Cultural voltage/ Emergence

Group project manifesto with Jeremy de Lavaulx

 

In the urban fabric of Melbourne's inner north, how can vernacular architecture integrate, reflect, densify and intensify its inherent cultural diversity?

Speculaas studio takes a multi-faceted approach to explore and advocate for a design proposal which weaves this diversity within an architectural co-housing expression.

Our diverse clientele emanate from a large array of ethnic settings; and maintain unique characteristics and opportunities.

 

Through understanding their past experiences, present situations and expectations, a rich toolkit of first-hand data informs tensions at the human scale.

These sets of subjective variables act within a field of immaterial potential across the proposed site; a multi-dimensional puzzle requiring iterative placement, feedback and curation.

 

To harmonise with this curation of the immaterial, the larger scale architectural expression is in conversation with the users of space. This is achieved through a cultural translation of the vernacular: embodying landscape, architecture and shared spaces. This provides the larger scale counterpart to the human experience.

 

Through this multi-scalar dialogue, Speculaas' proposal fosters a dynamic and evolving process establishing cross-cultural and inter-generational community in pursuit of an entangled and enlivened future.

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Initial Individual Manifesto

Through diverse typologies offering a spectrum of communal and private spaces, Interwoven embraces the precarity and impermanency of contemporary housing conditions as an inspiration for diversity within a thriving and resilient co-housing community. The scheme celebrates communal cooking, teaching, and playing as ways of creating transformative encounters between people and weaving together individual tales into a greater narrative of diversity, experiences and aspirations.

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Architecture-wise, clearly delineated private spaces in the architecture are designed to be enriched and determined through occupation. Ambiguous programmatic zones within however, offer expansion and contraction of different spaces as an in-built flexibility responding to daily, short-term and long-term changes in living arrangements. These private spaces are woven together by communal spaces characterised by moveable translucent materials to create a layered, adjustable envelope and intermediate buffer spaces between the public and the private, the inside and the outside.

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