An existing house with the internal walls, ceiling and rear wall removed to make one large room connecting to a garden.

The garden is growing now…we will report back later

Photographs Rory Gardiner

This building is an outbuilding to a 1980's Concrete Block house designed by Ross Perrett. It is 1.5 storey (mezzanine), 26m2 footprint, and homes bikes, garden equipment and a flexible space for a range of activities. It is conceived as a building that provides that extra space an extension usually provides, but as a separate building in its own right because the existing house is an excellent building that did not suit extension.

It is in dialogue with the original house of solidity/masonry and simple geometrical shapes (common to the late Brutalist style) but plays with the solidity through transparency in response to the tight sight - allowing light to pass through to the garden and for the expansive interior spatial quality glass blocks create.

The shape - triangle in plan, is an outcome of multiple factors - a language of simple geometry of the original house, as well as the push-pull of the site - it angles away from the neighbours to not overshadow, but also to create (and actually leave in place) garden beds and a large Birch tree. The building physically retains a raised garden bed in the same location where the Birch was planted, importantly maintaining it's root ball that had grown to suit the bed. The building's footprint is almost exactly where a concrete driveway was and suggested the location for the building.

The 'deep gardens' - the wedge shaped gardens, are an important response to the site conditions leaving the long view available, and also in their turn creating the pointy end, which is in conversation with the house and it's view from inside out. The effect of the garden either side and the pointy end facing the house is that the building appears quite small from the house. In a play of shapes a small round volume housing a sauna sit's off to the side. Inside, the spatial quality is animated by the colours and shadows of the deep garden. The double height void and full height column connect the mezzanine and ground floor.

This is only our second masonry building, preferring to work with lightweight materials and suspended floors. In this built fabric of brick buildings on tight sites, the glass block was a solution not in our usual response.

2022

Melbourne, Australia

photographs Rory Gardiner

NGV Contemporary Design Competition, 2021

Open Weave /team

Grimshaw Melbourne Studio/ anchor practice

Baracco + Wright Architects/ design lead

with Winwood Mckenzie, McGregor Coxall Australia, Foolscap, Relative Projects, 20-20 Studio, Flux Consultants, AECOM, Eckersley O’Callaghan, 2x4 Inc, and Paul Memmott

Listen to Paul, Louise and Mauro talk about this project with Hugh Goad on RRR here.

We have approached the notion of landmark as ‘placeness’ embedded with experiential quality. The building is knowable as a singular, yet soft form collected by a veil, and is dynamic according to light and time of day. The building’s transparency and plan distribution brings you to the edges of the gallery spaces and overlaps you with the city and Country. These spaces, their quality, generosity, transparency, and an awesomeness that is more geological than institutional are all important types of spaces for the setting of contemporary art and its experience.

To embed placeness we began our thinking of this project as the site of architecture’s connection to Country, a natural ecosystem, and the city. The site, was once the continuation of a gradual slope towards the confluence of the living rivers, Birrarung and the Maribyrnong, falling to the area we call Southbank where an ephemeral wetland is still latent in the high water table and geological profile, reflected in the lower actual ground which intersects the historically ‘flattened’ out upper podium. Nearby there once was a waterfall in Birrarung which registered the meeting of the salt water and sweet (fresh) water which was undoubtedly of cultural significance, but this waterfall was removed and Birrarung was re-routed.

Sensitive articulation of the two ground planes brings together opportunities to re-know this place in the cultural landscape and weave a critical and productive narrative around how we can reimagine our city each time we demolish a building. NGV Contemporary can be a first step to bringing the non-human, deep soil, and actual ground into consideration in an urban context, promising greater resilience in a changing climate and reframing the idea of a civic and cultural landmark through opportunities embodied in the design that project far beyond the present moment. To achieve this, we are proposing a ‘many grounds’ approach, where an upper podium ‘constructed ground’ brings the St Kilda Road level across at grade, enabling a surfacing of deep geology at the site of the ‘actual ground’ beneath.

Planted with endemic species and creating a microclimate at the onset of prevailing winds, the design establishes a deep setback at the lower ground that can be thought of as a ‘landscaped lobby’, which surfaces the soil condition and acts as a quiet counterpoint of the urbanity of Southbank Boulevard. The shape of the constructed ground above moves in and around the vegetation, forming an urban balcony to the south drawing visitors up and into the gallery and wider precinct. The pedestrian experience is dynamic, as the building weaves in and out of vegetation, with the double height NGVC Design Store addressing Southbank Boulevard as a street level storefront in its own right, and large scale artworks in the Arrival Gallery visible from below. The southwest corner of the site is treated as an urban sponge landscape in its low lying area, which will need to perform in storm surge and overland flow events.

The urban form of our design has evolved from the site context and vision for it to be part of a family of Melbourne Arts Precinct buildings — to draw in rather than project out, and to participate in the solid mass and simple geometries of its ‘siblings’. We have explored ways of making a building feel solid from the exterior, while admitting light and revealing its program. Our design proposes a building veiled in a fabric like mesh skin, creating a breathable enclosure that permits light, shades glass, and allows one to see out (in a non-framed, non-colonial way). By night, it is transformed and revelatory.

In thinking through the position of NGV Contemporary within the evolving cultural landscape of Melbourne, we have been informed by the site’s simultaneous identity as both an ancient and future place. Embracing the unknowable quality and unspoken agency that defines a truly urban space, our design proposes an open and generous building that is organised as an extension of the city and capable of absorbing and adding new layers: a museum brought to life by the way it is used and its function within wider cultural and environmental ecologies, rather than a museum that exists as an artefact in itself.

We tend to understand ‘contemporary’ to mean being of the present. But in its most literal sense it means to be ‘together with time’. Contemporary in architectural terms is most powerfully expressed in ideas and approach, rather than an attempt to be formally contemporary. Our design envisions the NGV Contemporary as a more than 100 year building, capable of adapting and reinventing itself by allowing for a simplicity in its flexibility. An elemental approach turns the introverted container inside out, opening up the institution while keeping the controlled envelope only what it needs to be. It allows for future layers to evolve in these spaces as they might in a city, while collecting the enclosed internal spaces of the galleries into an efficiently stacked volume.

