lewis on 16 May 2023

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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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REDISCOVERING THE GROUND

Jessie Lewis on 15 May 2023

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REDISCOVERING THE GROUND

REDISCOVER PHYSICAL COUNTRY TO EMBED FIRST NATIONS STORIES AND MATERIALITY

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

Central to the landscape vision of the Student Precinct is the ‘Welcome Terrain’ and the ‘Water Story’ – both concepts ensure a strong physical connection with local Indigenous knowledge.

The primary urban design move of the Student Precinct is removal of an twentieth century elevated concrete plaza covering the central area, reinstated by a new version of ‘solid ground’, both restoring the settings of original heritage buildings and embedding them in a new Indigenous-led conception of place.

Underlying the ‘Welcome Terrain’ is a network of connective gathering spaces paved in a patchwork of Indigenous stones that signify reconnection with the ‘lost’ ground. This includes representation of a ‘Water Story’ narrative from the pre-colonial waterway through the site, encapsulating the importance of eel migration paths that have been buried beneath layers of development.

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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ONE BLOCK AT A TIME: ANGASTON HILL

Jessie Lewis on 15 May 2023

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ONE BLOCK AT A TIME : ANGASTON HILL

USING JENGA* AS AN ANALOGY FOR HOW THINGS CAN BE NOT ONLY CONSTRUCTED BUT DECONSTRUCTED

Taylor Buchtmann Architecture

LOCATION
SA
Angaston, Barossa Valley, South Australia
Peramangk Country

One Block at a Time is a central tactic of employing micro incisions, or small manoeuvres. Exercising them strategically, exploring where we can open gaps to insert, intervene and subvert.

Each project provides a baseline for the next. We’ve learnt that changes that are very difficult to achieve on a project the first time, become almost easy next time. We expand our multi-tactical approach to the limits of each project.

Incremental (or marginal) gains are talked about in sport.

The law of incremental gains: Small incremental improvements in any process amount to a significant improvement when they are all added together. The concept came to prominence in 2012 in cycling.

We use this approach on each project, and to advance our work project to project. The opposite of death by a thousand cuts!

Jenga* provides an illustration – small manoeuvres for maximum impact. Eventually the whole topples. Our practice size is small. Our ability to impact decolonisation is small. With this approach we see opportunity for change in and with our projects.

Angaston Hill is a cluster of dwellings housing four generations. A family – each different, yet clearly related.  Three houses are organised as a series of plateaus connected by ramped and stepped circulation, around
a central linear axis. Universal access is fully integrated. Angaston Hill explores ideas of prospect and refuge, and provides space to be together and apart.

tbarch.com.au

BUILDER
Bartsch Builders

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COUNTER-PACE

Ben Cottam on 15 May 2023

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DETECTIVE WORK

LAYERS OF EVIDENCE TO GARNER SWAMPLAND INTELLIGENCE

baanytaageek: Great Swamp Regenerative Collective

LOCATION
VIC
Cardinia and Koo Wee Rup
Boon Wurrung Country

Understanding and working with the deep structure of environments requires a suite of forensic processes. Map-making can garner such intelligence through the careful piecing together of diverse knowledges over time and space. This layered map of the Great Swamp catchment on Melbourne’s eastern edge reveals its dynamic past and underlying waterscape in the context of radical colonial change.

The map does not invent or project; it simply traces and records complexity, superimposing a version from one moment in time over another. This includes markings of explorers, records of subdivision and parish plans and the reconstruction of possible swamp zones, all shown in relation to topographic contours and geological features. The drawing, constructed using GIS technologies, includes archival material from a range of sources with different types of subjectivity overlaid and geo-positioned in relation to ‘official’ contemporary datasets. Further detective work includes recordings, which make ‘natural’ sounds audible by placing hand made microphones in mud on the ground, and enable deep time connection to the ‘material’ of place through the rhythmic patterns of Boonwurrung language.

AUTHORS:
Nigel Bertram
Catherine Murphy

CONTRIBUTORS
N’arwee’t Carolyn Briggs
Daniel Kotsimbos
Rutger Pasman
Ben Waters

IMAGE AUTHORSHIP
Great Swamp Catchment drawing
by Monash Urban Lab with Rutger
Pasman, 2023.

