RMIT Architecture Major Project Catalogue Semester 1 2020

With Melbourne Subtitles Sushma Prabhu Supervisor: Vicky Lam Does unpacking the sensibilities of where we come from give us an objective understanding of place?

Can distancing ourselves from our ideologies, test the limits of our imagination, pushing us towards new ways of relating to ourselves and each other?

This project can be mistaken for a Jacaranda in the Australian landscape. A foreign film with Melbourne Subtitles.

Located under the Flinders Street Viaduct, it recognises foreignness as a consequence of the city’s architecture. Could Architecture then be a consequence of foreignness? An endeavour that began as an outsider in Melbourne wherein acknowledging my difference, helped relate to difference within the city.

Whether read as pavilions of the unfamiliar or an optimistic reinterpretation of the city’s infrastructure – the project was an opportunity to leverage the specificity of my foreignness to augment the reading of space. Creating subtitles to the city, through adjacencies, proximities, multiplicity and reinterpretations extracted from a lived past abroad to present local findings, that then embed itself within the quality of space and the scale of its objects. At the same time, engaging with the unnoticed personas of the street - a conversation which then became the architecture.

The project, therefore, possesses both vulnerability and resilience. It is both foreign and local.

Perhaps there is value in acknowledging an outsider’s interpretation of the city, and if so, what do I bring to the table as an architect here?

This proposition doesn’t hope for utopia but rather suggests other lived realities, other systems and ultimately, other architecture. Encouraging me to constantly question - Who am I? Where am I? And what do I value?

Click here for portfolio