Curating the Void

“Modernity and manufacturing can be summed up in many disparate words: industrialisation, modernisation, exploitation, wealth and poverty, life and death, local rupture and global flow, backwardness and industrial triumph, nature as a resource to be technologised or aestheticised, all the way from the picturesque to the technologically sublime.”

- Mari Lending

Deer Park is a site with its own contested industrial history. Arguable a historically important site for Melbourne, it was the first site that produced dynamite for the gold fields in the late 1800s creating the wealth that lead to Melbourne’s formation and prosperity as a city. However, it was also a destructive landscape where some workers lost their lives.

Now, the site is wiped clean as a result of the remediation works that have taken place due to site contamination through centuries of manufacturing and is at risk of losing its history and memories that gave the site its identity.

It is a site on the precipice of change where its history could be forgotten.

As the buildings and landscape of the explosive factory no longer act as a physical repository of monuments to the site’s industrial history, the studio explores how architecture can navigate the complex terrain of the site, identity, and memory in a period of environmental, economic, and social transition.

Harrison Brooks is a practising Graduate Architect with a  focus on civic and public works. He is a tutor at Monash University (MADA) and the University of Melbourne (MSD). He completed his studies at the University of Melbourne with  a specific interest in historical studies, politics and narrative.

He was a co-editor for the 6th volume of Melbourne School of Design’s journal Inflection titled Originals. Harrison’s work has been exhibited at the Buxton Contemporary, FCAC, and Glen Eira City Council Gallery.

Duncan Crowe is an architectural practitioner currently working for a local practice with a domestic focus. Through teaching and practice Duncan has a specific interest in experiential qualities of space and how that can articulate relationships between people and place.