Fair Go Land

RMIT University, Master of Architecture, Graduate Project 2014

Supervisors: Michael Spooner & Gretchen Wilkins

Awarded the Antonia Bruns Memorial Medal

FAIR GO LAND is realised on the historical site of the free speech movement in the egalitarian community of Brunswick, Melbourne. This project ministers to the many ways people communicate, negotiate, debate, chat, battle, and even whisper. It identifies and brings together four sites at the centre of community life. The life of this project was shaped through an immediate and idiosyncratic sensitivity to the people, buildings, streets, and programs. Daily experiences of the existing sites—Catholic Church, office building, local theatre, Town Hall, and souvlaki kiosk—revealed the cultural plurality of Brunswick, captured in a series of articulate and whimsical drawings.

The richness of these drawings established key prototype characters, which were then relocated back onto the four sites, their perceived personalities and attitudes inhabiting the gestures of the proposed program (Chapel & Sunday Market, Bar and Theatre, Souvlaki Palace, Worker’s Union & Tenancy Union). The character studies were conflated into an architectural language, indulging further in the shifts in scale, material, detail, and composition conceived in the initial drawn explorations.

By claiming an exaggerated fictional methodology, the project sought to examine how an architect might speak on behalf of a community and how we might give the same character to our voice. This project explores how an experience of a particular place and culture can be conceived as an important architectural instrument, one that can nourish the wonderful, ludic, and marvellous instants of the world.