Francesca Sanguinetti

Monash Caulfield campus is positioned at the meeting of major transport routes, hosts creative faculties and is surrounded by recreational facilities- yet the campus presents as a hostile fortress to the local community. This project considered how to open up Monash Caulfield to the community through its transformation into a thriving creative precinct, with the use of 4 key interventions addressing culture, hospitality, small business, leisure and art.

This intervention acts as a living activity billboard of campus life, located on a narrow site along the face of Architecture Building F. The volumes float between the trees, angled for optimum visibility to 2 directions of busy traffic, while offering respite or quiet work space for campus students.

Situated outside the current campus food hall, this intervention capitalizes on the blank facing wall of Building B by incorporating cafe spaces below and stadium seating above, while linking also linking the ground with the upper-story walkway via a compliant ramp. The facility can be used to show moving image artwork or as an outdoor cinema, while being used as seating during the day.

Rising from what was once the Coles supermarket complex on Dandenong Rd, the Fab Plaza incorporates fabrication facilities, artist studios, study spaces and retail opportunities while retaining much of the existing built form to reduce the proposed carbon footprint. The hilled forms on the rooftop act as a buffer between the noise of the busy road to the north, while also providing a dynamic space for recreation. The ramp transition from ground floor to roof is publicly accessible and moves between the different activity volumes, so that visitors are exposed to all that the plaza has to offer as they ascend.

The fluid form of the Plaza roof is continued out into the pedestrian link, in a move that disrupts the rigid forms of the surrounding built context, providing areas of seating, shade, and park.

The collages are the initial explorations of themes and interventions which were subsequently developed.