Ephemeral Architecture

Juhani Pallasmaa has described the encounter with building as an ‘inherent suggestion of action’. He went further, discussing the ‘verb essence of architectural experience as the act of entering the room, not of the formal design of the porch or the door’.

Approach: Ephemeral architecture privileges the life of a work over its formal appearance. To invite time into a work is to also open it up to external forces acting beyond the scope of the site boundary. Landscape and ecological systems, and urban flows can provide a dynamic context for creative works. Within the everyday use of a building its spaces can also invite relationships with site phenomena, such as light, the weather and seasonal change. Here buildings are no longer conceived as static objects, instead becoming places to stage change of over short and long spans of time – where the notions of the incomplete and the transitory hold more significance than permanence. How might architecture stage ongoing change?

Site: at the intersection of the Goldfields Track and Fryerstown (small township 10kms south of Castlemaine). At 210kms, the Goldfields Track is the longest shared use track in Victoria – providing a pathway for cyclists and walkers linking Ballarat and Bendigo.

Project: the design a small building to help with the regeneration of a small rural town – a minimal intervention to start the process of regeneration. The brief requires range of accommodation that extends and strengthens initiatives that have already been implemented by local and state authorities. The building provides for a range of shifting uses with the requirement for landscape infrastructure to help organise external spaces between existing buildings. The main building has to accommodate the following:

– short stay overnight accommodation for twenty people – hikers/cyclists (GoldfieldsTrack)

– living accommodation and a studio space for an artist-in-residence for a longer stay, up to 3 month duration (old school recently refurbished as exhibition venue)

– a place to accommodate the weekly arrival of the mobile library – where residents can meet

– public landscape infrastructure to assist with influx of 3000 people during the annual Antiques Fair