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RMIT Architecture Major Project Catalogue Semester 1 2025
Contents
Introduction, Professor Vivian Mitsogianni...06
What is Major Project?...07
Back End Forth, Gabriela Amstalden Martins... 08
Observing Country, Benedict Peter O’Flaherty... 10
Its only a school. Its not that serious., Ryan Samuel Thomas Poppins... 12
One Ship, New Ship, Red Ship, Blue Ship, Aaris Koutsoulakis... 14
Material Has A Memory, Do You?, Cara Louise Mary Banks... 16
Fluid Impermance, Caigan Patrick Meade... 18
Symbiotic Infrastructure, Kang Liu... 20
Unearthing: The River As A Model, Harriet Barrile... 22
Like Construction, Xiangning Zhu... 24
Drowning And Other Ways To Become Australian, Exzur Kristofer Borja Peralta... 26
Confluence Of Steps/Sangam Of Steps, Krupa Laljibhai Sanghani... 102
Urbancut, Zengwei Wang... 104
Future Of Car Parks, Spandana Tirumala Venkata... 106 On Boarders, Simran Baid... 108
Habitus. Housing For A Life In Motion, Marcela Vichi Ruberth... 110 Đong - Together, Trang Do Thuc Pham ... 112
Waterscape, Xingya Hao... 114
Certainty And Uncertainty: Change Of Season, Yohanes Christopher Haryono... 116
The Silent Carer, Daniel Paul Preziuso... 118
Impractical Concourse, Zhi Jie Chia... 120
City In Building Building In City, Jiaheng Helen Xu... 122 View Finder Pavilions, Sousata Vanna... 124
The Fifth Pillar, Hadigalage Duleka Thuyacontha... 126
Supervisors Semester 1, 2025... 128
Students Semester 1, 2025...129
Introduction1
Architecture schools should be concerned with experimentation that challenges the apparent self-evident certainties and accepted orthodoxies of the discipline (in its expanded definition), the underlying assumptions about what architecture is and can contain, and what it should do next. Architecture schools need to ensure that their graduates have all the professional competencies that are required for professional practice and registration, but Architecture schools should also lead the struggle to challenge the default conventions of the discipline. The architecture school should strive to point towards possible futures not yet evident within existing understandings of the discipline and wider cultural/political terrains.
Architecture is about ideas. It is part of a wider cultural sphere and a way of thinking about the world in a broader sense. Knowledge and learning in architecture do not finish in the academy but require continued learning and a level of receptive agility from the architect, throughout the architect’s life. The rapidly changing economic and cultural conditions in the extended fields that architects engage with necessitate this, requiring, but also opening up possibilities for, new types of knowledge, fields of engagement and practices.
The architecture student’s graduating Major Project – a capstone for the formal design degree – should not merely demonstrate the competence and skill they acquired in the course. These are base expectations on entry into the graduating semester. The graduating project is an opportunity to speculate through the work and to develop ideas that will serve as catalysts for future, lifelong investigations.
The project should lay bare considered attitudes, brave speculations and leaps of faith, pursuing these with rigour and depth. We would hope that the projects are ambitious, brave and contain propositions relevant to their time. We would hope that students experiment – in whatever form this might take – and engage with difficult questions, contributing not merely to areas that are well explored, but to what is yet to come. Experimentation though, in the graduating project, as well as in the design studio, comes with the risk of failure. But failure can be cathartic – it is an essential possibility tied to innovation.
At RMIT Architecture we understand well the ethos and importance of experimentation and we have long-standing processes to reward it, importantly through our grading and moderation processes. In the RMIT architecture programs, we call this venturous ideas-led design practice. ‘To be venturous is to be brave and take risks. What we hope is happening here is that students are learning to establish their own explorations which they can constantly reconsider and navigate through future conditions that may not resemble present understandings of practice. Competencies and experimentation can happily co-exist.
We aim to educate students to engage with architecture’s specific characteristics unapologetically, and to not be afraid of its complex, uncertain and liquid nature. We aim to prepare our graduates to engage in and contribute to a broader world of ideas and to eventually challenge our ability to judge with new, challenging and meaningful propositions. This semester we saw some astonishing and brave projects and propositions from a student body deeply concerned with making a positive impact on the world around them and with contributing new ideas to their discipline. We look forward to following our students’ careers as they join our global community of practice and to seeing how the ideas seeded here are pursued and advanced.
Professor Vivian Mitsogianni Dean, School of Architecture & Urban Design RMIT University
1For an expanded version of this text see Mitsogianni, V. (2015). Failure can be cathartic! The design studio - speculating on three themes In: Studio Futures: Changing trajectories in architectural education, Uro Publications, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 25-31
The Major Project Medals
The Anne Butler Memorial Medal, endowed in honour of an outstanding emerging practitioner, is awarded to a Major Project that exemplifies the goals of Major Project.
The Peter Corrigan Medal celebrates the project that is most critical, political and culturally engaged. It is awarded to a student with a strong independent vision in honour of Professor Peter Corrigan who taught successive generations of architects at RMIT for over 40 years.
The Antonia Bruns Medal, endowed to recall Antonia’s interest in the relation between film and architecture, is awarded to a Major Project that investigates the relationship between architectural representation, association and perception.
The Leon van Schaik 25th Anniversary Peer Assessed Major Project Award celebrates Prof. Leon van Schaik’s arrival as Head of Architecture at RMIT 28 years ago. It is decided by all Major Project voting for what they view as the most adventurous and future-embracing project of the semester.
In Major Project, students are expected to formulate an architectural research question and develop an articulate and well-argued architectural position through the execution of a major architectural design project.
What is Major Project?
RMIT Architecture values ambitious, adventurous projects; those that demonstrate new and pertinent architectural ideas or show how established ideas can be developed or transformed to offer deeper understandings. The best major projects take risks and attempt to see architecture anew. Major Project should form the beginning of an exploration of architectural ideas that can set the agenda for the first ten years of original and insightful architectural practice.
The nature of the project is not set, and the scope of the brief and site is established by the student in consultation with their supervisor as the most appropriate and potentially fruitful vehicle for testing and developing their particular area of architectural investigation. Typically, major projects proceed in a similar way to design studios – with the difference being that students themselves set their brief and topic of investigation.
The research question and architectural project will often develop in parallel and it is expected that the precise question and focus of the project will be discovered and clarified through the act of designing. This process is iterative and develops through weekly sessions. Projects are also formally reviewed at two public mid semester reviews before the final presentation.
Major Projects have ranged from strategic urban and landscape interventions with metropolitan implications, through to detailed explorations of building form, materiality, structure and inhabitation; to detailed experimentation in the processes and procedures of architectural production. It is expected that Major Projects will develop a particular and specific area of interest that has grown during a student’s studies, rather than merely complete a generic and competent design. Often these specific interests will develop in relation to those of supervisors – we encourage students to work closely with their supervisors to build on mutual areas of expertise and interest.
It is understood that major projects will differ in scope, scale, kinds of representation produced and degree of resolution; with these factors depending on the nature of the architectural question and accompanying brief. Emphasis should be placed on producing a coherent and complete project, where proposition, brief, scale, degree of resolution and representation work together to provide a balanced, convincing and focused expression of architectural thought.
There is no expectation that Major Project be ‘comprehensive’ in scope. Rather, the aim of the subject is to establish, through the completion of a major design work in a rigorous manner, a well-argued architectural experiment that has the potential and richness to engender future explorations and that will sustain the student for the next ten years of their architectural practice.
A high level of skill and a demonstrated knowledge of existing architectural ideas is an important component of a successful major project, however the goal should not be to demonstrate a professional level of accepted best practice. Rather it is an opportunity to demonstrate new kinds of knowledge and ideas through architectural form.
_Excerpt from Major Project Briefing Notes 2023
Back End Forth
Gabriela Amstalden Martins Supervisor: Dr. Michael Spooner
Back End Forth offers the city its own back in reflection. It renders visible the counter-space where infrastructure resides and utilizes the perfunctory as grounds for a dialectic between pragmatism and the spectacle.
Situated along the Upfield line in entanglement with transport and logistical networks, it contends with a post-industrial landscape by capturing the infrastructural continuum in a point of specificity. Proposing a Trades College, it posits for the instrumentalization of the institution as a form of resistance apparatus. One to contain industrial histories by capturing and promoting a cultural memory through the materialisation of its practices in a civic and educational context.
In a process of refraction, vibration and distortion, the shed is operated upon and abstracted based on site conditions. Misaligned by angles too subtle to be immediately perceive but with the intent to instruct on a scale larger than itself. It accrues its surrounds, forming a point of gravity for the congregation of industrial activity. The resulting form is both a study of residues and a form of premonition, giving expression to its tension with its gentrifying surrounds. It leans on the duality of over-determination and indeterminacy. Both with a fidelity to the industrial type and an irreverence to its efficiency in favour of drama.
The project is a receptacle, accumulating its collusions with the city and its procedural genealogy. Embedding the idea progressively, the result is deeply superficial. Aspiring for a dissolution of the architecture, it hovers in-between diagram and ruin, institution and infrastructure. Back and Forth.
Anne Butler Medal Semester 1, 2025
Supervisor Statement
Gabi’s project takes the city from behind, reimagining Brunswick’s infrastructural backside as a site of generative potential. A supine terrain composed of rail lines, warehouses, service lanes and a tram depot is recast as a Machine Trades College. The logic of a 0.4° deviation—iteratively flattened and refracted—catalyses the process, unfolding an architecture of aesthetic resistance. This productive illegibility conjures a spatiality of affective backwardness, estrangement and reversibility: tactics aligned with the non-frontal experience of public life. Gabi proffers a project sprawling on its back—a machinic assemblage of expressive intensity.
