Pangea Proxima: An Immigration Museum for Potential

RMIT University Master of Architecture Graduate Thesis 2023

Supervisor: Michael Spooner

In 25 million years, the north-west coast of Australia will collide with the island of Borneo.

In the intervening time between now and then, in the lower west corner of Melbourne’s ‘Hoddle Grid’, the Immigration Museum will consolidate a record of the city’s migration. The content of its collection and the efforts of its curation trace a path that continually steps ahead, in pace with the indefinite cycles of arrival and settlement. This project peers forward, expanding the Immigration Museum in anticipation of Pangaea’s arrival.

The project was instigated as a sequence of additions and alterations, analogous to the staged history of the Old Customs House, and to imagine the temporalities between now and a potential future. The final spatial proximities evolved through the process of packing, unpacking, and repacking form into the interstices and corners of the T-shaped site and Old Customs House. The configuration gathers an assemblage of rooms and voids around the notable Long Room, with an extra suitcase or two added along the journey.

The museum is positioned as an architectural apparatus; a dynamic, operable element within the machinations of a city’s migration.