Walking Through Facade Chaoyu NameYang Supervisor: Supervisor: Vicky Lam
The project is a critique of facadism which has spread across Melbourne like an epidemic. Driven by housing demand, contemporary high-rise buildings are designed following a profit-driven space production logic and treat heritage architecture as a two-dimensional attachment. The problem is that the results are so often lazy and cheap, patchwork solutions rather than visionary repurposing. These chimaeras hide an alarming implication: Much contemporary architecture is so banal and soulless that the veneer of the past needs to be plastered on top. Selecting the malt store as the site, my project is a renovation project which tries to challenge facadism. My methodology is to reconfigure spatial experience as a memory trigger to help users to perceive its historical identity. The new design unpacks the malt store’s heritage values and transforms her as a public garden serving for the whole site. The new submerged garden activates the adjacent muted plazas to contribute a continuous journey in a limited footprint, which not only revives the experience of “carriageway” and “storage facility”, but also stretches time and blurs the edge of interior and exterior. Barley plantation is an importation program to provide an interactive experience to recall the malt store’s historical identity as a brewery factory. New arrangement tells the old story. Functionally, the malt store serves as a super amenity open for the public, but when you walk through the facade, her historical identity can still be perceived through spatial experience.