- Dr. Michael Spooner
Observing Country
Benedict Peter O’Flaherty
Supervisor: Caitlyn Parry
This project explores the intersection of architecture, Country, and Indigenous knowledge, grounded in the Dreaming stories of the Barkindji, Ngiyampaa, and Muthi Muthi peoples. Centred around Lake Mungo and the surrounding river systems, it draws on the Rainbow Water Serpent, Ngatji and Weowie, as guiding forces that shaped the land and continue to sustain it. The serpent’s journey informed digital simulations using geospatial river, lake, and water table data. This enabled the landscape to shape the architecture, rather than have the architecture imposed upon it.
The design responds to the deep spiritual and ecological wisdom embedded in Country. By aligning with the CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics), it acknowledges the limitations of settler-collected data and centres Indigenous stories as the primary interpretive framework.
Through iterative massing studies, a conceptual clarity emerged that privileged spatial qualities and framed views of the sky, water, and land. Though the design is not illustrative, it listens to stories and follows their lead.
Ultimately, the project is a respectful attempt to create a built form that honours Country as a living entity. It recognises the architect’s role not as author but as listener, enabling design to become a process of following rather than claiming.
Antonia Bruns Medal Semester 1, 2025
Supervisor Statement
Benedict’s project challenges Western design by centering Indigenous knowledge systems and story as guiding forces. The visitor centre rejects imposed form, instead asking how architecture can emerge from Country— expressing a reckoning with by deep time, geological scale, responsibility, and cultural cycles. Observing Country, evolves from a design methodology grounded in connection, listening, and relational knowledge. Rather than asserting presence, it frames architecture as a practice of respectful engagement—one that maps, responds, and aligns with both land and Sky Country. This approach redefines architecture as a process of stewardship and story-sharing, honouring 65,000 years of continuous knowledge.
- Caitlyn Parry
It’s Only A School. It’s Not That Serious.
Ryan Samuel Thomas
Poppins
Supervisor: Steven Chu
It is a map
It is a scheme
It is a utopic amalgamation
It is an instruction model for a potential future
It is extra-contextual
It is in constant flux
It is post-modern science fiction
It is diagrammatical
It is its own context
It is Sisyphean
It is provocative
It is inevitable
It is the culmination of its own thinking
It is the celebration of an education
It is an idea at best
It is unashamedly referential
It is about wayfinding
It is about finding a voice
It is about questioning everything
It is about being a cog of continual discourse
It is a place for the cyclical crowning of the Carnival King
It is a place to hold my wedding ring
Peter Corrigan Medal Semester 1, 2025
Supervisor Statement
Ryan’s joyful project understands that architecture has always been a cultural proposition. Ryan clearly articulates his position on the school versus the building and the profession versus the pedagogy. Using a playfully contradictory idea of the Folly as Functional Form as the key mode of inquiry and discourse, he discards both form and function to present the idea of assessment through reflection of both self and the public, and the idea of reflection through public discourse. He begins to present an ambitious vision of the private institution as a public institution and delivers a retrospective manifesto for our collective future.
- Steven Chu
One Ship, New Ship, Red Ship, Blue Ship
Aaris Katsoulakis Supervisor: Graham Crist
Traditional emergency housing offers short-term relief for people sleeping rough but consistently fails as a long-term solution. Maritime regulation, such as Marine Order 11 and the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), designed to address the isolation of life at sea, mandate access to space, amenities, and healthcare to support physical and mental well-being.
This project's aim is to adapt these regulations and amenity benchmarks to address another form of isolation—the isolation experienced by those who have slept rough. Three repurposed container ships have been redesigned to offer housing for the 78 people currently sleeping rough in Melbourne’s CBD. This project reimagines emergency housing through a maritime lens, blending positive aspects of traditional land-based solutions, and the provisions for amenities and necessities as outlined within ship building codes.
A persistent issue with housing rough sleepers, while framed in various ways, is at core an infrastructure issue. We lack the necessary volume of permanent social housing to accommodate those sleeping rough. The ship, in this context, is both infrastructure and machine—an engineered solution to isolation and shelter.
Leon Van Schaik Medal Semester 1, 2025
Supervisor Statement
To house 78 of our most vulnerable citizens in three salvaged container ships requires a sense of humour, design dexterity and ethical seriousness. Aaris’s project deploys and juggles Dr Suess, Soviet cinema, maritime regulations, dazzle patterns, theatrical nostalgia, safety colours and planning loopholes toward the real problem of crisis housing our cities seem unable to solve. When Cedric Price proposed NHS funded annual cruises for retirees he meant it was viable - Aaris has deployed actual architecture to re-work these three ships out. The superior mirage here becomes the perfect metaphor for reuniting the surreal and super-real of our situation.
- Graham Crist
Material Has A Memory, Do You?
In a city obsessed with botoxing its buildings, this project asks: what if we stopped embalming history and started listening to it?
Material has a Memory, do You? takes the tired trope of facadism and flips it on it’s [terracotta] head. Set within the weathered bones of 2–8 Spencer Street, this is not a preservation project — it’s a love letter to impermanence. The building becomes an organ donor, gently unbuilt and redistributed; its cracked parquetry and smoky timbers finding new life in civic gestures across Melbourne. A drain that traces the Yarra. A fountain evoking the casting of iron frames. A sundial that doesn’t tell the time, just the truth.
Because memory lives in patina, in joints, in dust. And in a time of climate urgency and cultural amnesia, perhaps care is the most radical architectural act of all.
Guided by Ruskin, Scarpa, Plečnik, and a deep suspicion of the heritage checkbox, the project unfolds in three phases: Unbuild with Care, Retention through Reuse, and Carbon-Positive Transformation. The final gesture? A skeletal structure made of now — designed to flex, decay, and eventually unbuild itself.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s stewardship. Because the material remembers. The question is — do we?
Cara Louise Mary Banks Supervisor: Claire Scorpo
Fluid Impermance
Caigan Patrick Meade Supervisor: Lucinda Mason
Silverleaves, with its fluctuating ecology and informal urban fabric, shows that there is no stability within the suburb. Rather than simply reapplying past strategies to a new environment, the project asks how architecture might be a tool for living within uncertainty, for inhabiting and repairing a place that is always on the brink of change.
The concept of fluidity runs through the entire design, starting with the infrastructural framework of the berm. Here, architecture becomes the agent of negotiation, not through rigid frameworks, but through a responsive, distributed network that does more than simply shield the land from flooding, it converses with the shifting terrain. Each node of the berm, whether a utility building or a structural intervention in the landscape, is aligned with the sedimentary flow of Silverleaves. Working within the shifting environment to foster a new model of development, one that is adaptable, iterative, and fundamentally rooted in the understanding that the land is always in flux.
Taking the concrete stump as a quiet yet enduring artefact of the fibro beach shack typology that arrays strategically throughout the suburb as an attractor to the sediment. Service buildings bound the suburb like nodes, drawing lines of relation between themselves and adjacent homes. Silverleaves does not demand permanence. It invites an architecture that listens, observes, and shifts like the coastline it inhabits.
Symbiotic Infrastructure
This project focuses on sustainable tourism through the development of a multifunctional infrastructure at the Twelve Apostles. It is inspired by three key site conditions: the dynamic sea erosion landscape, prevailing strong winds, and the fragile coastal ecosystem.
To address current challenges and enhance the visitor experience, the design uses computational tools through three customized algorithms: 1. Sea Erosion Simulation: It digitalizes the mechanism of topography, providing a dynamic terrain. 2. CFD Wind Simulation with Isosurfaces: It forms the shape of the building according to wind speed and topography. 3. Extensible Tectonic System: It enables construction using recycled, irregular timber, and wood waste, promoting sustainable use and low carbon in the whole life cycle.
The building provides sheltered interior spaces for visitors during harsh weather or at night, and three lookouts offering enhanced and brand-new views of the ocean, limestone stacks, and cliffs. For those seeking a deeper understanding, exhibition and interpretation spaces are available. A research station is also included, aimed at educating visitors on environmental conservation and enabling long-term climate observation.
The project features sustainability. The material prioritizes recycled and waste timber, uses prefabricated components, and is designed for disassembly and reuse. The unique tectonic creates
Kang Liu Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao
Symbiotic Infrastructure
Unearthing: The River As A Model
Unearthing simultaneously describes the act of digging and revelation.
Like an unsolicited proposal to council, this project is imagined as a revision to Hobart City Council’s current 20-year development plan. It centres on uncovering the Hobart rivulet through the city, reinstating it as a continuous pathway from the mountain to the river, making public what already exists as a public asset.
Demolition is seen as careful negotiation. Taking note of what is found and seeking to retain as much of what already exists, subtraction is mediated with scaffolding, decanting and reuse.
A reciprocity of accommodation occurs between the rivulet and the city. Adherence to planning requirements is understood as a necessary exchange. From what has been overlooked, the project allows for the possibility to mend an ecology and privilege a heritage that predates colonisation, while caring for the city and revealing alternatives for its future habitation and development.
In this way the rivulet is representative of something greater than itself, an idea of the city and architecture.
Harriet Barrile Supervisor: Simone Koch
Live Construction
Xiangning Zhu Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao
LIVE CONSTRUCTION is a contemporary temple project that transforms an abandoned grotto through a critical response to fast-paced, low-quality developments. Instead of pursuing rapid completion, the project proposes a carefully planned 15-year construction timeline. This extended process of continuous building becomes an integral part of the temple's identity and spiritual narrative, allowing visitors to witness the evolving craftsmanship and the passage of time as part of the experience.
