The State Library of Victoria and Emergent Cultural Institution Incubator

RMIT University Master of Architecture Graduate Project 2016

Supervisor: Michael Spooner

In Utero is an Expression of Interest in the redevelopment of the State Library of Victoria. The project reflects on the genealogy of the State Library, continuing the site’s legacy as a forum for cultural institutions by introducing the programmatic agent of the Emergent Cultural Institution Incubator. This incubator provides a new home for institutions such as the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archive and 3KND Radio Station, representing liminal communities and allowing them to build fiscal and cultural capital in partnership with the State Library of Victoria. It places these institutions at the forefront of Melbourne’s key seat of cultural expression in a space of diversity and opportunity.

The project presents two distinct conditions. The exterior is like a fortress, an acropolis, a temple to the library and its incoming institutions. It frames and exaggerates the dome, portico, and fortified language of the existing architecture. It reflects and draws on the language of the surrounding city, creating a new experience of the library as both artefact and stage. The interior is a displacement of the known; objects that depart from the existing SLV language house these new programs.

This project was never in search of particularity in its programmatic definition. Instead, it sought a language, spatial and surficial, that would help define the departure of the new from the old—an opportunistically enriched discordant occupation of an existing condition, marked by small celebrations.