The Intervals is a music hub at Jacksons Hill shaped by the idea of sound as memory. Housed in the 1865 Industrial School Hospital later the Sunbury Asylum it works with the site’s bluestone fabric and history of confinement instead of overwriting it. Echoes, traces of movement, and moments of silence guided the new spatial order.
The programme moves from quiet to communal: recording studio, bar, record store, public amenities, rain garden, and an indoor–outdoor amphitheatre. At the centre is the counterweighted operable door. Closed, it creates a focused acoustic chamber; open, it becomes a canopy and allows performances to unfold into the landscape a physical and symbolic release.
Indoor-Outdoor Amphitheatre
Amphitheatre Perspective View
When the door lifts, Esche notices the shift the way he notices a change in a room’s reverb. The amphitheatre eases outward, its boundaries loosening as the landscape folds into the space. It feels less like an opening and more like a slow release a gentle widening of atmosphere.
Sound Garden
Esche notices the small movements first wind catching the salvaged frames, metal chimes shifting, rainwater pooling through the wet garden. Nothing here demands attention;each element carries its own quiet rhythm. To him, the garden feels like a score written by the site itself, where listening becomes a way of belonging.
Proposed Section: Amphitheatre / Wet Garden
Water becomes the connective system. Roof runoff and ground drainage move through visible channels into the wet garden, cooling the amphitheatre and supporting native wetland plants. This follows First Nations principles of returning water to the country rather than pushing it away.
1:20 Sectional Model
The sectional model captures the relationship between the static weight of the bluestone hall, the kinetic counterweighted operable door, and the soft, shifting ecology of the wet garden.
In the spirit of reconciliation Monash University acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
