Double Ground

We will be releasing the ground and making ground through architecture.

Metropolitan plans have been historically formed two dimensionally around geography that supports commerce. Double Ground will imagine a reversal, where the plan is redefined on the terms of natural systems, through the targeted removal and relocation or reaccommodation of buildings that hinder their health into existing buildings/other urban areas.

Commencing with ecosystem regeneration principles and the Cultural Heritage Act, the rehabilitation of the waterway corri- dors will inadvertently drive the redefinition of the urban fabric through reuse of what is already built. Students will consider the removal of built form from within a selected corridor within metropolitan Melbourne, and its relocation within the urban fabric proper, independently consolidating and connecting natural systems and fragmented urban form in an reciprocal act of environmental and urban regeneration.

You will be exposed to

  • Relationships between buildings and living things
  • Metropolitan Melbourne urban planning and planning scheme
  • Melbourne’s natural systems
  • Hybrid typlogies

The studio will unfold in the following way

Urban plan x natural systems
Mapping, seeing, knowing, unknowing
Planning
What planning instruments are in play in natural system protection
Programs
What buildings/programs are there and where and how else could they be
Measuring
How might we measure and advocate for the value of natural systems,
Micro/Macro
The role of the micro (building, intervention, individual site) in the macro (urban plan, natural ecosystems)
Dense, hybrid, nimble built form
In the relocation/reaccomodation in existing areas, we will reimagine typologies through careful understanding of program, form and occupation

Students will work individually and in teams. Through the embedded tutor, Anna Gilby of Gilby + Brewin, students will be ex- posed to strategies for community engagement and unsolicitied architecture in practice, and will produce a 1:10 scale detail drawing.