Exhibition spaces have been considered to provide maximum agency for curators, artists, and designers. This results in multiple conditions in which to experience art and design, including large-scale exterior (sheltered) and interior (through the ability to connect vertically through the medium and small galleries) contexts. The triangular shaped site — an outcome of the forces of land parcelization and transport planning — denied as a place making factor in the lower and upper ground planes, translates into the main gallery plan shape to achieve the large single level space. The enclosed galleries are contained in the maximum footprint available and gathered across three connected levels. Their stacking and relationship to circulation means they could operate collectively to host a single exhibition, or independently and discretely. All circulation space is imbued with the possibility of programming that forms a relationship to the internal galleries.

This is especially evident in the arrival experience of the upper ground. Ascending from Southbank Boulevard or meandering through the landscaped public realm of the transformed Melbourne Arts Precinct, a visitor’s immediate encounter is with art that can be seen in the transparent Arrival Hall, that blurs the feeling of being inside or out, and allows for both architectural scale immersive works and intimate connections. The space is at once contained, but visible from all around, positioning art and design as intrinsic to the civic life of the city. Its physical openness invites collaboration across the precinct, while its unique dimensions afford artists, designers, and curators an unprecedented freedom to realise their creative vision, spanning the spectrum from activation to contemplation. It provides a flexible platform for site specific performance or time based works that invite public participation and respond to the multi sensory quality of changing light, weather, and seasons.

The building is imagined with an inner core and layered collection of interconnected spaces outside, reflected in its structural logic. The structural simplicity is designed around the plant floor acting as a large portal frame, while at the same time efficiently distributing services above and below the main gallery floor and to performative terraces. This logic allows for largely column free spaces. It is imagined that each gallery floor could operate as one large space or be easily divided through a ribbed ceiling structure with cross ribs, to enable internal walls to structurally meet the ceiling. The ceiling itself can accept any surface.

A city comprises multiple time-spaces, processes, and publics, suggesting the need for a civic architecture that is multi-layered and relational. Each space is considered in its own right like you might construct a city. There are no rooms at the end of a hallway in a space you cannot orient yourself in.

The constructed ground of the upper podium is enveloped by the vegetation from the lower level continuing up the terraced stairs and gently guiding the visitor to the main entry signalled also by a 12 metre high ‘lifting’ of the veil and bringing you on axis with the Arrival Hall Gallery. It operates as a generous and welcoming threshold that invites the city to flow in. With the controlled galleries elevated and stacked above, a finer urban grain emerges internally through a diverse program distributed around and across multiple smaller volumes, interstitial spaces, and circulation paths.

This design decision is central to our intent to create less a building than a series of spatial conditions that are deeply connected to their place, and cohere as an immersive, holistic experience to move through, be in, and curate. Within the Arrival Gallery, programs overlap around the main gallery space which is contained spatially by two large volumes, buildings in their own right. These programs are arranged in relationship to each other and can operate as a suite out of hours and bring night-time activation to the precinct. Hospitality and retail are conceived as vibrant social spaces, which draw visitors in from the edges of the public realm.

Throughout the building, visitors move through a series of human scale experiences defined by levels of enclosure or openness, layered upon the macro experience of city and Country. We imagine the connective circulation volume along the eastern edge as a highly activated social space that could be programmed and curated while at the same time generous and relaxing. It allows a visitor to move in a free and intuitive way: slowly via a stair, quickly via elevators, or at a medium pace on escalators. The circulation is an orienting device to Country and could capture sight lines to significant Kulin sites as well as a phenomenological relationship of being ‘in’ space and in contact with light, air, weather, sounds, and smell. This transparent volume is the foundation for legible wayfinding and curated storytelling connected to the elevated views which makes certain aspects of Country available for articulation in the final design (often the most legible way to know Country and cultural landscape in an urban context).

B+W+ (Baracco+Wright)

Architectural elements #2,

“Tree Wall”, 2022

Trees, polypropylene planter bags

Photographs Hamish McIntosh

Digital print, 30 x 42 cm, 2022

"Tree Wall" is part of Baracco+Wright’s ongoing research into architectural elements that explore buildings and living things. Through this artificial construction of trees arranged into a thick wall formation the usually well-defined boundary of the wall is reimagined as a dynamic threshold redefining space constantly, with depth and spatial connection. Notions of inside or outside are suspended.

"Tree Wall" is one of a larger series of photographs of this installation by Hamish McIntosh and is exhibited in: Communal Atmosphere or The Space The Air (Falls) behind you as you move, curated by @rozalinddrummond, 4 February – 26 February 2022 @caves.melbourne #cavesgallery

ISSUE 56 — AUTUMN 2021

This issue of Antennae, titled ‘Spaces and Species’, aims to, in the words of co-editors Linda Tegg, Mauro Baracco, and Louise Wright, “ask architecture to reframe what it does best – to make careful relationships between things – this time with other species. The observation this requires – reflected in this issue – is aligned to practices of listening over processes of objectification as a precursor to acting with. We seek more diplomatic ways to conduct ourselves in the shared environment to find the gestures and patterns of living that enable us to follow those we live amongst”.

Architecture has for thousands of years mediated our relationship with the nonhuman and the land. Delimiting, separating, excluding, and isolating—at times architectural structures have implicitly reinforced the nature/culture dichotomy that has not only defined our daily activities but that has shaped our anthropocentric conception. This issue of Antennae features the contributions of artists, architects, and scholars whose practices help us to re-envision our relationship with the spaces and species that make up the interconnected world we live in.

DR. GIOVANNI ALOI

EDITOR IN CHIEF

download a copy

https://www.antennae.org.uk/

Unknow, 2021

B+W+

for The Climate Imaginary

Melbourne Design Week, 2021

curated by Leire Asensio-Villoria and David Mah,

Melbourne School of Design

Invisible ground conditions are revealed in the ecosystems they support. Pre-Anthropocene geology, including groundwater and composition, have cursory effects on how we think about the built environment other than as sites for farming or resource extraction. These maps of the geological and ecological landscapes under what is called Melbourne, encourage time-spent unknowing the way we may conventionally see and know and invites this knowing into processes of making the built environment.

During Melbourne Design Week, these maps will be bill posted throughout the city.

These maps are the initial step in a research project through B+W+ that explores alternatives to land-use zoning approach to planning.

Graphic Design Arabella Kilmartin

Thank you to D. Higgins and Hugo

Western Plains Grassland grasses, single gene selectively bred plants, horticultural propagation boxes

Convergent - coming together

Evolving at the intersection of the built and natural world are converging ecosystems forming urban landscapes.

Convergent brings together indigenous vegetation of the Plains Grassland plant community that once grew here, alongside selectively bred plants of the Ozbreed catalogue. It reflects the nature and nature of Australian urbanization.