The project not only emphasizes long-term cultural and architectural value, but also establishes sustainable cycles within its development framework. Financial flows are carefully managed to support ongoing construction and society involvement, while strategies for soil recovery and ecological regeneration are integrated into the site's transformation. Through this approach, LIVE CONSTRUCTION aims to create a lasting destination that balances architectural quality, cultural meaning, and environmental responsibility
Drowning And Other Ways To Become Australian
Exzur Kristofer Borja Peralta Supervisor: Dr. Michael Spooner
The White Australia Policy asserted that an ‘Australian’ was somebody with proficiency in a given European language – that one’s fluency in the Queen’s English could evidence as much or as little of their ‘Australianness’ as one’s fluency in German or Scottish Gaelic depending on the border officer.
The imperial nation-state needs a degree of self-assuredness to impose, expand, and conquer; it must be able to say, ‘I am this.’ The rub is that the presupposition that one could ever be described with absolute and singular immovable certainty is a deeply unnatural one. It is a wicked problem at the root of ‘The Citizen.’ To ask ‘What am I? What is an Australian?’ brings the machine to a crawl. It momentarily dispels the fog of nationalism since it reveals that nobody knows; that like a river, the answer changes all the time. The inverse is a less arduous and more favoured question, ‘What isn’t Australian? How does your difference invalidate our commonality?’ This deferral is the quiet atrocity which makes possible the louder, catastrophic ones.
This is an Australian project. The project proposes a ‘Post-Imperial Citizenship Centre for Becoming Australian.’ This project chooses to ask itself the question, ‘What is an Australian?’
Arden Interludes –Reinterpreting Vacancy
Runting Fan Supervisor: Lucinda Mason
In a city rushing to fill its gaps, this project asks: what if vacancy isn’t a flaw to be corrected, but a condition to be re-read? Set in Melbourne’s Arden district—where warehouses await demolition in favour of rigid 49-metre towers—this project resists the tabula rasa impulse of planning. It instead lingers in the in-between.
Arden Interludes unfolds as a series of quiet, architectural acts—roller doors lifted like curtains, staircases hung like threads, housing stitched into party walls. Each intervention is temporary, theatrical, and light-footed, seeking not to occupy, but to connect, to reveal, to suspend. Density emerges not through erasure, but through careful layering.
Here, the warehouse becomes a stage; its voids are not problems, but invitations. Drawing on dramaturgical theory and trickster tactics, the project performs spatial mischief—playing with ambiguity, appearing and disappearing, inside and out. It treats the city not as an object to be mastered, but as a scene still in rehearsal. me.
Friends Of The Void
Jamie Shannon Bond Supervisor: Mark Jacques
Urban preservation today is not merely about what we retain, but how we keep places alive. Friends of the Void reframes preservation as an ongoing, temporal practice – one that prioritises transformation over stasis. In the context of Melbourne’s flattening, suburban logic, the project argues that the most radical act may be to care for its contradictions: the large, consolidated, unbuilt pockets, that the project calls Non-city Islands.
This project looks at sites that don’t clearly register as valuable or threatened, instead advocating for sites of absurdity, uncanniness, and latent potential – urban voids that resist resolution and commodification. Informed by the cautionary tale of Berlin’s Tempelhof, where total preservation has led to its ossification, the project proposes a more fluid and participatory framework. It introduces six infrastructural interventions staged across four temporal stages: before, now, after, and thereafter.
The void here is not a vacancy. It is a valuable social, ecological, and architectural proposition, and will not survive by accident.
Preservation becomes an ongoing rehearsal of care enacted through time, resisting resolution in favour of emergence. Calder Park is a petrochemical wasteland, a noise machine, and a major waste of space – in other words, one of Melbourne’s most unloved types of sites. It doesn’t ask to be kept alive, but this major project suggests that maybe it should be.
Acting In The Meantime
Eliza Ng Supervisor: Lauren Garner
This project reclaims Melbourne’s blighted spaces as sites of alternative housing. In a housing system where over 3.25 million homes are owned as investment properties, vacancy becomes a byproduct of treating housing as capital rather than shelter.
Spanning across three different sites: Fitzroy, Solomon Heights, and Fishermans Bend, this project repositions the housing delivery model, placing residents and the housing provider on the same line, with the architect as facilitator. Inspired by Toponimi (the naming of places) and the logics of abusivismo edilizio (trans. unlawful building), it reframes housing not as an object, but as an evolving framework. This process opens the possibility for something else to take shape: a housing model where dwelling is slow, negotiated, and built from the ground up, by those who intend to stay.
It unfolds across three phases: signal, testing, and occupation. Signal uses installation as a form of architectural thinking, a way to make absence visible. Testing invites residents forward and occupation is where housing is formalised.
This approach interrupts rather than resolves. They act in the meantime, holding space for what formal systems have yet to deliver. By naming them, we refuse these spaces neutrality.
The Patient Will See You Now
‘The Patient will see you Now,’ subverts our current model of healthcare through decentralization & seamless integration into the domestic condition. Using the mechanism of public housing, the project’s outcome & delivery assist in improving the health of tenants & existing architecture of Melbourne’s forty-four public housing towers.
The project begins with the retention of Melrose Estate’s three towers, filtering tenants through a newly constructed decanting facility on site. The architecture exists as temporary accommodation during the remediation of the towers; designed to transition into a future hospital (Melrose Medical Hub). This allows tenants to receive improved amenities through clinical legislation requirements, while its future as a medical hub acquires elements of the home, resulting in a more ‘humane,’ environment for all.
Within the tower’s prosaic moments, health practice becomes entangled in everyday rituals. Corridors become sites for self-diagnosis & respite, karaoke booths become spaces for patient consultation & enjoyment, & clinics inhabit social podiums. The insular nature of the tower & our model of healthcare can now be made public, improving the health of the tower, its existing tenants & the surrounding communities.
Patrick Douglas Green Supervisor: Simone Koch
Are You Being Served?
Eliza Jane Innes Supervisor: Peter Brew
Set in Penola, South Australia, this speculative project responds to a fictional state of emergency following the discovery of soil contamination at a disused petrol station. The town mobilizes around a collective effort to remediate the soil using sunflowers — a slow, community-led process of phytoremediation that transforms the land from a site of environmental liability to a shared asset of social value. This is a project in perpetuity which traces how architectural intervention can shift the value of land, creating a zero-debt equity asset that enables further development over a sixteen-year period.
The remediated site becomes home to The Penola Exchange — a communal hub for making, repairing, and knowledge-sharing. Managed by the newly formed Penola Commons Board, this evolving precinct reflects rural values of self-sufficiency, reuse, and intergenerational exchange. A new medium-density housing development is introduced, grounded in the architectural language of Penola’s historic fabric and designed to borrow backyard functions from The Exchange.
Through this framework, the project explores architecture as a catalyst for social, ecological, and economic regeneration — where stewardship and collective agency redefine capital beyond financial terms.
It Was Mine First
Eleanor Frances Curry Supervisor: Graham Crist
Within Melbourne, the context of a laneway is widely considered one of character and delight. The mind jumps to Degraves Street, to Hardware Lane, and while these areas are filled with joy and community, the laneway condition exists beyond this - oftentimes in a less loved and more derelict way.
With the site a dumping ground for the backlog of nightlife coming off King Street, the laneways serve as something to be afraid of, exacerbating the lack of care towards it in turn. ‘It was Mine First’ attempts to combat this, by injecting life into these laneway spaces. Done with enfilade plans and constant echoes of familiarity that come from existing Melbourne typologies, the project works through a journey.
There are many paths through the site, but all aim to draw you into the confines of the lanes, once feared, now beloved. By layering programs and opening ownership, the adjoining businesses on the site gain communal areas and access to parts of Melbourne that have previously been shunned as back of house or inaccessible. This sense of open ownership allows in the public without diminishing land titles, and for those who already called the site home (not removed but accommodated for), the words “it was mine first” becomes something to boast proudly of - rather than to sweep away.
All Visitors Will Be Welcomed
Brentyn Ronald Cummins Supervisor: Simon Koch
Tasked with the regeneration of the declining suburban life, the project test’s strategies for suburbs which have left over and under used space, they are the ideal location for the integration of a strategy which is aimed with the rehabilitation and care for the surrounding environments and community, local conditions and existing forms driving the project forward through the steps it once missed, re thinking the urban design through distributed systems and local networks which are able to push forward the local community and built form, creating a more robust and future proof community, a community which is more engaged and productive, and a strategy which is able to scale grow alongside it as their requirements change.
The project speculates on how The Pines a suburb of isolation and stagnation is able to have an after growth, re-growing the way the residents live, produce and participate within the community, breaking down the conventional ways of living and development, to instead propose sustainable solutions to the social, ecological and built environments. Investigating the synergy of dispersed yet connected injections. Encouraging social engagement in place of a fence, road, or yard. Each incision is carefully considered within the existing sites. The density has now more than doubled.
Corkman: Heritage as Contested Events
This project aims to proliferate the political viewpoints of heritage architecture, questioning its current lack of contestation and nuance. By designing a building on the contested site of the illegally demolished Corkman pub, the project encourages a more critical way of practicing heritage architecture. The societal and political values that shape heritage values are constantly changing and, and so should heritage architecture be.
Architecturally, the site offers a new public building to the city that is tall, complex, and expensive, as it demands heritage to be taken seriously. Through its program, form, and tectonics, the building becomes a site for public engagement with heritage as a living, debated process, such as the void created by the outline of the demolished pub.
