GROUND MOVES

Allison Claney

Ground Moves

Gretchen Wilkins

RMIT ArchitectureUpper Pool Design StudioSemester 01, 2008Tutor: Gretchen Wilkins

Exhibited Students:Allison ClaneyIlani Hana MasturahNor Aziah Hassan

“Much of the landscape surface left in the wake of rapid horizontal urbanization is not a clearly defined, stable, and fixed entity. It is between occupancies and use, successional phases and (dis)investment cycles. The term in-between describes a state of liminality, something that lives in transition and eludes classification, something that resists new stability and reincorporation. The in-between landscapes of the horizontal city are luminal because they remain at the margins, awaiting a societal desire to inscribe them with value and status.”1

HEREThe Ground Moves studio studied architectural propositions for edge sites within the industrial area of Port Melbourne. This section of the city, unlike the dense, vertical and tightly organised Central Business District, is loose, thin, and horizontal. Rather than being defined by landmarks, roads and cultural precincts this area is identified through industrial logistics, systems of exchange and information flow. It has no strong visual identity or recogni sable imagery, and is not dense with buildings or people. Rather density here is defined through rates of exchange, patterns of production and streams of movement.

Even without the requisite characteristics “the city,” the industrial territory of Port Melbourne is urban. Indeed, in the polycentric Melbourne metropolitan area, this area is the logistical centre, managing the flow of nearly all goods and materials necessary for the livelihood of the city but doesn’t have room for. For example, every day this region, and the nearby Port of Melbourne handles 700 motor vehicles, 550 tonnes of tea and coffee, 750 tonnes of wood and timber, 1300 tonnes of chemicals, 2200 tonnes of fruit, vegetables and nuts, 2400 tonnes of dairy products, 5100 tonnes of cereals, and 10,800 tonnes of petroleum, alongside many other raw materials and manufactured goods.2 Passenger ferries, cruise ships, and visiting naval ships also dock here. It’s urbanism without the city.

How one occupies this “city,” or operates within it, cannot follow the same organisational logic as conventional urbanism. Architecture here suggests a new set of practices – practices that recalibrate organisational logics and readjust how and where value is assigned. It’s not so much about the objects as the spaces between them and the systems which connect them. It’s not about density of buildings and images but the density of exchange and interaction. The focus is not on architecture but on the moments at which architecture intersects with other disciplines, such as landscape, industry or ecology.

and THEREThe Ground Moves studio considered architecture which responds to the unique urbanism characterised by our site(s) in Port Melbourne. This form of urbanism skims across the horizontal surface of the ground, organising infrastructures and enabling activities. It relies on elasticity, adjustability, slack, and multiplicity. It is programmatically resilient and formally mutable. It is populated with infrastructural dross, retail outposts, industrial machinery, distribution hubs, and residual, unclassified landscapes. It is off limits, restricted, under surveillance, and unclassified. It is neither the city nor the suburbs, it operates between consumption and production, it’s distributed here and there.If the city isn’t where we think it is, as the Ground Moves studio proposed, where is it? Has it dematerialised into information networks? Has it been absorbed by landscape? Is it scattered throughout highway space? To be sure. But architecture is not reduced or replaced by this resilient, un-formed urbanism. It is positioned newly and squarely within it.

WORKThe first phase of work in the studio explored “slack” spaces within the industrial area of Port Melbourne. Slack spaces were defined as the underused, transitional or isolated areas between the interestingly diverse range of existing programs in this area, including: automobile manufacturing, a memorial park, international customs processing, an elevated highway, low and medium density housing, health and swimming facilities, go kart racing, aeronautical research and manufacturing, fishing, a rifle range, athletic fields, a marina, railway lines, a floating petrol station, a printing and packaging plant, 7 kilometres of waterfront, and cycling tracks.

A short, team-structured research project early in the semester generated 6 project themes for the studio: Infrastructure, Production, Reclamation, Mobility, Leisure, and Event. Collectively these themes focus on the space and program of the ground, positioning architecture as a mediator between, for example, industry and ecology, land and water, production and consumption, or property and populace. Within the shared theme or site each project brief was determined individually.

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1. Drosscape, Alan Berger2. Port of Melbourne Corporation

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Ilani Hana Masturah

Nor Aziah Hassan

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Ilani Hana Masturah bridge

Nor Aziah Hassan Allison Claney

2030

2008

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Allison Claney