Fair Go Land

FAIR GO LAND is realised on the historical site of the free speech movement in the egalitarian community of Brunswick, Melbourne. This project ministers to the many ways to talk, negotiate, debate, chat, battle and even whisper. The project identifies and brings together four sites at the center of community life. The life of this project was shaped through an immediate and idiosyncratic sensitivity to the people, buildings, streets and programs. Daily experiences of the existing sites (Catholic Church, office building, local theatre, Town Hall and souvlaki kiosk) made aware the cultural plurality of Brunswick, captured in a series of articulate and whimsical drawings. The richness of the drawings established the key prototype characters. These characters were then relocated back onto the four sites, their perceived personality and attitude inhabiting the gestures of the proposed program (Chapel & Sunday Market, Bar and Theatre, Souvlaki Palace, Worker’s Union & Tenancy Union). The character studies were conflated into an architectural language, indulging further the shifts in scale, material, detail and composition conceived in the initial drawn explorations. In claiming an exaggerated fictional methodology, the project sought to examine how an architect might speak on behalf of a community; how we might give the same character to our voice. This project is an exploration of how an experience of a particular place and culture can be conceived as an important architectural instrument; one that can nourish the wonderful, ludic and marvelous instants of the world.