The project is not saying we need to change what we consider as heritage, but rather that the existing heritage buildings are much more valuable than we assume, and by inspecting their stories and the events that happen to them, much can be learned about society. Heritage as a phenomenon that reveals much about society and history, a heritage practice in which buildings are active partners, and not simply a result of it.
Mada Aldeeb Supervisor: Paul Van Herk
CORKMAN:
Heritage as Contested Events
Protect, Preserve, Promote
This project, located in Zhapo Bay, seeks to protect, preserve, and promote the Dan way of life. It responds to the urgent need to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage while improving the quality of life for both sea-based and land-based residents.
The Dan people are an ancient maritime community in southern China, known for their long-standing traditions of living on water. Historically, they made a living by collecting oysters and selling pearls, and they worship Mazu, the sea goddess, for protection andprosperity. Over a century ago, a devastating typhoon forced the Dan to relocate to Zhapo Bay, where traces of their floating lifestyle still remain today.
The design enhances traditional infrastructure—revitalizing floating markets, fishing ports, and rafts while introducing new communal facilities such as a seafood production farm, boat workshops, a floating supermarket, and a central station that anchors daily life. These interventions respect the Dan community’s fluid relationship with the sea and create stronger connections between the water and the land.
By blending cultural continuity with architectural innovation, the project serves as a living framework that celebrates identity, sustains tradition, and supports the evolving needs of the Dan people in a modernizing world.
Sun Jiaqi Supervisor: Patrick Macasaet
Chunck Tectonics
Chunk Tectonics explores the architectural potential of generative diffusion models through their application in both 2D and 3D design workflows. By integrating AI-generated imagery and volumetric outputs, the process allows a hybridised design language that challenges conventional architectural expression.
Diffusion models offer not only aesthetic novelty but also a means of exploring tectonic complexity, enabling designers to engage with material, form, and detail in unprecedented ways. Through iterative use of diffusion-based generation, components emerge that are not simply ornamental but carry embedded logics of part ontologies—defining relationships between elements, assemblies, and their constructive roles.
This approach reframes ornamentation not as superficial embellishment, but as a generative system of articulation, tied to how parts are formed, related, and potentially fabricated. In this way, ornament becomes a byproduct of process, not an afterthought.
The integration of these AI tools encourages a shift toward a more speculative yet materially grounded architecture, where tectonic expression is derived from the interplay between digital formation and physical feasibility. The outcomes are not singular objects, but systems of parts capable of adaptation and fabrication, opening new trajectories for architectural imagination that are both visually rich and constructional intelligent.
Julien Flinti Supervisor: Ian Nazareth
Ghosts
This project is a spatial commentary of Darwin Turf Club. A site contested through policy, industry and public opinion (smell). 60,000L of waste oil from NT mines is mandated to be poured into the sand track annually. The site's hauntings are designed as a spatial commentary of agency and governance.
'Ghosts' is a project, where new spatial languages of taint, delay, excess and scent unveil the true layers of the site. Reframing the design to explore materialization as governance. A device, atmosphere and actions that provoke agency.
The project proposes a local aquifer to decentralize governance by creating informal systems. Three parties, the residents, businesses in Parap and the racehorse course will perform governance through use, care and ritual of the water.
Five key interventions of the wishing well, whistleblower, hot desk, weed bank and water delay spatialize governance as care and rituals of the site. Through scent, smoke, water and residue, governance is redistributed into practices of care and confrontation.
The process uses Krea Ai and simulations to push architectural discourse beyond form and function into a realm, where narrative, symbolism, and digital imagination create new spatial languages and atmospheric devices.
Lynn Maria Gonsalves Supervisor: Vei Tan
Devils In The Detail
We are in the midst of a housing crisis, and our current response is to demolish existing conditions along with the memories and embodied ideals of the Australian dream that are entwined within the detached dwelling typology. But what if we could imagine a future where density is layered over the familiar, rather than built in place of it?
Devils in the Detail is an exploratory project that investigates how inclusive density might be introduced into the existing fabric of middle-ring suburbs while retaining current conditions and preserving the architectural elements that reflect the increasingly unattainable Australian dream.
The project proposes a new set of criteria for densification: Six Aussie dream moments, six small site elements, and six new baseline requirements. Using these benchmarks, six alternative typologies are presented, each aiming to increase density while protecting the existing built fabric and the cultural values it holds.
This is not a blanket solution, nor does it claim to fix all our housing issues. Instead, it challenges the business-as-usual approach, which too often feels like the coward’s way out. With a little more autonomy and courage, we can enhance upon what makes the Australian suburb so desirable in the first place. Densification doesn’t need to erase the past; it can build upon it.
Sophie Eliza Beckerleg Supervisor: Claire Scorpo
Break In Case Of Flood
This project reimagines a precinct on the brink of hydrological collapse as an adaptable landscape rehearsing its own survival. The Southbank Resilience Overlay proposes a suite of urban clauses - each designed to transform existing infrastructure into a network of productive, absorptive, and distributive systems.
Flood-prone sites are repurposed as mobilization corridors and emergency staging grounds. Roadways are retrofitted into decentralized farming strips, and underutilized commercial properties become autonomous urban survival complexes - housing cultivation systems and additional dwellings. Along precinct edges, rewilded buffer zones blend flood mitigation with amphibious food production, using raised beds, swales and native vegetation to hold, grow, and adapt.
Rather than resisting change, the architecture here is shaped by it—designed to fail safely, recover quickly, and nourish those it holds. The framework is not solely a masterplan, but a set of rehearsals imagined through the perspective of a resident within. In doing so, it imagines a civic response to climate risk that is not technocratic but social, not singular but seasonal. Southbank becomes a testbed for resilience—where architecture learns from water, and cities learn from collapse.
Jason Ho Supervisor: Ian Nazareth
Architecture At The Threshold Of Promise And Collapse
Blake Hillebrand Supervisor: Dr. John Doyle
This project is quixotic.
It began with the belief that architecture could intervene in the stalling and quiet erasure of major public projects — if entangled and shared. But deeper currents emerged: bias, exclusion, and the shaping of futures through influence and omission.
It explores how architecture legitimises agendas often reduced to image, while real decisions happen behind closed doors. Still, we hold agency: deciding what to privilege, who to represent, and how to frame the civic.
Set within Melbourne’s black hole of value — the Jolimont Railyards — the project constructs five ideological “worlds”: Capital, Culture, Politics, Ecology, and Civital care. Fifty-two stakeholders, split into competing teams, each produce their own masterplan.
At the centre: a gameboard — first a critique of top-down planning, then a platform for play. It surfaces contradiction and invites civic agency.
Three architectural moves emerge:
N.A.A.R.M. — a Truth and Reconciliation Arts Park
G.R.I.D. — a data-ecology exchange hub
H.U.B.S. — a civic platform for care, housing, and migration At its core, the project embodies a paradox.
It doesn’t resolve the conflict but questions whether a conflicted or exclusionary built environment is inherently flawed and then argues that if this conflict cannot be resolved, the way we act and design — regardless of outcome — becomes of critical importance. The project offers one model of engagement.
The Levelest Crossing
The Levelest Crossing is a radical counterfactual to the dwindling level crossing removal project. Sited at Thornbury station, the project examines an inverted counter proposition to the removal of the level crossing, instead removing everything else.
The resultant heightening of the level crossing condition is carried into a series of civic interventions on the periphery of the square. The program of these interventions is dictated by the suburban fabric found at the adjacencies of the initial move.
The square acts initially as a deferred mechanism for creating architecture. Pushing program to its edges where it is concentrated into a heightened state. The reoccupation of the square is used as a staging device to accelerate the edge conditions fighting back against the initial totalitarian design move.
The project references many eminent speculative projects of the 20th century, graphically appropriating the endless Superstudio's endless grid as the basis of the square.
Jude Forsythe Danta Supervisors: Paul Van Herk
Overheard On The Manja
Vimalpreet Kaur Supervisor: Vicky Lam
Overheard on the Manja is a spatial and cultural unfolding. A project that tunes in to the quiet, colorful exchanges of multilingual life, rooted in the slackened ways knowledge transfers across communities.
Set at the overlooked edges of a local secondary school that hosts weekly Punjabi, Turkish and Macedonian classes, the architecture challenges how community language education is treated: peripheral, borrowed, or temporary. In its place, it proposes gestures that activate the thresholds beyond the classroom - a playful schedule of routines inside a program of meaning and not necessarily function.
At its heart lies the manja. The glitched (mis)translation is a ‘woven cot’ or ‘bed’. In reality, it is a humble, brightly patterned and mobile platform that anchors Punjabi culture, where stories are passed, meals are shared, and language drifts gently between generations. Here, the manja is both object and idea: informing the design methodology and conceptual grounding as a motif of informal learning, presence, sociality and storytelling.
Through the actions of fragmenting, adding, inserting and extending, the project gives hyper-meaning to the margins. It embraces the etymological anomalies that emerge when cultures overlap. Its hybrid spatial logics loosen the suburban school typology. Language is reframed as a living montage of color, culture and conversation.
New Jianyeli: Adaptive Reuse Of Longtang
As Shanghai’s urban fabric undergoes rapid transformation, traditional longtangs find themselves increasingly caught in a wave of commodification and aesthetic packaging. Once dense with everyday life and neighbourly exchange, many have been reduced to stylized backdrops — heritage sanitized for tourism or repurposed for boutique consumption, their social vitality hollowed out.