The indigenous plants here come from the native grass farm Floravic on the Western Plains of Melbourne, many of whose seed has been sourced from places that are now roads or houses.

The indigenous grasses are enroute to be planted in a former grassland in an urban area of Melbourne. The Ozbreed plants will join other plants from their catalogue in an urban garden in Melbourne. The propagation boxes will be donated to an indigenous nursery for plant propagation.

Commissioned by Sneakerboy for Salomon

Installed at Sneakerboy, Melbourne, 2020

Photographs Ben Hosking

Species

Single gene

Lomandra confertifolia Echnida Grass, Grandview Monbulk

Lomandra confertifolia Frosty Top, Austraflora

Lomandra longifolia Spiny-head mat rush, Immij pty ltd

Lomandra longifolia Tanika, Ozbreed

Lomandra hystrix Creek mat rush, Norwood

Carex comans Frosted curls, Norwood

Dianella brevipedunculata Native flax lily, Norwood

Pyrus calleryana Ornamental pear, Immij pty ltd

Eucalyptus melliodora Yellow Box, Norwood

Pennisetum alopecuroides Swamp fountain grass, Ozbreed

Poa labillardieri Eskdale, Ozbreed

Indigenous, from the field

Eucalyptus viminalis Manna gum

Poa labillardieri Common tussock grass

Themeda trianda Kangaroo grass

Rytidiosperma spp Wallaby grass

Austrostipa semibarbata Fibrous speargrass

Austrostipa elegantissima Feather spear grass

Nina Stool + Greta Table + Anna Marble Table

Furniture, 2020

Fabrication Ky Starcevich @themakeryclub

A series of stools and tables, one timber one marble, to compliment and play with the CH36 Chair by H.J. Wegner for Carl Hansen & Son

Photographs Rory Gardiner

Vico Magistretti – Travelling Archive

The lesson of conceptual simplicity

Introduction from the Archive folio, by Mauro Baracco

The idea for this exhibition and its design is simple and straightforward: to group and collect the exhibition content – photos, images, sketches, texts and other material put together by the Magistretti Foundation as an ‘archive’ of Magistretti’s practice[i] – into a large folio that visitors can peruse while at the same time inhabiting a room à la Magistretti, experiencing chairs, lights and a table designed by this Milanese architect. Following yet differently from previous shows in other parts of the world where the archive material was primarily pinned up on walls,[ii] this travelling exhibition, hosted in Melbourne as part of the Melbourne Design Week (14-24 March 2019), echoes typical practices that normally take place through the consultation of archive documentation, involving careful handling of the material included in the archive collection.

It is indeed a simple, ‘obvious’, idea – in a way reflecting the sense of immediateness and essentiality that inform the design approach of Vico Magistretti, constantly inclined to the realization of products as outcomes of clear and communicable concepts.

Magistretti has been described as an author of “exemplary projects that don’t need to raise their voices or show their muscles. They are deeply innovative essentially because they are, above all, backed up by concepts, the fruit of intuition and ideas that Magistretti himself, through his proverbial understatement, describes as elementary and obvious”.[iii]

Differently from some other Italian architects – who are obsessively drawn by the detailing – often over detailing – in their design, Magistretti’s approach is fresh and immediate, to the point that some of his works – Chimera lamp among others comes to mind – was ‘designed’ through discussions over the phone with the maker.[iv]

This is indicative of an approach that is intellectual rather than ‘architecturally heroic’, an approach that believes indeed in the strength of – and collaborative discussions about – ideas rather than in complex and convoluted design (over) performances. An approach that is at the same time confident and humble, firm and gentle, capable to stay open to and embrace the maker’s expertise for the realisation of the final product. An anti-heroic approach, capable to freshly operate in negotiating modes, relying on the maker’s know-how.

We don’t have indulgently beautiful sketches with Magistretti, but rather clever and witty ideas, in the trajectory of that Italian design tradition of conceptual simplicity which is praised by this Milanese architect: “I loathe style; I couldn’t care less about it…instead the only thing that interests me is concept design. I believe that among the characteristics of Italian design, the thing that struck me most is its conceptual simplicity”.[v]

It is through this approach that Magistretti constantly works with all his industry clients, believing that the relevance – and only possible nature – of product/furniture design is based on its capacity to be generated – to come to life – through a close relationship between the designer and the manufacturing company. The success of Magistretti and his peers – architects and designers of an Italian generation that has never been literally aligned to modernism[vi] – is heavily based on lively and fruitful discussions with brilliant manufacturers, whose visions and yet full awareness of the potentiality inherent in the envisaged design proposals (also and above all in financial and market terms) are an essential condition for high standard results.

It is also in the name of the designer/producer circularity so relevant to Magistretti that the curatorial framework of this exhibition in Melbourne has deliberately promoted a dialogue with Australian industry partners whose collaboration, in addition to that of the other institutional partners, has invaluably contributed to the installation fit-out and related collateral events, throughout and after the Melbourne Design Week.[vii]

Magistretti’s direct relationships with collaborating clients and manufacturing companies has been extended to builders and developers through a practice also consistently involved with architectural design – a field that Magistretti considers different, even opposite, and yet related to furniture/product design.[viii] In parallel to this, he was also a generous educator for younger generations, mainly at the Royal College of Design in London where he taught for twenty years – Jasper Morrison’s and Konstantin Grcic’s inclination to simplicity and essentiality are undoubtedly indebted to their Milanese teacher and mentor.

If we think of Magistretti’s propension to conceptual simplicity, to essential and geometrical forms rather than mannerist stylistic exercises, it doesn’t surprise he was a key figure within that Italian design tradition so often inclined to look at and reinterpret anonymous objects. As we know, anonymous objects are primarily the result of functional rather than stylistic reasons, although not necessarily informed or trapped by functionalist ideologies.

Moreover – we are here proposing a further reading on the attraction to anonymous objects – perhaps the fascination with non-designed things from the everyday world may come more natural to Italians, who since the remote time of the Roman Empire, have never been concerned with imperialist inclinations. In modern/post-medieval times Italy has never been a dominant nation, but rather a country of many different regions constantly invaded and dominated by others. This must have certainly triggered a deep sense of care, of cherishing love, for the many regional, provincial, local cultures – and associated things – in need of shelter, even preservation, under the ‘universalist’ agendas of the various colonizers (being these French, Austrian, Spanish, Swedish or others). This must have promoted an idiosyncratic way to look with careful attention at everyday objects ingrained in local cultures and contexts.

