Caring Culture

Caring Culture explores how spaces for CULTURE become spaces for CARE. There is no denying that visiting a cultural destination has a positive effect on our well-being, but how does contemporary architecture amplify, augment or even instigate these well-being effects?

The studio tested architectural interventions across the new Arts & Cultural Precinct at Jacksons Hill, Sunbury - known for its heritage listed buildings and landscapes and past use as an institutional healthcare precinct. Students designed additions and alterations to the existing site and buildings to house new arts & cultural programs ranging from theatres, studios, workshops and residencies. Projects engaged with aspects of preservation, renovation and adaptation along-side re-invention and creation.

Ideas and explorations were expanded through the use of storey-telling - and projects pivoted around invented characters’ needs and desires, as well as experiential descriptions of post-occupancy dialogue. These conversations with site imaginaries forced a dualistic approach to past and present, weaving in layers of history to sit side-by-side with new site uses.

These intimate narratives were complimented by large-scale physical models of students’ final architectural projects - synthesising a complex array of both peri-urban and socio-political contextual analysis, city-scale thinking and multiple stories in an expressive, vibrant and technically ambitious physical artefact.

Studio Lead: Danielle Peck / Architecture Associates