This project offers another path — one that resists the flattening logic of capital-led re-development. Rather than replacing or erasing, it proposes a slower, more embedded form of renewal. Using JIANYELI as a testing ground, the design seeks to preserve not just the physical grain of the Longtang, but the temporal depth and social entanglements woven into its fabric.
New programs are carefully inserted into the existing structure: public-facing spaces open the Longtang to the city; reorganized units and rooftop additions make room for intergenerational living; and communal spaces support shared rhythms and renewed forms of cohabitation.
But the ambition goes beyond JIANYELI. By demonstrating how micro-acupuncture, adaptive reuse, and community-driven growth can coexist with historic masonry, the project outlines a transferable framework for longtangs still awaiting transformation.
Instead of salvaging bricks for nostalgia or clearing blocks for profit, it poses a quieter question: can urban renewal be measured by the persistence of ordinary life? In response, this proposal reimagines the Longtang — not as a relic of the past, but as a prototype for an inclusive, evolving, and plural urban future.
Zihao Zhang Supervisor: Laura Szyman
Incompatible Bodies: Where Ends Do [Not] Meet
Su Myat Shin Supervisor: Laura Szyman
This proposition dwells in binary tension. Not to resolve it, but to let it perform. Where two programs collide, the market and the cemetery, the architecture does not choose sides. It negotiates, deflects, folds, and hesitates.
Bodies: structural, human, ritual, institutional, press against one another without merging. Some hold. Some retreat. Some deform to remain present. Architecture becomes a method of staying inside contradiction: between structure and ground, between presence and absence, between permanence and temporary, between the stalls and the graves.
Here, the grid does not organize. It ruptures. Zones resist alignment. Boundaries refuse clarity. What results are fragments that do not belong to any one system, but are shaped by the tensions between them.
There are no fixed programs. A bench mourns. A wall trades. A roof veils and shelters both. Use slips. Meaning displaces. Form negotiates.
This is not a project that asks what should be built. It asks what persists when incompatible demands are never reconciled?
What holds space when ends do — and do not — meet?
INCOMPATIBLE BODIES
Quiet Negotiation
Phuong Linh Nguyen Supervisor: Lauren Garner
In Melbourne’s inner suburbs, rigidity has slowly become ingrained in both the urban fabric and the rhythms of everyday life — reinforcing an increasing sense of separation. This spatial binary tension has diminished opportunities for shared experience, leading to a subtle erosion of both ecological continuity and social connection.
This project speculates on a different possibility: one where nature and architecture co-author space — not in opposition, but in reciprocity. It explores how architecture might operate as a gentle mediator, reweaving ecological presence and collective life back into the rhythms of domestic space. Focusing on residual spaces and edge conditions— the project proposes a system of nature-led and adaptive strategies that soften the hard edge between public and private domains. Nature becomes more than a backdrop; it acts as a spatial medium that can reactivate overlooked margins, where overlapping interactions unfold.
Sitting on three distinct sites along Nicholson Street — from public to semi-private to domestic — Small-scale infrastructures reframe suburban domesticity as a space of negotiation, where built form, landscape, and community life intersect. These interventions do not impose but evolve — embracing informality, enabling microclimates, and nurturing the possibility of co-existence.
Disarming The Fringe
Supervisors:
Housing anxiety in Australia has reached its lowest point on record. While both urbanisation and suburbanisation grow overburdened, the neglected fringe areas remain largely unoccupied. How might peri-urban render a new way of living? Disarming the Fringe seeks beyond established urban and suburban archetypes by developing periurbanisation—interweaving living, community, and ecological systems in balanced ways.
Located within a farming zone, Kilmore East endured severe bushfires during Black Saturday and was later impacted by the Mickleham-Kilmore fire. The loss of ecological vegetation alongside repeated bushfires has left the site vulnerable, placing it under erosion management. The proposal begins with restoring the erosion zone. A scenic pathway follows the terrain through recovered native landscape and shelters, providing moments of pause and visual delight while preserving the soil. Four rainwater gardens filter runoff and store excess water in tanks for fire emergencies.
The swimming pool sits along the erosion boundary, reframing fearful perception of bushfire zone by enhancing sensory experience. It opens to the uphill prospect while being shielded from main road noises by facility areas. The car park serves both residents and emergency assembly, with a fire risk sign visible to passing drivers.
The collective living model steps with the terrain, including private and shared balconies for each level. Its double façade system and three evacuation staircases prepare it as a refuge structure. It allows ‘prospect’ to ease panic, while being fully sealed during fire. A bell tower, extending from the communal gathering space, alerts residents to risk levels.
Yuanyuan Sun
Liam Oxlade & Olivia O'Donnell
The Action of Inaction
Dini Lee Supervisor: Dr. Michael Spooner
What began as a proposed means to solve traffic congestion at an intersection of two major roads with the purchase of a house, proposed demolition, and installation of a slip lane, instead triggered an escalating entanglement of dispute.
The Action of Inaction is an assemblage of residue from property quarrels and urban conflicts prevalent anywhere and everywhere. From a stretch of land is left barren for more than 10 years or a heritage house abandoned for more than 40 years, this Project is grown from such evidence of silent discords caused by the differing opinions and proposed intentions of oppositional parties.
Largely overlooked in passing, we rarely encounter the inactive activity of (often petty) feuds except glimpsing, at most, into these parallel realms via bureaucratic settings like the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).
As an aggregated multi-complex, the actors from these discordant cases are forced to be together, along with the adjudicating figure of VCAT and potentially a cameo appearance from squatters in one monolithic building, perched over a surrounding residential neighbourhood. With oversight impossible, the ridiculousness of these contestations and the enormity of limbo sites are highlighted as lost potential for real beneficial outcomes.
THE ACTION OF INACTION
The Grain Of Growth
Jude Willems Supervisors: Matt Stanley and Rodney Eggleston
‘The Grain of Growth’ explores how architecture can mediate between rapid urban change and the preservation of local identity in Hawthorn. Responding to Victoria’s “Plan for Vic” and the mandate for Boroondara to double its housing stock by 2051, the project investigates how place, character, and heritage can be sustained amid densification. Focusing on a mixed-use precinct at a councilowned carpark behind Glenferrie Road, the design challenges conventional planning by redistributing building heights for contextual sensitivity and prioritising sunlight, views, and pedestrian movement.
The project interrogates the ambiguous planning term “fine grain” through iterative design studies, reinterpreting it as native grain, directionality, building element, and craftsmanship. These ideas inform a site strategy that integrates formal and informal pathways, open-air circulation, and landscape interventions using native grasses, referencing First Nations’ agricultural practices. Public programs including a seed library, bakery, and propagation centre anchor the precinct, reviving traditional knowledge and fostering community resilience.
Architecturally, the project draws from Hawthorn’s Edwardian and Victorian shopfronts, reimagining their active ground floors and grand parapets in a contemporary context. The use of heritage and site-made bricks, along with ceramic workshops and kiln rooms, celebrates the suburb’s legacy of making and adaptation. Residential towers feature flexible layouts and communal balconies that encourage creativity and shared agency.
Ultimately, ‘The Grain of Growth’ envisions architecture as a catalyst for embedding resilience, connection, and evolving identity into Hawthorn’s urban fabric, ensuring that as the suburb grows, it remains rooted in its unique history and community values.
“Waste is only waste if we waste it”
In a speculative future where Melbourne’s landfills have reached capacity, a new mandate requires every city council to process its own waste within municipal boundaries. Trash Talk responds to this provocation by reimagining the city block as a vertical landfill: one that doesn’t bury waste but metabolizes it within the heart of the city.
The project retrofits a cluster of underutilized buildings at 160 - 180 Queen Street into a layered waste-processing facility that coexists with everyday urban life. Rather than isolating infrastructure, Trash Talk embeds digesters, sorting bays, incinerators, and material archives alongside residential, commercial, and civic programs. Organic waste fuels digesters feeding heat and power to occupancies; compost feeds rooftop greenhouses supplying local cafés and community gardens. What was once discarded now completes a loop: visible, tangible, and civic.
The ground floor becomes a public ritual space where waste is not just dropped off, but discussed, displayed, and revalued. A transparent façade acts as both barometer and educator, revealing the consequences of consumption. The project proposes a new urban typology: not a hidden utility, but a shared responsibility. Through architecture, Trash Talk transforms the city from a producer of waste into its processor, educator, and advocate.
Trash Talk
Jeremy Girvand Supervisor: Caitlyn Parry
Kinda, But Not Really!
Rachelle Yeoh Supervisor: Ian Nazareth
Digital platforms are designed to fail - so are public spaces.
This major project operates in the in-between: part physical, part digital; part architecture, part infrastructure. It explores a hybrid reality where temporal glitches become design tactics that stage systems that misfire by design. Through the hijacking of Telstra phone booths, the reprogramming of a suburban church into a click-farm sanctuary and an AI that writes architecture as meme, the project maps the relationship between planned obsolescence and the enshittification of public infrastructure. It argues that failure is not a breakdown of innovation, but an inevitable consequence of the values embedded within our systems. In response, it attempts to reclaim a different kind of public good through acts of hybrid misuse.
Architecture is not the solution - it is the prompt. It offers tactics: parasitic, performative and promiscuous; slipping between meme and machine, prayer and protocol, joke and jurisdiction. It contributes to a critical spatial practice for a time where infrastructure is inseparable from culturewhere we must design not with naivety, but with hope. This project brings alternative strategies into architectural discourse that resist the seriousness of an industry that often overlooks the absurdity embedded in modern infrastructure. It resists cynicism not by denying dysfunction but by working with it.