Magistretti’s lesson to current practices – the enduring validity of his work – is based on an approach to which looking at the contribution from anonymous objects and designing through open collaboration are two attitudes indicative of the deep trust placed by this architect on the power of the idea. Furthermore, his swift and witty ideas tend to produce essential objects, capable of ‘lightly’ and agilely being part of our lives, opposite of the many, too many and unnecessary, redundant things that clutter the world.

Magistretti’s relevant currency is also and above all reflected in his continuous call for simplicity as a fundamental quality for our world.[ix]  As a precursor, well ahead of the many pleas that today invite to work towards the creation of sustainable environments, his approach is not surprisingly in empathy with practices currently inclined to urban and social ecologies informed by levels of ‘lightness’. Among others, the call, by contemporary philosopher Leonardo Caffo, for a world that needs to be increasingly released from our weight well echoes Magistretti’s fascination for simplicity and lightness:

“If we really want to embrace sustainability as a concrete tenet of daily life and design, we must force ourselves to abandon rhetoric and symbolism and rapidly put into place effective solutions…(shifting) architecture away from the symbolic dimension (which we perhaps could afford to embrace back in the 1960s when there was Superstudio and radical architecture) and head(ing) toward the concrete dimension of effective change in our relation with the nonhuman environment, with ecosystems…I am imagining the design of lifting the weight of humans on the world, a design that is sustainable because it decreases the load toward we need to carry, instead of strengthening the structure that must carry this weight”.[x]

[i] The Magistretti Foundation is located in the office space in Via Conservatorio in Milan where Magistretti has practised through all his life. The Foundation is further and more extensively discussed in the text by Rosanna Pavoni in this folio.

[ii] Previous shows of this exhibition took place at the following locations: Italian Institute of Culture, Paris, France, 2014; Italian Institute of Culture, Los Angeles, USA, 2014; Italian Institute of Culture, San Francisco, USA, 2014; Idesign, Palermo, Italy, 2015.

[iii] Beppe Finessi, Vico Magistretti, Edizioni Corraini, Mantova, 2003.

[iv] “…I designed a lamp over the telephone…it’s called Chimera, and I explained it to the maker by telephone. I told him, ‘Look, make three circles, one, two and three, using this material, which is very easy to bend. Stand it up vertically and cut it at the top by 45 degrees. And then bring it here for me to see’. The model arrived ten days later”. Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Interview with Vico Magistretti’, Domus, no. 866, January 2004.

[v] Ibidem.

[vi] Achille Castiglioni, Marco Zanuso, Gio Ponti, Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Enzo Mari and Ettore Sottsass just to name a few among others.

[vii] This exhibition, a partnership between the Italian Institute of Culture in Melbourne, the School of Architecture and Urban Design of RMIT University and the Magistretti Foundation in Milan, with the collaboration of industry partners – Euroluce Australia, Artemide Australia, Boffi Studio – and the support of RMIT Design Archives, RMIT Design Hub Gallery, and Lockrey Shewan Collection, is part of Melbourne Design Week 2019, an initiative by Creative Victoria in partnership with NGV. From 14th to 24th March it is shown at RMIT Design Archives, Design Hub, RMIT University; following this, from 28th March to 18th April, it is shown at the Italian Institute of Culture, Domain Road, South Yarra, Melbourne.

[viii] In Magistretti words: “I have always been concerned with architecture, and I still am, though at the moment most of my time is devoted to industrial design…Architecture and (industrial) design are two very different things. Like mountains and the sea. Two opposite but important aspects of the same panorama”. Hans Ulrich Obrist, op. cit.

[ix] From an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist: “HUB: What does a design object need to make it last? VM: Most of all, the most complicated thing in the world: simplicity”. Ibidem.

[x] Leonardo Caffo, ‘Ecology: the end of rhetoric + an invitation to reality’, Domus/EcoWorld – Design for a healthy planet, supplement to Domus, no. 1027, September 2018.

Photographs Ben Hosking

Australian Pavilion, Venice

Opening Speech 24th May 2018

Creative Directors Mauro Baracco, Louise Wright and Linda Tegg

(Louise)

Architecture occupies land yet we rarely confront this simple fact.

We invite you to look anew at a plant community that has been overlooked as a site only for human use, to the extent that there is only 1% now left. We are inviting you to reflect on the ground, what it supports, what is displaced. It is presented to you here in our premier cultural institution. They will live on through seed we have already started to collect and through relationships we are building with research institutes in Europe.

It took us 8 months to grow them with a horticultural school in Sanremo Italy from seed that was difficult to get, some collected from a site that is now a road.

It is difficult to keep plants alive inside buildings that usually deny life, and the work Skylight will replicate the sun to keep them alive.

We will continue to weigh up the benefit and issues of displacing this plant community here in our aim to present it as something of value.

We also invite you to stay a while and watch Ground, a series of videos that present projects that participate in the environmental, cultural, social and economic repair of the places they are part of. Filmed from two points of view they displace the object in favour of the context.

Repair, we hope, is a provocation toward and architecture not yet fully imagined.

Thank you to the Australian Institute of Architects, the sponsors, Linda, Mauro and our creative team, and the architects whose careful approaches to repair provide us with optimism.

(Linda)

Now that many of us are here in Venice I thought I would take a moment to reflect on who has arrived. In many ways we’re extremely fortunate to be joined by around 65 species of Victorian Western Plains Grassland Plants. We chose this plant community as it once stretched across the place we now know as Melbourne. And now, it’s almost all but lost.

The plants you will see have been grown from seed sourced from indigenous nurseries, community groups, the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne and personal collections. Louise carried the seed of over 100 species in her suitcase to Italy, not all of them germinated for many of these species there is not much seed available, they’re very difficult to propagate, the connections are tenuous.

Many plants have perished in the process of being moved and transplanted. And we’re now flat out caring for the grassland in this new environment. They need constant attention, and I have to say that I am grateful to the first of our volunteer attendants Kendra and Arya, who are now learning to care for these plants in such an unlikely environment. And by extension providing for the well being of others including reptiles, insects and humans.

I would like to thank all the exhibiting architects for showing us through your work how architecture can work with and for a multitude of publics. And of course a special thanks to my collaborators Louise Wright, Mauro Baracco and David Fox for their courage and dedication in this process and always choosing the most challenging and interesting path.

