Groundwork

This studio will be the first of a series of Design Make projects to be undertaken in the coming years in collaboration with Joseph Norster and Millie Cattlin of These Are The Projects We Do Together (The Projects) at The Quarry, a post-extractive industry site being rehabilitated on the‬ outskirts of the Victorian township of Beech Forest in the Otway Ranges on the traditional lands of the Gadubanud (see www.theprojects-quarry.com). The studio explores the theme of groundwork in relation to the layered occupations and industrial uses of the site, the architectural act of designing in, on, and over the ground and the literal constructive act of working at 1:1 scale.

The destructive act of natural resource extraction and the wastefulness of material use in the production of the built environment forms the broad context for the studio. In response, the studio has worked within tight material constraints, working with primarily reclaimed materials currently in storage at The Quarry including bricks, ‬blocks and timber salvaged from past NGV pavilion projects as well as material sourced from site including quarried stone.

This semester’s studio has figuratively laid the design groundwork for an intensive making project that will happen at the quarry in summer. The collectively designed project that has emerged from the studio, to be made in February 2025, is a pair of gathering spaces situated in the floor of the former quarry. One space is conceptualised as a ‘negative space’ whereby the ground surface will be removed to create a lens to the underlying ‘living rock’ of the site. The other space will utilise this removed ground material as fill to raise the level of a waterlogged part of the site upon which a ‘positive space’ will be situated. Here, salvaged materials will be stacked, assembled and bundled together to form a circular amphitheatre-like space for groups large and small to gather.

Studio Leader: Ross Brewin