Caring Culture

Caring Culture explores how spaces for CULTURE can fuse as places for CARE, and vice versa. This semester students have been experimenting with this provocation across a large and complex inner-city urban site in Fitzroy, the current home of a national not-for-profit organisation delivering numerous care programs to the community, amongst other things. The developed site has acted as a testing ground for exploratory thinking where they have introduced a variety of cultural programs to the established care landscape. In an attempt to avoid singular design outcomes that assert singular agendas, rather, the studio has been structured as a dialogue between many with the prescribed design tasks being delivered in a fragmentary manner. The architectural projects are interventions into the existing fabric that target three distinct experiences: Arrival, Engagement and Retreat. Each student project exists in the site field, and together, they have co-authored a diverse contextual response that promotes an exchange. Ideas have been hatched through the use of storey-telling, enabling the students to invent clients, with narratives. Each project is a culmination of their invented characters' needs and desires, and their experiential descriptions of a post-occupancy dialogue. Culminating in large scale (1:20) physical models, the hope is to translate these experiential commentaries into a collection of legible architectural tectonics and strategies that enable a language of CARE & CULTURE to co-exist.