(Mauro)

Freespace is about generosity, thoughtfulness, a desire to engage. We responded to the call to “stimulate discussion on core architectural values” and to consider the “earth as client.”

To engage with natural ecosystems requires generosity. The generosity of a decision to make space for open space.

The generosity of the architectural space inside this pavilion transformed into a grassland has already made space for frogs, lizards, and insects.

The Australian projects shown in the video series Ground are generous to the places where they are, from taking care and rehabilitation of the land to the support of repair of social, cultural and even economic disrepair.

Our aim and provocation is that through a primary approach of the repair of the natural environment, a participation in the human physical and mental health, social, economic and cultural health repair can occur through the care required to do so and through the connection and presence of nature in our everyday lives.

(Louise)

In Australia we will often work on or next to remnant vegetation and natural systems and we will always work on top of the land of the First Nations Peoples.

CATALOGUE available by contacting Australian Institute of Architects for Australian distributors and through Actar http://actar.com/repair/

see

https://www.domusweb.it/en/speciali/biennale/2018/grasslands-repair-brings-a-whole-ecosystem-into-the-australian-pavilion.html

All photographs by Rory Gardiner 

Kia Ora, 2017

Renovation, Kia Ora Apartment, Melbourne

original building, c 1936, Lewis Levy

In this small apartment, a lot of attention is paid to the domestic details of handles, light switches, shelves, texture and materiality, light and lighting and places to sit.

The feel of the interior renovation is of a new layer against the original features and dark timberwork. The new layer has the feel of Art Deco, but is also contemporary, revealing the original interior. New joinery is a muted green, new tables and benches white Carrara marble. New light fittings are white glass spheres and the wall finish is a light grey. The joinery curves where it meets the existing, playing with spatial depth and also separating itself from the existing.

The entry contains a new cantilevered shelf with a drawer under, and coat hooks to the wall beside. A new large oval shape marble table forms a large 'kitchen bench' and a place to sit. Frameless glass panels sit in front of the existing window creating privacy and soft morning (east) light while keeping the fabric of the existing. In this small bathroom, the space has been unified using a curved tile system.

In the Living room, a marble hearth, raised off the floor, ‘floats’ across the width of the room uniting the living area. A custom designed sofa with a rear desk/shelf component is the main element in the room. The balcony spaces are connected by a narrow marble shelf along the west of the balcony for plant pots and widens to become a seat servicing a small round table.

Photographs Rory Gardiner

PARK was a short lived installation in urban Melbourne commisioned by Mazlyn Salt

The plants were rehomed at CERES.

Interview 2019

Hi Louise, welcome to ADR! Can you tell us a little bit about PARK?

PARK is a play on words. The site was a car park for 40 years. We have taken up the bitumen, releasing the soil and bringing in Indigenous plants and trees in a deconstructed open space. It was quite a large undertaking, 454-square-metre site on Little Bourke Street.

It sounds like a pop-up garden. Is it?

The temporary nature of the site is similar to a pop-up garden. It will only be around until the end of summer or a couple of years at best. On this site we aren't allowed to plant in the ground in Melbourne without a permit, so all the trees are in recycled plastic bags, which I really like because it plays on the idea of what's here/not here/should be here in the sense that the plant community is suspended awaiting permission. Perhaps the bags will disintegrate and the trees will just grow there anyway. This addresses our original brief, which was to release the site from its car park condition and consider its natural heritage .

What do you mean when you say you returned the site to how it used to be?

PARK is a simple, modest installation of what would have grown in pre-colonial Melbourne - a grassy woodland with species like red gums, acacia and sheoaks, as well as different types of native grasses and shrubs. The site is a lot more open than it might have historically been, but we liked the idea of people being able to see through the trees to the urban fabric. The real idea is the juxtaposition of the plant installation and the urban condition.

How did you know what originally grew on the PARK site?

The finished project is not an exact copy of the species that grew in Melbourne. That would be almost impossible. The goal was simply to acknowledge the natural heritage of the site, the elements that get displaced by cities, so we looked at the entire central Melbourne area. We reached out to the academic Gary Presland, but even he wasn't sure what was right in that spot. So we turned to the Ecological Vegetation Class, and chose a sample of what you might have found in the area. Although to be fair, Australian vegetation can change quite a lot and it's a creative interpretation. We aren't trying to go backwards, but rather to care for something.

Did you find it harrowing to be undertaking such an unconventional project in the heart of Melbourne?

It was a big responsibility, but we would never apologise for planting trees. Very early on, we invited Amy Hahs, an urban ecologist, to help us understand the role vacant sites can play in the urban ecology of a city. She described this site as an island. It doesn't link to anything else, but the vegetation provides a little haven for the insect and bird species in the city who can use it as an island to pass through the urban environment.

Australian Design Review 2019

Photographs Rory Gardiner

Inspired by the simple and clear concept of Hugh Strange, Max Creasy & Elizabeth Hatz – Footnotes, backgrounds, sheds

This small book is the first in a planned series that build the ideas around a research or built project of our office and collaborators.

In this book, the concepts of primary geometry, simplicity, and play are explored in the work of Vico Magistretti. His lessons are revisited and revealed in the curation and design of the exhibition Vico Magistretti – Archivio in Viaggio/Travelling Archive by Baracco+Wright Architects, and his legacy of simplicity and nimbleness are considered for current issues facing designers.

Graphic design Arabella Kilmartin

https://www.vicomagistrettimelbourne.com/

#magistretti_melbourne

http://actar.com/product/geometry-simplicity-play/

Exhibition Installation, 2017

RMIT Design Hub Gallery

This exhibition fitout was designed to mediate and support the audio and video exhibition Super Field by Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish, at the Design Hub gallery in November 2017 – January 2018, curated by Fleur Watson and Kate Rhodes.

Super Field  exhibited audio and video made at a diverse range of remote locations over four distinct programs many of which were intended to capture an ‘otherwordly’ sense of space and time.

 The spatial concept of the exhibition is to create an unexpected space that is singular in its gesture but allows for multiple experiences. The audio was installed in the large space and the video in the smaller space.

 In the audio exhibition, we hung shark’s tooth scrim (white) which uses the high ceiling of the large space and allows for the play of ‘there’…’not there’… through the way the fabric can be manipulated with lighting to be transparent or opaque.

Above the scrim the speakers were hung at varying heights and clusters to create a field of sound and, when lit from within, a visual spatial field of speakers.

