Transverse

The site is located in Melbourne’s west, an area stretching between Brooklyn and Altona, tethering the city’s multi-nodal infrastructure and linking major airports and logistical terminals, with regional networks extending to Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat.

The studio will propose a transverse link across the complex geometry of the city’s infrastructure, framed as activity centre. The linear site can integrate and connect an array of development typologies, constituted by a new thoroughfare, and an ecological corridor (Kororoit Creek).

As a product of the shifting models of urban growth, consolidation and sprawl, (characteristic of the fluctuations between manufacturing and service economies), ‘Transverse’ should operate as both, a connector and a landscape extending across the urban fabric.

The studio will work across the ebbs and flows of industrial activity and post-industrial dross, responding to sensitive ecologies, while proposing residential areas and service employment clusters. To do so, students will engage with the documentary process of analysis, investigating the area, its metropolitan systems and infrastructure, as well as precedent architectural projects. Proposed conceptual and speculative works will identify key instruments and strategies and its relationship with the form of the city.

Projects can be opportunistic, while contending with urgency. Set out against the radial structure of the metropolis, projects for this site will weave the urban system at a scale that is critical to confront spatial questions of the entire metropolis. The proposition for new sequences and networks necessitates a new vocabulary and aesthetic. ‘Transverse’ will explore critical questions of urbanity, stressing the form and character of the public realm and new social spaces.

What potential do the defunct brownfield stretches of land hold for the future of the city? How can they enrich the metropolitan structure? What will the nature of its urban form be? Will it strike a balance between environmental urgency and urban intensity? What will it look like?