Beyond Compartmentalised: House & Home Queen Mary Car park, Camperdown
Beyond Compartmentalised: House & Home, investigates the spatial and emotional realities of contemporary student housing. Focused on providing First Nations students autonomy over their living space, while also encouraging connection. In a time where architecture is increasingly defined by efficiency and isolation, Beyond Compartmentalised: House & Home proposes an alternative—one that leans into the ambiguities of shared life, spatial tension, and connecting students beyond their invidual compartmental spaces. A nondescript commercial carpark, is redefined beyond the transitory and comparmentalised. Instead of reinforcing strict divisions between public and private, the design opens thresholds—both physically and experientially. It aims not only to house, but to hold, and allow room for time and connection. Each room offers the resident a space to self-regulate, decompress, and adapt their environment to their own rhythm. This spatial autonomy is crucial—not only in response to student life, but as an act of cultural respect. The building stands on unceded land, and its interior logic honours this by ensuring that each occupant is afforded agency over their own space, their own air, their own time. But the project refuses to stop at autonomy. Instead, it carefully unpicks the rigid compartmentalisation often found in housing typologies. Balconies are staggered, double-height operable windows introduced, and sliding study desks extend the act of learning into shared air. These design choices allow the building to breathe. They invite moments of interruption, mutual visibility, and ambient presence—acknowledging that even discomfort can carry a kind of warmth. Throughout the project, common areas are not designed as set pieces of social life, but as spatial overlaps—places where silence or sound can spill from one unit to the next. Where a student working late might catch the glow of a neighbour’s lamp. Where lives bleed softly into each other without demand or spectacle. These moments are minor, but they hold deep emotional resonance for students finding their footing in the city. Materiality plays a crucial role. Glass bricks, perforated balustrades, and transitional zones layer the façade in gradients of light and proximity. The external structure remains legible, but the additions blur its boundaries. The building becomes a vessel for shared weather—literal and emotional. In naming this project Beyond Compartmentalised: House & Home, the distinction between shelter and belonging is foregrounded. ‘House’ becomes the framework: structural, legible, and essential. ‘Home’ becomes the residue: the soft marks left by light, sound, presence, and time. The project doesn’t offer a solution to the messiness of shared life—it offers a way to witness it more carefully. Ultimately, this is an architecture that accepts benevolent contradiction. It allows tension between solitude and solidarity to sit unresolved, yet held. Because somewhere between the walls, the breath, the light left on next door—a home is quietly made, with enough room for the self and student collective to co-exist.
Lauren Cvetko
A Huge House IV 270 Student Housing