Sanctuary In Disquise: Safety, Anonymity, Civic Activation
Keanu Arya Tanoko Supervisor: Lauren Garner
Domestic violence and North Melbourne share a history of systemic neglect. North Melbourne—once a major contributor to the city's industrial growth, was abandoned post-deindustrialisation and now faces pressure from commercial redevelopment, while domestic violence remains a national crisis, with one woman killed every four days.
This project envisions a dual revival: transforming North Melbourne into a sanctuary for survivors of domestic violence, while critiquing the failures of current social housing models to foster a sense of security and community.
“Sanctuary in Disguise” explores how the adaptive reuse of industrial fabric can create a form of security that balances anonymity with civic connection. It proposes a spatial model where protection is not achieved through isolation, but through thoughtful integration within the urban fabric. The design is guided by three conceptual frameworks: security through civic activation and passive public surveillance, the building envelope as a medium for healing and protection, and hidden sanctuaries embedded within existing structures. Together, these strategies generate a layered environment— enabling survivors to remain unseen when needed, while still offering moments of shared encounter and social reengagement.
This project redefines what refuge can look like in the city, challenging conventional notions of visibility, separation, and care.
The Glass Prison: Architecture Of Obedience And Illusion
Minh Duc Vu Supervisor: Laura Szyman
"Glass Prison" is a surreal architectural journey exploring the tension between obedience and freedom, set within the shell of an old Woolworths car park in Melbourne.
The project follows DJ an imagined character, a character torn between inherited dreams and personal desire. Each act of the architecture mirrors a psychological stage: from the façade that echoes voices of encouragement, to a golden stage that flatterers his success, to a car park that loops reality into illusion. Architecture here is not static—it listens, responds, tempts, and traps. Elements like golden speakers, rotating chandeliers of childhood sketches, and inverted thresholds suggest freedom, yet lead only to deeper entanglement.
The climax takes place in a collapsing theatre where D.J finally confronts the seamless wall of glass—his own mind reflects back at him. The building is both stage and actor, illusion and truth. It offers agency but writes the script. Inspired by earlier exploration from Macbeth, Severance, Inception, and Paprika, and using my own personal experience, this project blurs narrative and architecture to interrogate systems of control. In the end, DJ walks back in. Not as a prisoner, but a participant—with the intention to rewrite the rules from within. The prison remains. But now, it is seen.
Làng – A village In A Building
Nguyen Supervisor: Dr. Christine Philips
With Vietnam’s aging population growing rapidly, there is an urgent need to create more comfortable and appropriate living environments for the elderly. While aged care homes are not a new concept, many facilities in Central Vietnam still fall short in providing genuine empathy, companionship, and restful living.
As society shifts from a mindset of merely “living enough” to “living comfortably,” especially for the elderly—a group often more sensitive and particular—the design of aged care environments must evolve. Transitioning from multigenerational family living to community-based aging requires spaces truly designed for them.
This project explores the concept of “aging in place” through the creation of a new home—one that feels familiar, respectful, and welcoming. While it may seem imaginative and even a bit playful, this design approach is intentional. Elderly individuals possess a strong sense of identity, emotional depth, and, at times, stubbornness. The design supports health, multigenerational interaction, and community connection, drawing deep inspiration from the 200-year-old traditional houses of Hoi An and local craftsmanship—blending heritage with contemporary art.
Emma
ShiftScape : The Urban Service Sanctuary
Rachit Rupesh Joshi Supervisor: Vei Tan
This project comes from my own time working in the city—waiting between deliveries, resting on curbs, looking for shade or a place to sit. That experience made it clear: our cities rarely make space for the people who keep them running. My design approach started from that street-level view—from the pause, not the plan.
I began with a series of micro-sanctuaries across Melbourne—small-scale rest spots offering seating, shelter, and charging. These weren’t final answers, but test sites, embedded in daily routines, that asked how architecture might quietly support those working in motion. Each intervention responded to a different informal stop used across various times of day and parts of the city.
From those fragments, the project grew into a central hub—a large, elevated structure between buildings. After engaging with overlooked and often invisible working conditions, I wanted to create something that couldn’t be missed: a civic statement for the invisible workforce. The hub offers rest, repair, and self-sustaining systems where users generate and exchange value through movement, energy, and care.
This project doesn’t treat support as an add-on, but as a core function of architecture. If this workforce is essential to the city's rhythms, then shouldn’t the city reflect that—visibly, structurally, and with dignity?
The art museum of the new era should no longer be a box that hides artworks inside.
-For artists, this will reduce their exposure
-For audiences, this reduces their chances to explore more works
-For passers-by, the walls of the building prevent them from "entering" a world they have never explored.
This building turns the facade into an exhibition window, but it is not completely transparent, but somewhere between transparent and semi-transparent, and the transparent part changes with people's line of sight. In a very ambiguous way, it guides people to enter and explore. The building uses a vertical suspension structure to greatly reduce the structure's obstruction of sight. There are almost no solid walls in the interior space. All of them are iron nets like a layer of gauze as space partitions. The exhibition areas are also full of mutual space hints, attracting the audience to further explore. The iron net can be raised and lowered like a curtain and is also equipped with blackout curtains. The exhibition space can change its size, movement line and light at will according to the needs of the exhibits.
Post Digital - Urban Precinct
Bengaluru, India—dubbed Asia’s Silicon Valley—is grappling with rapid suburban tech park expansion, sidelining youth and freelancers while entrenching remote work’s isolation.
This project reimagines CBD-based workspaces as hybrid social and professional hubs, fostering collaboration and reducing stress through tactile, interactive environments. By repurposing existing buildings and inserting adaptive reuse towers via chamfered nests, the design revitalizes urban fabric. Elevated bridges link structures, creating a network of shared spaces that blur formal and informal boundaries, fostering spontaneous peer interaction.
A common thread that ties all human fear is the fear of the unknown and the unpredictable. So much so that, for generations, we have continued to cater to only 0.01% of the living population, prioritizing human needs while disregarding common everyday inhabitants of the urban city like the members of the avian and pollinator communities. This rigidity and sterility of our built environment form suffocating accretions around our organic core.
Considering this Anthropocene, we need a new architectural language. Hence, exploring the intricacies of Epiphytic architecture, one can see how small architecture makes a big difference across the Urbanscape. Instead of curating and sterilizing every inch of our cities, we must create frameworks that invite nature to take root, adapt, and evolve alongside us. My aim is to use Architecture not as a tool for dominance but rather as a mediator between human life and the untamed forces of the avian and pollinator variety, allowing coexistence, unpredictability, and regeneration to shape the environments we call home. Navigating the complexities of where to draw the line and define “Soft Territories” and where to blur them is the crux of this project.
The Avian Scaffold
Sowmya Shankar Supervisor: Mark Jacques
The Great Passageway
Ann Nishara Rashmini Jayawardena Supervisor: Lura Szyman
How does architecture become a patient negotiator in lands fractured by conflict, not between humans, but between humans and elephants?
In the Minneriya region, generations of “bad habits” have formed: roads slicing through migration paths, villages that encroach on wild territory, and a cycle of fear that repeats with every broken fence and raided field.
Architecture here does not arrive with force or finality. Instead, it listens. It adapts. It allows time to work. The interventions across five key sites introduce forms that shift with the seasons, change with their users, and slowly guide both species toward better habits. A bridge becomes a seasonal offering, a tower becomes a non-intrusive observatory, and village homes take on new forms that protect without harming.
These structures are not permanent. They are designed to disappear, to erode, be reclaimed, or repurposed once their role is fulfilled. Inspired by natural systems and sacred geometries, architecture is treated as a living organism: born with purpose, and humble enough to leave when that purpose is served.
This is not architecture for dominance or defense
This is architecture as a mediator
As a patient negotiator
As a living organism
Not to fix the land
But to grow with it
And when the time comes
To let it go
Stuck In The Middle
Sienna Crook
Supervisor: Liam Oxlade & Olivia O'Donnell
Faced with the binary housing choice between outer-suburban sprawl and inner-city apartments, this project asks: What if we re-imagined the middle suburbs? Over 15 weeks, I have designed selfishly, not indulgently, but introspectively. As a radical act of proposing a third option. If it works for me, maybe it speaks to others.
Rather than demolishing to densify, this project retrofits existing 70s brick veneer homes into a hybrid cluster housing model, enhancing density while retaining character. Set within Notting Hill, near Monash University, it proposes three typologies that nest relationally into the suburban fabric. By removing fences, increasing canopy cover, and prioritising communal green space, the model reclaims the front yard as shared terrain, blurring public and private.
In a city obsessed with the new, driven by neophilia, we overlook the "ugly ducklings" that hold latent potential. This project argues for intensification without erasure, proposing a future-facing, inclusive suburban utopia. It is through these acts of careful intervention that we can construct a new narrative of urban life, one where being “stuck in the middle” becomes a connected and sustainable lifestyle for future generations, and not a compromise.
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE
Opti-Vert Stadium
Songyang Li Supervisor: Lucinda Mason
In the high-density urban context of RMIT's city campus, this project explores how to reconstruct the public value of educational space through architectural topological translation, focusing on the production mechanism of public space. Faced with the current situation of the separation of traditional educational buildings and urban functions, it is proposed to use sports facilities as the core spatial medium to catalyze the multi-dimensional coordinated development of education, entertainment and community affairs.
