Car / Park / Pool

This studio will engage with the current trend for public authorities to hand over the focus and definition of new town centres in the five growth corridors to commercial developers. Although this approach is arguably consistent with Melbourne’s history of development, as evidenced through retail strips such as Smith Street, modern-day outcomes seem to lack a civic dimension.

The aim of this studio will be to engage this reality and employ the program to critically redeem it.

Program: Sports and aquatic centre set within the larger urban gesture of the civic park

Site: adjacent to Craigieburn Central –the latest brand-spanking new town centre

Through initial exercises students will be expected to cultivate knowledge of the constituent spatial and programmatic types of the sports and aquatic centre coupled with civic landscape and urban typologies. This knowledge will be gleaned through building tours, readings and analysis. From this base, tactics will be developed through iterative processes toward the producing a project which could be imagined to become the site of collective (summer) memory.