The Black Diamond

RMIT University, Master of Architecture, Graduate Project 2011

Supervisors: Michael Spooner & Melanie Dodd

Awarded the Antonia Bruns Memorial Medal

The township of Korumburra, located in southeast Victoria, is an endeavour by its people. Dating from its coal mining origins to its present day dairy industry, the town of 4500 people has largely been self supporting. This project aims to provide amenity for the town, but foremost, provide an architecture which will celebrate, critique and exaggerate the idiosyncrasies and latent conditions which make Korumburra so unique.

At the bottom of Main Street, a proposed supermarket, reception centre and cheese tasting room mark entry to the town from Melbourne, whilst at the top end an indigenous arboretum, self-storage facility, and room for listening to giant earthworms addresses the point of departure. The buildings locate themselves within the larger geographical and topographical framework of southeast Victoria since the town is situated between Melbourne and the popular tourist destination of Wilsons Promontory. While addressing the transitory experiences of the passer by, the needs of the locals are also ingrained within the buildings, and this is manifested in conditions which only a local might be aware of.

The ambition is that these buildings will be simultaneously both familiar, yet also provocative and uncomfortably strange.