Nested Melbourne Timothy Chan Supervisor: A/Prof. Graham Crist
The Project is an urban precinct nestled into the block of Melbourne around the old Melbourne Gaol and RMIT. A perverse reinterpretation of urban life, created by the deliberate disappearance of humanistic sensibility, within a walled district where space, movement and living are all converged into a system of surrealism, otherness and uncanniness, or even autonomous in its urban fabric, an area which does not appear to be Melbourne. The project has started by addressing issues observed in Melbourne, where the city has been overly two-dimensional with a loss of intimate spaces, urban hierarchies, precinct identities, public rooms and process of unfolding. Therefore, the project uses the opportunity inherited in the site where the two grids collide and manifest a new grid system overlaid by devices called the Armature, the masses, the urban rooms and the net to induce cohesion and uncanniness out of the collision. The architectural form bizarrely plays with perception, fake reality and false memory by the expression of juxtaposition between the classical ordinary and the imaginative provocation. The ideology is ultimately visualized if other edge conditions of the Grid can breed precincts with similar qualities and can act as gateways for the CBD, bring layers and depths to Melbourne’s urban fabrics, city formation and public realm. Click here for slides