A raised floor mound, embedded with vibrating speakers, created the possibility to have different sources of sound and intimately engage with the overhead scrim. The gently sloping but large mound on the floor, constructed to appear as part of the floor bulging up, could be traversed and brings the listener under the scrim to a compressed height of 1.4m, encouraging one to sit or lie down. The spatial compression, ‘deformed’ shapes, and large scale of the scrim which can be light or heavy depending on lighting, all support the audio recordings.

The spatial concept of the smaller space, continued the theme of controlling the spatial experience, with a further emphasis on a play of unusual or unexpected forms.

We deliberately left this space quite simple to the let the video dominate on a field of screens and created a large bulge in the plasterboard wall on approach to the field. This created a spatial tension and sense of ‘otherness’ in its unexpected presence.

The exhibition design aimed to mediate a strong presence while allowing for the audio and video work to come ‘forward’.

 Photographs 1,2,4,6 Layla Cluer and 3, 5 Tobias Titz

Domain Park Flats

1960-62, Robin Boyd

Refurbishment,  2017

This building is one of the first high rise residential towers in Melbourne. It is an exemplary residential tower and a major work by Melbourne architect Robin Boyd.

This apartment is particulalry representative of Boyd’s vision, looking directly into a tree canopy and enjoying views in both the north and south direction.

The renovation of the apartment is entirely internal, maintaining the important window and balcony arrangement. The new internal layout respects the former plan and arrangement of rooms and relationships to windows.  

Our interpretation in the new plan aimed to heighten the two way views by opening the kitchen and living room to look both ways and by using glazed partitions to indicate the light from the southern view deep into the plan. We also aimed to strengthen the visual connection to the parkland to the north through the deep green rubber floor colour choice. The rooms relate to the original window layout in the same positions and the ceiling plane has been freed of various bulkheads to reinstate the strong overhead plane. Items retain a sense of the original layout.

 The design takes cues in its feel from the building, especially the clean lines, use of glass and obscure glass (in the foyer) and views to the Botanic gardens and adjacent large tree overlooked by the balcony.

Elements and materials empathetic to a ‘Boyd’ aesthetic are used: dark green floor, diffuse light, mosaic tiles, and an attention to domestic details.

The services are kept along the back wall arranged behind a frosted glass wall, admitting daylight into the hall during the day and softly lit from within at night. The kitchen sits slightly back within this wall with a deep bench and deep window sill for plants. The island bench is reimagined as a large high table (at kitchen bench height), servicing the kitchen but also being a generous (1.5m diameter) space where to informally sit. It straddles kitchen and living room in feel, being more like a piece of furniture than a kitchen.

 Photographs Rory Gardiner

Robin Boyd: Spatial Continuity

PUBLISHED 2017

Routledge UK

https://www.amazon.com/Robin-Boyd-Continuity-Mauro-Baracco/dp/1472478436

Australian Architect Robin Boyd (1919-1971) advocated tirelessly for the voice of Australian Architects so that there could be an Architecture that might speak to Australian conditions and sensibilities.

His legacy continues in the work of contemporary Australian architects yet also prompts a way forward for architecture particularly in relationship to the landscapes they inhabit through a quality of continuous space found in his work where the buildings are spatially reliant and sympathetic to the places they occupy.

A selection of 22 projects are documented comprehensively in this book for the first time. This slice through Boyd’s body of work reveals a gifted, complex and contemporary thinker.

Photograph

Aaron Pocock

Garden House, Westernport, Coastal Victoria, 2014

This holiday house is conceived as just a little more than a tent: a deck and raised platform are covered by a transparent 'shed', the interior perimeter 'veranda' is garden space. The soil and natural ground line are maintained and carried through. A low lying site with terrestrial orchids and lillies, flood waters seasonally move through the site unimpeded. Similarly the indigenous vegetation has begun to grow inside.

 The owners like the idea that, like a tent, once unbolted, it would be as if it were never there.

https://architectureau.com/articles/garden-house-baracco-and-wright-architects/

Photographs Rory Gardiner

Rose House 2, Melbourne, 2016

A new house for the Rose family combining two residences in one volume: a 2 bedroom terrace type house for the adult children and a 3 bedroom + study house for the parents.

In this house the Architects negotiate the complex site while hoping to create an enduring building with civic presence, extending the urban form of the historic Alfred crescent and also contribute to the typology of the wedge shaped buildings on similar sites throughout the inner suburbs of Melbourne. This triangular shaped site also allowed the architects to carry on their exploration of simple geometries. The building is triangular in shape, filling the site, with a curved ‘point’ to the narrow south elevation. It takes cues from the many triangular shaped buildings found throughout the area with a simple geometrical form and a shallow front setback and reinterprets the brick historical buildings of its setting with some interpretation of rounded Art Deco geometry.

The program consists of a smaller house designed using the terrace typology – at just over 5 metres wide and 30 metres long – it continues the street pattern of the side street through its entry, setback and house type. The larger house faces the corner and it’s entry is literally the corner of the site. Although taking cues from the side street, the two houses are overall treated as one form. The west facade is ‘solid’, punctuated sharply through few windows, presenting a 'hard' confident mass to the street. This condition disintegrates as the building moves around to its more intimate relationship with the reserve and busy street level (bike and pedestrian path) on the 'softer' east façade, where the materiality is a play of negative space, transparent mesh, pergola frames, reflection of trees in large windows and planting.

The form was also derived simultaneously with the aim to create interior spaces that were private but also highly connected to the site. The smaller house plan is open on the first floor – connecting the user to both the east and west views at once. In the larger house, the hit and miss brick work of the curved point creates a screened study, the undercroft space to the east creates a flexible outdoor yet sheltered space that mediates the ground floor living space to the reserve. The use of a mesh curtain to enclose this space, which can be opened along its entire length, offers a generous sharing of spatial quality with the adjoining public space rather than a hard wall or garage door. This space is used recreationally but can also accommodate carparking. The first floor continuous band of windows creates a wide and continuous relationship with the park across the road around to the reserve. The use of a planning technique of spatial displacement rather than division (using the bathroom, or an internal core, to define space rather than division through partition walls and hallways), one is in touch with the perimeter as they move around. This technique has been explored in many of Baracco + Wright Architects’ projects as a key planning strategy. In this design, there is no ‘back’ or rear.

A roof deck sits discreetly within the roof line, taking advantage of an adjacent tree and adding to the varied type of outdoor spaces on offer.

The garden has now grown up continuing the gardens of the side street with a layer of purple flowering plants that nod to the Jacaranda Trees of Edinburgh Gardens, a collaboration with the landscape architect Amanda Oliver.