Make the building itself an active social hub and coordinate the multiple streamlines of education-entertainment-community. Specific strategies include: three-dimensional hybrid sports and teaching functions, using topological optimization structures to create special net heights required to accommodate large sports projects; innovative application of 3D concrete printing technology to build efficient bionic structures; at the same time, strategically open the ground floor of the building and transform it into a vibrant public space to actively make up for the lack of urban public space. This integrated design aims to break boundaries and make campus space an organic extension and generator of urban public life.
STADIUM
SUPERVISOR: LUCINDA MASON STUDENT: SONGYANG LI
Fusion Haven is an intergenerational co-living project inspired by the spatial logic of the traditional Chinese siheyuan (courtyard house). It is designed to provide a shared and supportive living environment for young individuals experiencing stress and seeking short-term respite, as well as for elderly residents in need of long-term care and companionship. The project is not only an experimental exploration of co-housing models, but also a forward-thinking response to future residential typologies—aiming to reconnect generations and reshape how we live, grow, and age together.
Drawing from the courtyard-centered and enclosed structure of the siheyuan, the project creates an inward-facing, secure, and private spatial atmosphere. On this foundation, it integrates contemporary needs for flexibility and social interaction. In response to current societal challenges—such as generational disconnection and urban isolation—Fusion Haven seeks to promote emotional healing, mutual support, and intergenerational engagement through spatial design.
In terms of design, Fusion Haven achieves this through:
– The spatial interweaving of private and communal areas to encourage natural, everyday interaction;
– A contrast between old and new materials to symbolize coexistence and dialogue across generations;
– The ramp as a shared circulation path and catalyst for intergenerational connection;
– A courtyard-based enclosed layout that enhances safety, comfort, and a strong sense of belonging—while honoring traditional Chinese values and exploring new possibilities for future living.
Fusion Haven
Ran Li Supervisor: Claire Scorpo
Fusion Haven
Ran
Tide & Trace
Dev Ashish Ashar Supervisor: Thomas Muratore
Tide and Trace is a spatial framework that reimagines Melbourne’s Yarra River edge as a layered urban tapestry, where histories, ecologies, and public life intertwine. As Melbourne continues to densify and its public spaces face increasing pressure, this project proposes an archipelago of interconnected interventions that do more than occupy space — they trace memory and allow tides of cultural, social, and ecological activity to shape the riverfront anew.
Beginning with the observation that many existing parks along the Yarra remain underutilized, fragmented, and divorced from their historical and Indigenous contexts, this proposal uses a kit-ofparts methodology — a series of programmed typologies inspired by Melbourne’s own spatial DNA. Amphitheaters, pavilions, foyers, and landscape gestures each respond to site-specific needs, layered through traces of the past and tuned to future climates.
The project offers a new language of public space: one that encourages co-existence between water and land, flora and infrastructure, people and history. “Tide and Trace” becomes both metaphor and method — the ebb and flow of time and use is embraced, while spatial traces offer continuity and familiarity. The outcome is a porous, adaptive urban edge that strengthens communal belonging through design grounded in memory, rhythm, and resilience.
TIDE AND TRACE
Beyond Aisles
Raj Yogesh Shah Supervisor: Lauren Garner
This project reimagines the supermarket—not as a sealed retail machine, but as an active urban participant.
Set within Coles Central at the Flinders-Elizabeth junction, it questions the dominance of aisleheavy,brand-controlled layouts and proposes a spatial system that gives back to the street and the community.
The design compresses the traditional retail footprint, reclaiming space for a stacked program where circulation, pause points, and public moments become integral.
A through-connection to Degraves Lane activates an alternate pedestrian route, transforming a store entry into an urban threshold. The compacted maze zone lifts up, allowing a green plinth and community amphitheater to anchor the street edge. Rather than maximizing shopping duration or controlling user flow, the project invites unplanned interaction—blurring the line between customer and citizen.
At its core, this is not just a supermarket redesign—it’s an architectural argument against retail monoculture.
It imagines a model where public life and commerce coexist, and where urban supermarkets act less
Confluence Of Steps/ Sangam Of Steps
Krupa Laljibhai Sanghani Supervisor: Dr. Christine Philips
This project reimagines the riverfront of Prayagraj, the sacred site of the Kumbh Mela, into a dynamic and adaptive landscape that responds to the spiritual, cultural, and everyday needs of its people.
Inspired by India’s step architecture and the sacred geometry of the Shree Yantra, the design balances ritual and function. During the Festival/Event, it guides millions of pilgrims through recontoured terrain, permanent platforms, and temporary structures that facilitate safe movement, rituals, rest and reflection.
Spaces are inclusive, accessible, and spiritually resonant.Beyond the festival, the site becomes a community common: open area host cricket, volleyball, and local games; shaded areas offer recreation for elders; and pavilions transform into meditation spaces and community workshop venues. The design serves both the sacred and the everyday — a space of continuity, not just occasion.
Material choices like brick, terracotta, and timber root the architecture in local tradition, while Jaali ceilings create play between light and shadow, adding atmosphere and serenity.This is not just festival infrastructure — it’s a living spiritual and civic landscape, transforming chaos into calm, ritual into rhythm, and place into experience.
Urbancut
Zengwei Wang Supervisor: Patrick Macasaet
The project focuses on capturing sensory and spatial qualities through urban observations of Chongqing and Melbourne, transforming those experiences into sequential, scenery-led public programming circulation systems to counter the flattening of urban feelings and the lack of public functions in commercial buildings within the existing CBD, which is primarily driven by a commercial consumption orientation.
The project begins with my urban observation of the impact of consumerism on Melbourne CBD, as well as reflections on Rem's Junkspace and Takashi's Superflat theories. To respond, I present "Urbancut": The urban experience is not only based on the urbanscape but is primarily formed by the circulation and the spaces it connects. The diversity, fragmentation, and transitional nature of the spaces, along with their sensory and emotional impact, collectively construct our perception and experience of the city.
This theory extends beyond urban research to inform the strategic approach of architectural design for narrative-driven spatial experiences.
I separate the sensory-captured design into two aspects: Spatial qualities driven (Sensory via Form), primarily derived from Chongqing through memories of sensory experiences, diagrammatic sketches, and photographic documentation; Program, Context, and Human activity qualities driven(Sensory via Program), primarily from Melbourne, based on revisits and research into context and heritage.
Future Of Car Parks
Spandana Tirumala Venkata Supervisor: Dr. Christine Philips
The Future of Car Parks: Reimagining the Future of Urban Infrastructure
“A building has at least two lives: the one imagined by its maker, and the life it lives afterward.” — Rem Koolhaas.
Taking this as a starting point, this project explores how the fundamental elements of architecture— walls, stairs, ramps, and floors—can move beyond function to shape narrative, public life, and cultural expression. A wall might become a storytelling surface. A stair might double as a stage. A ramp might be reimagined as a gallery in motion.
Car parks, stripped of their original use, become architectural frames for experimentation. Instead of demolition, they are adapted through insertions, cuts, and layering. This approach responds to global shifts in urban transport and the urgent need for affordable creative space in Melbourne, where over 120 artists are on waitlists and grassroots hubs are at risk, despite widespread vacancy in existing buildings.
Three multi-storey car parks across central Melbourne serve as case studies: The site of the former MPavilion, 522 Flinders Lane, and Golden Square Car Park. Each is reimagined not as a blank slate, but as an active structure, transformed into a hybrid infrastructure that combines studio space, public use, and civic engagement.
These interventions prioritize inclusion and align with Melbourne’s cultural policies. They serve First Nations artists, migrant creatives, queer communities, and others excluded by rising inner-city costs— offering a timely, strategic reuse of what we already have.
On Borders
Set near the Attari-Wagah border, this project investigates the architectural potential of a site choreographed by nationalism, waiting, and unresolved identity. Rather than resolving the tensions embedded in this politically charged ground, the proposal frames them spatially and temporally through a civic infrastructure that operates in both conflict and post-conflict conditions.
At the core is the idea of choreography, the embodied, repetitive sequences of movement that take place across the border zone. From ceremonial parades and military gestures to civilian routines of waiting, queuing, eating, and leaving, these movements become scripts for architectural design. By mapping these flows, the project crafts a hybrid typology: a car park, a market hall, a waiting area and a storage area for when the trade is halted.
The architecture is not fixed; it shifts with the state of the border, open or closed, festive or silent. Rather than attempting to erase the performance of the border, the project holds it in tension, highlighting its absurdity, emotional weight, and lingering potential for transformation.
Ultimately, this is architecture as witness, as infrastructure of anticipation. It is a spatial strategy for navigating the in-between where nations draw lines, but people continue to move, wait, hope, and remember.
Simran Baid Supervisor: Vicky Lam
Attari Wagah
Habitus. Housing For A Life In Motion
Marcela Vichi Ruberth Supervisor: Tom Muratore
This project proposes a housing typology for people in transition — students, migrants, young professionals, and newcomers — who often arrive in the city without the stability or support needed to truly settle. It rethinks the idea of “home” not as a product but as a process: one that balances privacy and collectivity, adaptability and belonging.
Rooted in lived experience, the project responds to the alienation many faces when navigating temporary housing or exploitative rental markets. It offers a spatial framework that values everyday rituals — the shared coffee, the visible sky, the gentle greeting of a neighbour — as essential architectural moments. Through a system of small-to-mid scale buildings embedded in Melbourne’s changing urban fabric, it explores co-living models that feel generous, grounded, and communal.
Two contrasting sites — one on the edge of the CBD, another in suburban Balaclava — test this strategy across contexts. The result is not a single building, but a housing network: adaptive, humanscaled, and locally responsive. Public-facing ground floors, varied apartment types, and integrated green terraces create a sense of spatial generosity on compact footprints.
