In Conversation Briony Ewing Supervisor: Dr. Peter Brew
This project could be interpreted as a strategy for staging a conversation. It poses a question – How much of architecture is overdetermined at the cost of other voices? The site for this project borders between discernibly different logics, as a condition found at the edge of the city and internal to itself as architecture. The architecture, as both artifice and instrument, elevates the differences between the various narratives that affect it. In turn, recognizing its own value at their points of encounter. The project proposes a way in which we give substance to qualities intrinsic to architecture and place other than forms predicated by program. It makes it possible to imagine the voice of the shadows. As a strategy, it avoids ‘writing over’ the problems and confrontations that arise in conversation. Instead, formalising these points to instate their value. The architecture is represented in a way that is both seemingly abandoned and with impending purpose to suggest that an architecture exists before the intentions of an architect. Like how the ruin invites us to imagine what it will take to restore it, or what may be of it in the future. Click here for portfolio
Antonia Bruns Medal Semester 1, 2020 Supervisor Statement In his inaugural speech to RVIA 1863 - Redmond Barry whose statue is in the library forecourt - spoke of the Hoddle grid as a commercial instrument of property without provision of civic or public spaces. Though the subsequent unfolding of the grid to the south and from Victoria Street to the north resulted in irregular spaces that have in time become the site of remnant vegetation, small parks, memorials and public institutions (form anticipates function). There is an assumption in Redmond Barry’s speech that the city in its design anticipates a future city. Though it is unlikely that Hoddle could have imagined Mawson’s trek to the Antarctic, the temperance movement, need for fountains, the First World War or that Black Lives Matter that these spaces are available may be as much by accident as design - but they raise the question of intention and programme - to the purpose of the city and its possibility. The project on the corner or Russell and Mc Kenzie St explores the programmed content of architecture. It considers the accident and that which is caused by intent. Architecture rediscovers a history of the cities in itself and local architectural precedents (the works of Yuncken Freeman, Bates Smart McCutchen, to Marika Neustupny’s ‘Curtain Call’ study and book and Peta Carlin’s ‘Urban Fabrics’ photographic project). The project aims to claim nothing of itself other than the possibility for a future. _Dr. Peter Brew