Australian Institute of Architects Winner of the Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award for Best Residential House , 2017

https://architectureau.com/articles/rose-house-2/

Photos Rory Gardiner

Fitzroy Community School Creative Space

New building, re-fit existing building, 2011

Thornbury, Melbourne, Australia

in collaboration with Richard Stampton Architects

This building, for around 35 children, is a new creative space for the Fitzroy Community School. It is designed to have informal domestic style spaces for learning and teaching: kitchen, library, veranda, garden. It has a compact footprint positioned to create a big backyard space as found throughout the residential area of Thornbury. The backyard creates a space between the new building and an old converted workshop at the rear of the site.

A simple domestic pitch roof shape is abstracted in form in a two storey volume with a big roof enclosed inside a 'greenhouse' type veranda that also provides the main circulation space, a buffer from the busy road and a layer of informal space.

The main space of the school is the combined kitchen and library room. Its warm timber linings are juxtaposed to the light and open veranda and backyard.

https://architectureau.com/articles/fitzroy-community-school-creative-space/

Photographs Derek Swalwell

Commendation, Public Building, 2012 RAIA Victoria

Farm pavilion

2006, 2016, Conversion

Barrabool, Victoria, Australia

A series of sheds in this collection of prosaic buildings are in the process of being converted from farm activity to habitation. They accommodate simple rooms and veranda spaces for weekend accommodation. The approach resists the addition of another building and embraces the dynamic siting amongst the sheds. Small inflections in plan and subtle changes of material were used – clear corrugated rather than galvanised corrugated cladding and so on.

2006 - conversion of former garage of the original house that burnt in the 1960's

2016 - conversion of former stables

2016 - ongoing - landscape plan connecting remnant patches of vegetation from the Barwon river, along a water course and through this collection of buildings

Photographs Mauro Baracco and Jonathan Ware

Simpson St addition

2006, Addition

Northcote, Melbourne Australia

The narrow site and close proximity of neighbouring dwellings, resulted in the plan being stretched over the site playing with the only available long dimension. The section of the house explores the form of the rear 'lean-to' of the shotgun vernacular. The result is that the living space faces a courtyard for its entire length rather than one end of the room only. The courtyard is densely vegetated and grounds the lightness of the tent like room.

On the occasion of moving from our long time house + office…

From an upcoming publication…

“…We sit and talk and gaze out the enormous window-wall onto the carefully tended native garden. It’s deliberately a wall – not a series of sliding doors that would make a completely open aperture, but a fixed window with a human-sized door so that the room we are in is firmly a room. The outside is one thing and the inside is another. But the reflections of the garden and the interior features against the glass coalesce to form one strange intersected image or middle-place. The deeply sited angle and shape of this enormous piece of frameless glass dissects the back half of the block and draws light right into the front of the house. There’s also a ‘backdoor’ in the transparent wall for doing backdoor things: sitting on the step with a cup of tea or – as Mauro will do unconscious of me when he arrives two hours later – to clap away crumbs from your hands out of the kitchen and into the garden like you would over a boat, or outside the flap of a tent. The house has been designed with a sense of permanent impermanence…”

Kate Rhodes August – December 2019

 Photographs Rory Gardiner, 2019

Original residence 1974 Roy Colomb

2000, Multipurpose room

Kew, Melbourne Australia

This room is a converted garage. It was built to match the robust and simple 1970’s house by Roy Colomb and Associates. The distribution and design of the house was very good and the reuse of an existing building allowed for it to remain intact. A new garage was planned for the future at the front of the site, so that the garden could be reclaimed from the driveway.

The room retains its original dimensions and avoids a domestic subdivision through using layered curtains that divide sleeping spaces and create a rear ‘wall’ to a living space.

Photographs

Aaron Pocock

Original residence 1974 Roy Colomb

Deck+Garage +Landscape

Original residence 1974 Roy Colomb

Garage and landscape

Kew, Melbourne Australia

This project followed on from the 2000 conversion of the rear garage into a multipurpose room.

This house is one of a pair sited on a rise, where the slope is registered by the lower house sitting above the ground, and the higher “in” the ground. The design attempts to solve several issues -  a new garage in order to reclaim the site from a long driveway to a rear garage, create privacy to the front fully glazed rooms, and a private deck that takes advantage of a city view. The project also joined what were two separate front gardens, complimenting the twin houses, and creating a scale that also belongs to the street. The formal response exaggerates the geography of the rise, bringing the garden up to room level, while burying the garage below the room level. The roof of the garage becomes a private deck and screen to the front rooms.

The sharpness of the geometry of the built landscape and garage structure heightens that of the simple rectangular houses, cutting across the facade. The abstract shape of the garden is very building-like. Its simplicity of form holds together a variegated group of planting.

Interests explored here are the relationships to be found in the specific, the ‘quietness’ of simple geometries, and the ‘thinking’ through of design across disciplinary boundaries so that even small interventions form part of a wider fabric.

This last point and the act of joining up vegetated space across property boundaries and with the street are evident of the early interest of Baracco+Wright in the role of architectural design thinking to not only dismantle traditional architecture, landscape and urban design boundaries, but also in their role in the health of an urban ecology.

Photographs

Aaron Pocock

Planting design: Izabella Meraviglia - Crivelli of Essence Gardens

Winner, 'Small' category, 2012 RAIA Victoria

Former Lawrence Residence

Circa 1971, Lawrence “House and Flats” by Robin Boyd

2005, Refurbishment and landscape

Kew, Melbourne Australia

The restoration and intervention of new elements into this Brutalist late work of Robin Boyd involved the removal of subsequent layers to restore the Brutalist qualities of exposed materials. New built in and loose furniture, lighting and small changes were considered for their position in a legacy of design approach rather than as historic reproductions.

The landscape design centres around a long deck that connects an open and undercroft space, exploiting the buildings forms, creating a horizontal and rectangular element true to the language of the building while releasing the ground plane to slope underneath as a strong ground plane of the building.

