fragments
LOK / 2018
From SPC
Taught by Peter Brew
Programme Five Homes
The SPC Mooroopna site was an edifice to efficiency, its stability grew to become a cornerstone not only of the economy of the area but also to social fabric; it was now ingrained in the psyche and memories of the area. People had spent lifetimes working in that site, their hands weary from maintaining the machinery, their uniforms stained from decades of work, generations of families working in the site. But now it stood lifeless and abandoned.
The project centres around the invitation of life back into the site, it ponders how reverentially to the history this could be done. To do so I chose to embed, the topology of a house; in all the kitsch suburban glory of the suburban street. This demanded a process of finding the properties the project demanded and then map those to the properties of the site. As the premise of the studio relied heavily on the use of a point cloud scan, a system was derived in which a virtual scanner would rescan a space, thereby through the continuing the rhythms and cadances of the site, whilst through a series of glitches resulting in a new architecture. The resulting set of scans act became part construction document, part conceptual map, allowing the beholder to determine what may have been, or what could be. A ruleset was then created to deal with the absence of points that are labeled ‘glitches’, be that placed services caps, chimneys, sky lights, windows or voids. The resulting architecture is formed in subtraction and addition, escaping the facadism that is associated with modern reverential design.