COUNTER-PACE

RHYTHMS BEYOND LINEAR AND HUMAN TIMESCALES

N’arweet Carolyn Brigs AM, Justin Buckley, David Chesworth, Taylor Coyne, Alexis Farr, Laura Harper, Xavier Ho, Ana Lara Heyns, Sonia Leber, Jon McCormack, Marilu Melo Zurita, Oscar Raby

LOCATION
VIC
Rippon Lea Estate, Elstenwick, City of Glen Eira, Melbourne
Boon Wurrung Country

Hidden Rippon Lea is an immersive sound and augmented reality experience delivered through an app, which explores memory, plant and animal life, infrastructure, and waters at Rippon Lea Estate in Nairm (Melbourne). The project works to challenge the colonial legacies of the site – to recognize that it is Boon Wurrung Country, connected to a wider ecological and hydrological landscape.

We used counter-pace as a tactic to invoke a disruption to linear time. Audio and visual elements are introduced relative to the visitor’s location on the site, inviting the visitor to slow down and attune to their sensory experience. Soundscapes in the app unfold in a non-linear way, influenced by the way the visitor moves through and interacts with the site. A counter-pace is evoked through the diversity of sound-based rhythms from Rippon Lea that make up the soundscapes. These rhythms may be short, like the life cycle of an insect, or long like the geological movements of the earth. This rhythm diversity invokes the cyclical times of Country, like that of the Iilk (eels) who journey from the Coral Sea to Nairm, now traveling through the city’s stormwater systems to reach the Rippon Lea Lake.

INDIGENOUS ELDER
N’Arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs
AM

CLIENT
National Trust of Australia – Victoria,
Justin Buckley


FUNDING
Australian Heritage Grant
AHGII000002, Rippon Lea
Endowment Fund, The Drain Man


PROJECT LEAD
Laura Harper


RESEARCH TEAM
N’Arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs
AM, Justin Buckley, Taylor Coyne,
Alexis Farr, Laura Harper, Ana Lara
Heyns, Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita,
Jon McCormack


IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE AND AR
Oscar Raby


SOUND RECORDING AND COMPOSITION
David Chesworth, Sonia Leber, Taylor
Coyne


WEB DESIGN
Xavier Ho


IMAGE CREDIT
Laura Harper, Marilu Melo Zurita

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TIME

Ben Cottam on 15 May 2023

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TIME

MAKING TIME TO FACILITATE A MORE RELATIONAL AND HOLISTIC COLLABORATION PROCESS

Brave and Curious, Ashley Halliday Architects, Wax Design, the City of Port Adelaide Enfi eld, Kaurna Traditional Owners and Yitpi Yartapuultiku Custodian Group

LOCATION
SA
Yarta Puulti (‘Sleeping Place’), Estuarine Mangrove River System, Port Adelaide,
South Australia, 34.51S 135.30E
Kaurna Yarta

Allowing time and space is an essential ingredient in facilitating the processes of decolonization/indigenization. Time is essential to establish trust and meaningful relations with people, their memories, and experiences. Without time and space, cultural mapping and learning can become fractured and superficial. Time is also required to heal – connection, trust, learning, celebration, and healing are all fundamental signs of healthy communities.

Yitpi Yartapuultiku represents a significant shift in thinking wherein the traditional project management focus has transcended the core demands of compliance and milestone commitments toward a more holistic and hybridized accountability process. This new process recognizes the importance of allowing time to explore the complexities and interconnectedness of physical elements, environment, social structures, memories, and deep histories of a place.

A cyclical, multi-dimensional collaborative design process was developed to replace the traditional linear Gantt program. Through this process, we have successfully demonstrated the urgent need to facilitate more fluid and relational collaboration methods for cultural projects.

participate.cityofpae.sa.gov.au/yitpiyartapuultiku

CLIENT
City of Port Adelaide Enfield


CULTURAL DIRECTION
Kaurna Traditional Owners and
Custodians


ARCHITECT / PROJECT LEAD
Ashley Halliday Architects


LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
Wax Design


INTERPRETIVE DESIGN /WAYFINDING
Exhibition Studios


FILM MAKING
Living Stories


PROJECT MANAGER
Moto Projects


CULTURAL DESIGN FACILITATOR
Brave & Curious


DESIGN COLLABORATORS
PT Design, Lucid, RLB, Cirqa,
Wavelength, Golder, Succession
Ecology, Resonate, Eatscape, D Squared, Buildsurv

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