Photographs

Aaron Pocock

Court Residence and Labassa Conservatory

Conservatory circa 1880

Caulfield, Melbourne Australia

2006 Masterplan, Baracco+Wright Architects

2006, New bedroom volume, Baracco+Wright Architects

2007, Garden Design, Izabella Meraviglia-Crivelli

2010, Conservatory restoration, Studio and Guest Studio,

Heritage Alliance

2020 Interior Joinery and new layers, Architecture Associates

The program of a typical residence was spread out into separate volumes over a long narrow site that had been created by years of surrounding subdivision of the once large Labassa estate in a masterplan by Baracco+Wright Architects. The originally glorious conservatory has been  restored under the direction of Heritage Alliance and is used as a living space to complement the bedroom and bathroom ‘house’ at the rear by B+W in 2006. The new volumes create a pavilion/park setting with some connection to the street and an activation of the whole site. Their small size and simple generic 'house' form prioritise the conservatory and counterpoint its decorative quality. The crystalline quality of the polycarbonate cladding responds to the glazed and crisp quality of the set of buildings and bookend with solidity the transparent nature of the conservatory. An expressed stair is the only gesture, allowing the conservatory to be viewed.

Photographs

Louise Wright

Simpson St apartments

2006, addition

Northcote, Melbourne, Australia

Three apartments straddle two shopfront buildings at the first floor. They are wedge shaped in section and elevation, with the highest part towards the street. Simple pergolas continue and complete the form through the front and rear. The forms are geometric and clad in one material, sitting foreign yet quietly above the scattered and jumbled shopfronts.

Photographs

Aaron Pocock

Rose Residence

2009, New residence

Merricks Beach, Victoria, Australia

The accommodation is spread over the rectangular site displacing a central outdoor space. Importance is placed on being at ground level in an environment that is largely canopied and understorey vegetation. The buildings in this area are low and hidden. The plan of the main building employs the wide perimeter veranda typology, interiorising it for a cooler climate and using it as the main circulation. The casual and flexible nature of such spaces was considered suitable for a holiday house.

The familiar simple form and shallow pitched roofs transcend the vernacular through a consistent material application on wall and roof: light grey metal cladding that assumes the character of the ‘fibro' houses found in the area with a kind of non-expressive numbness. Delicacy is introduced into the robust forms through silver stained timber interiors against the exterior foliage seen through the perimeter windows.

Photographs Rory Gardiner

Beach image Louise Wright

Fitzroy Community School

2008 Multi-purpose room

Fitzroy North, Melbourne, Australia

A large room added to the third floor of an existing terrace house to provide a multi-purpose space to a school with otherwise only small domestic spaces. Without a garden at the school, a narrow cantilevered balcony space provides a veranda type garden aspect to the simple room and a hanging garden to the spaces below. The interior is a single material where the 'fourth' garden wall provides the richness to the space. The exterior pitched roof form is enclosed by a stainless steel trellis and sits amongst similar shapes at the rear of the terrace buildings.

Photographs

Aaron Pocock

Greening Australia Community Centre

New buildings and masterplan, 2013

Canberra, Australia

This unbuilt project connects the Greening Australia Aranda site to its context and community. The key propagation activity guides the building choice and materiality - polycarbonate and shadecloth - and is brought through all areas of the site including the mixed use sheds and into an extended planting around and beyond the building. The ‘sheds’ serve to collect a vast array of activities - meeting rooms, offices, cafe, toilets and seed storage.

...more soon

This small house, 6x7m takes its prosaic ‘house’ form and lightweight materiality from the typology of stables and shed buildings usually located to the rear of laneways in the inner areas of north and west Melbourne, Australia.

Continuing our interest in the planimetric and spatial quality of verandas, the house is organised around one quadrant – the ‘stair room’ as a kind of atrium – a significant amount of space to give over in a small footprint. The room organises the plan and creates a moment of spatial looseness and release. Constructed in timber and  lightweight translucent cladding the corner admits light but also signifies the volume’s presence at night in the lane.

A large sliding front door opens onto the lane and extends the stair room space, connecting also through to the kitchen and living space through an operable sliding window. The kitchen opens to connect to a terrace and small garden – extending the interior in two directions.

The first floor homes one enclosed room, and one larger space that joins onto the ‘stair room’, separated by a curtain – continuing the porous divisions of spaces throughout the house.

The house employs concepts central to our design such as a focus on the quality of the circulation, veranda type spaces, spatial release and lightweight materiality. 

Photographs Rory Gardiner

Crib Point

Design Framework for Mornington Peninsula Shire Council, 2009 -11

Crib Point, Melbourne, Australia

in collaboration with NMBW Architecture Studio

In this project we undertook an urban design analysis of the town of Crib Point, which is a small settlement located adjacent to Westernport on the south eastern part of the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.

This analysis aimed to influence and inform strategies for the future development of the town including privately owned land, public areas and the physical environment more generally. It responded to current issues and also projected a vision for the township within its regional context.

This work formed the basis for a set of Design Guidelines, a series of design proposals and contributed to the ongoing development of a Land Use Structure Plan for the area including revised Zoning and Overlays.

The settlement sits adjacent Westernport – an internationally recognised Biosphere site, and within and interspersed by significant remnant bushland. This required a rethinking of what urban design is in this area. Much of the analysis and recommendations centred around landscape design, vegetation protection and regeneration and natural environmental systems.

A sample of the research can be found here.

Photograph

Lucinda McLean

McCrae Village

Design Statement for Mornington Peninsula Shire Council, 2011

McCrae, Melbourne, Australia

in collaboration with NMBW Architecture Studio

This research aimed to identify the character of McCrae and McCrae Village Centre, a small coastal settlement along the western coast of the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria to inform a Development Overlay planning control.

The valued character of a place is made up of many aspects. These might include more identifiable aspects such as the natural geography, vegetation type and building type and pattern, but may also include less obvious qualities such as informal pathways, undefined edges and spaces concealed by vegetation. They are often intertwined and a consequence of each other. They may be large dominant elements or small and intricate, built or natural systems. The character may differ over time or seasons. Together they make up the feel of a place.

This work aimed to define and communicate these aspects and find the critical way that they relate to each other, what will weaken them, and how to strengthen them.

A sample of this report can be seen here.

Photograph

Lucinda McLean

 Stony Point Caravan Park

Landscape Design, 2011

Stony Point, Melbourne, Australia

in collaboration with NMBW Architecture Studio

Stony Point Caravan Park faces the beautiful Westernport and is surrounded by native vegetation. The requirement to address new regulations embraced the opportunity to better connect a new landscape design to its special setting and increase the amenity and presentation of the park. Indigenous plant species are used to create aspects, privacy, views, shade and shared spaces as well as control and capture stormwater to prevent sediment damage to the sensitive mangrove tidal mudflats.

The masterplan and view can be seen here.

Photograph

Lucinda McLean