HABITUS . housing for a life in motion
Đong - Together
This project begins with a question: how can architecture express the cultural depth of a land that lacks identity? Set on a new development site without a clear cultural anchor, the design becomes an act of definition—a gesture that draws from Vietnamese tradition to bring identity, rhythm, and warmth to the land. The word Đồng, meaning “people” or “community,” grounds the project. It is a structure made for the đồng bào- the people.
Inspired by Vietnamese festivals, the architecture is divided into three interwoven sequences: observation, immersion, and sensory experience. Each offers a way of engaging with culture—through sight, movement, and memory. A café serves as the sensory anchor, connecting the other two experiences.
Motifs from Đông Sơn drums and the mythical dragon appear across the façade and flowing roof, while vibrant colors recall traditional festival flags. These patterns do more than decorate—they bring history into form, and folklore into motion.
The project resists being just a neutral container. It becomes a landscape, a statement, and a place of home. A permanent festival—not for spectacle, but for a sense of belonging.
Trang Do Thuc Pham
Supervisor: Dr. Christine Philips
Waterscape
Xingya Hao Supervisor: Brent Allpress
Located at Point Park in Melbourne Docklands, this project is grounded in two key themes: filter and connection. In a city where anxiety, stress, and social isolation are embedded in the built environment, the design reclaims two fundamental human actions—eating and breathing—as spatial rituals that can heal, reconnect, and restore.
The project begins by filtering: a new tram station and ferry stop create deliberate thresholds, inviting people to slow down before entering the site. The architectural language then continues this transition—from hard, gridded urban remnants to fluid, natural landscapes. Solid edges dissolve into permeable boundaries, guiding visitors through shifting densities of light, air, and material.
The market itself is not just a destination, but a breathing framework. Through a series of courtyards, shaded walkways, rooftop gardens, and open-air kitchens, it offers spaces where people can come together over food and fresh air. It becomes a platform for everyday interaction—between strangers, neighbours, and the land itself. Rather than offering escape, the architecture offers relief and reconnection. In a fragmented urban context, it functions not as a monument, but as a soft infrastructure—filtering pressure, generating presence, and inviting people to live slower, deeper, and together.
Certainty And Uncertainty: Change Of Season
Yohanes Christopher Haryono Supervisor: Vicky Lam
Jakarta has experienced significant climate shifts in recent years, including increased rainfall intensity, irregular seasonal variations, rising sea levels, warming temperatures, and frequent flooding. Rapid urbanization and economic expansion have intensified these instabilities, making their effects increasingly unpredictable. The consequences for both the human and ecological system have grown more severe, as seen in the devastating floods of 2020 and 2021, which led to displacement, economic losses, and infrastructure damage.
These environmental UNCERTAINTIES challenge the built environment, particularly tropical and vernacular architectural forms. The raises questions about whether such designs can continue evolving to withstand increasing wet conditions. How can flood and rain resilience be integrated into architecture to enhance adaptability and ensure a safer future?
This major project reimagines Jakarta’s wetlands-shaped by the tropical monsoon, by equipping communities with resilient infrastructure and fostering a dialogue between land and water. Architecture can be a tool for strengthening adaptability in the face of unpredictable wet conditions.
Here, Jakarta’s coastal and riverine areas serve as the micro-context, with Indonesia’s urban wetlands as the broader framework.
By rethinking the relationship between built environments and changing wet conditions, architecture can help communities better adapt to UNCERTAINTIES, ensuring resilience in the face of climate change.
The Silent Carer
The Silent Carer is a mental health and wellbeing campus that reimagines the disused Footscray Psychiatric Centre — a brutalist remnant of Victoria’s institutional mental health past. Rather than erasing this history, the project carefully adapts the structure into a layered, community-focused typology that supports mental health without clinical stigma. The building is organised as a vertical gradient of care: from public and social activity on the lower levels, to therapy, retreat, and short-stay accommodation above.
Three key ideas underpin the design: Brutalism, Community, and Memories. Brutalist architecture is softened through topographic interventions, planted thresholds, and modular extensions that re-use existing façade panels. Community voices inform the site’s programming, including public walking tracks, healing gardens, filtered lake, and an art gallery showcasing lived experiences. Memories, both painful and personal, are embedded through spatial planning, therapeutic design cues, and preservation of material history.
This is not a hospital, nor a home, nor a school — but a hybrid space offering access to support before a crisis. It is architecture as a silent carer — not prescribing recovery, but quietly enabling it through design that is flexible, welcoming, and human. The project challenges conventional mental health infrastructure and proposes a new, care-based civic typology for Melbourne.
Daniel Paul Preziuso Supervisor: Claire Scorpo
Impractical Concourse
Zhi Jie Chia Supervisor: Simon Drysdale
In dense urban environments, the underground has long been co-opted as a space of necessity defined by sterile corridors, dim lighting, and an absence of life. These subterranean infrastructures have evolved into dystopian utilitarian typologies. However, why do we regard the subterranean as a space that cannot be inhabited, merely treating it as a necessary evil to commute from one place to another?
After all, retail culture taught us that enclosure need not be limiting. Within the confines of four walls and a roof, shopping malls created new rituals where walking becomes wandering, and consumption blurs with leisure. These enclosed artificial environments have become sites of social congregation and propagated culture and trends.
This project seeks to reclaim the potential of the underground. It challenges the conventions that define subgrade spaces as lifeless or purely functional; and instead proposes a new subterranean typology, one that imitates the rhythm and familiarity of vernacular elements in our streetscape.
Rather than designing corridors of movement, the proposal fragments the city and recontextualizes it below ground. It integrates spatial variety, social activity, moments of pause, and nature. It is a humane model of underground urbanism where people are not merely commuters, but inhabitants; not just passing through, but engaging, lingering, and thriving.
By subverting existing perceptions, the proposal presents the underground not as a necessary evil, but as opportunity, a latent extension of the city rather than its under belly.
City In Building Building In City
Jiaheng Helen Xu Supervisor: Dr. Peter Brew
This project proposes a city not defined by planning, architecture, or data, but by how people actually use space. While official systems like the CLUE dataset describe Melbourne through fixed categories — apartment, office, childcare — the real city operates through overlaps, adaptations, and mismatches. Offices appear in apartments; childcare is squeezed into warehouses, and laneways — which take up nearly 30% of the CBD — are left unaccounted for.
The project treats Melbourne as both a real city and a model of a city, compressed into a single building. It explores the idea of “City As City” — not as planning or statistics, but as shared tenancy, informal corridors, reappropriated foyers, and shifting boundaries of use.
Three base units — office, apartment, and childcare — are scaled according to their real urban floor space proportions and recombined into architectural prototypes. These are then reassembled on site, forming a building that makes visible the spatial mismatches often ignored in policy and design.
This project reframes the city as something far richer than what datasets and reports can describe — a living system defined by daily use, contradiction, and invisible yet essential forms of occupation.
View
Finder Pavilions
View Finder Pavilions is a network of three architectural interventions that explore how photographic techniques can transform the way we perceive, experience, and engage with Princes Park. Using the language of the camera framing, exposure, focus, and scale this project reactivates the park’s overlooked edges through sensory and spatial amplification.
The Camera Obscura Pavilion serves as both a social gathering space and grandstand for Crawford Oval. Its sloped form, embedded with a pinhole and mirrored roof, captures and projects live images of the skyline and sporting field into its darkened chamber, merging leisure, community, and optical wonder. Constructed from weathering Corten steel and blackened plywood and layered glazing of varying opacity glasses, offering a meditative shelter.
The NegativeSpace Pavilion, positioned along the cemetery boundary, draws from the adjacent memorial wall and sloping terrain to carve a sunken path beneath a hovering canopy. Its deep soft and stark silhouette evoke solemnity, while the excavated trench reconnects the running track to the earth, creating an emotional link between movement, memory, and landscape.
The TiltShift Pavilion invites users to recline on an inclined platform and staring upward through a narrow vertical aperture, reframing the tree line and sky from unexpected, intimate angles. Together, these pavilions operate as architectural “viewfinders” devices that heighten sensory awareness, foster social ritual, and invite reflection. View Finder Pavilions reimagines how architecture can draw from photography to frame new meanings within a public landscape, forging connections between past, present, and the act of looking itself.
Sousata Vanna Supervisor: Matthew Stanley
View Finder Pavilions
Pavilions to See Differently
Aperture Pavilion “Obscura Atrium”
PlaneShift Pavilion “Selective Clarity”
Silhouette Pavilion “Negative Space”
The Fifth Pillar
Hadigalage Duleka Thuyacontha Supervisor: Steven Chu
This project proposes a civic architectural intervention at the edge of Sri Lanka’s existing Parliament site, addressing the widening disconnect between the state and its citizens. Building upon the symbolic and spatial legacy of Geoffrey Bawa’s masterplan, the design reorients the axis of power away from insularity and toward public accessibility, transparency, and participation.
The intervention takes the form of a literal and conceptual bridge—an infrastructural and ideological connector between government and people. It integrates protest grounds, debate forums, media galleries, and a civic education center into a single architectural system. The project invites diverse forms of civic interaction, from dissent and protest to dialogue and learning.
Framing the public not as passive observers but as active participants in governance, the project introduces the concept of the “Fifth Pillar”—a civic force that stands alongside the Legislature, Executive, Judiciary, and Press. Here, architecture becomes a tool for empowering this Fifth Pillar: the people. By spatially legitimizing protest, discourse, and civic education, the intervention transforms the Parliament’s periphery into a living democratic platform—dynamic, accessible, and perpetually responsive to the evolving needs of the public.
