It was a beautiful start to Day 1 - sunny and still...(or so we thought)!
Team 9 (SH10.K) received our brief for site 4:
Urban / Stitch:
Sculpture thoroughfare
Fixing, a temporary procedure to affix one to another,make mend or join something, suture.
Your challenge is to create a weave using the existing threads to offer an alternative experience to the thoroughfare.
You are required to tap into the physical and invisible site conditions.
You must consider the dynamics of time; Eg, night and day, site conditions, seasons etc.
Our Site:
Is really interesting! A thoroughfare between the two National Australia Bank buildings linking Bourke St to the Harbour, along Captain's Walk. Although our site is outside (has an open roof), unless you actually look up you might not even realise this? It feels very enclosed and separated from the outside world. It is a transitory space, almost entirely surrounded by the built form and its main occupants are office workers coming to and from their buildings. Our space is not highly visible to the public from the Harbour and completely invisible from Bourke St. It is however, extremely visible from the office floors above with any meeting rooms and corridors overlooking our site.
We spent a lot of time walking around the site and talking with office workers and general passers by.
There were some really key elements that stood out to us:
- Even when it is calm and still outside, within our site there is always wind. Wind comes in from both directions. There is even a ‘wind door’. When this is down the main circulation is through a small revolving door.
- It’s dark and cold with no life and all hard paving.
- Our site has slope and framed harbour views. It is mostly office circulation, and a smoking corner.
Ideas:
We talked about A LOT. in brief...
- Connections: bottom to top, left to right and through, the need to attract and distract people into our site, the idea of bring people in and spitting people back out. Do we want to create a usable space?
- The relationship and different experiences of Bourke Street and the Harbour boardwalk - what is the role of our thourougfare/corridor/ system
- Wind and sound. Stitching people together, stitching people to place.
- Work versus play, the head versus the heart, creating different environments
We are all different people and the tricky part of this project is to make one thing. (or bunch of things)
It’s the problem with public space, this expectation that we should all agree on a safe and civil environment for everyone. In trying to please everyone, you risk either pleasing no-one or just making beige, no-place space.
We are already committed to layers and layers, and what happens when you design with disagreement and diversity and discovery?
Our process so far has been about splitting then coming back together, different teams into different depths then messy conversations to connect us. Perhaps the most pervasive bit is that the everyday, ticking of the clock, windy cold and sunny patches are the vices that will eventually glue something.
Not sure yet, but we can attest to all that our process is making lots of ideas and occupations, making public space through fill.
Please follow us on @URTeam7 for live updates or join our facebook page!
x Team 7
37° 49' 7.85", +144° 56' 47.12"
We hit the ground running and made our way to site 6, on the corner of Bourke Street and Harbour Esplanade, Docklands. 
lanning and workshopping of our core concepts continued. Having spent more time on the site the overarching theme of "Flow" was chosen due to the large volume of both foot traffic and bicycle riders moving through our space. 
It has officially begun…
After the initial excitement of finally getting together as a group, and the decision to name ourselves Super 8 (other close contenders were The Mighty Docks, the GO! team, and
The Transformers), we were given our brief! And this is what it read…
Site. 3: Movement or Transfer of something to another situation, with effort.
Consider the site as a body that is lacking a vital organ. Your ch
allenge is to transfer an activity within the site to improve its daily function. You are required to use objects that have a reconceived function to generate a
playful spatial outcome. You must consider the dynamic of time e.g. night, day, site
condition, seasons, etc.
Our site runs along a boardwalk in front of high-rise commercial buildings. It is a grassy patch at the end of a long grass garden bed. Our site is opposite and existing art installation comprised of remnants of dock pylons, condensed into a cluster, wearing white hats. This site-specific work ignited our interest and from then on sparks were flying!
Many ideas were flowing! Ideas about, interaction, relation, excitement, interest, engagement, play, distraction and many more were all starting to grow inside us… From here we decided we also wanted to create something that would be experienced on many sensory levels, in order for it to be able
to be experienced on many levels and also in be able to be viewed across varying scales; near, far, under, over.
At this early stage, we are not wanting to commit to anything to early… And so the adventure begins…
Peace out.t
Through an exciting round of picking slips from a a hat, we received site Five. Site five is nicely situated at the south eastern edge of the docklands, with views out to the city and the harbor. As a team we are trying to look for a way to reinvigorate this corner into a hub to gather and re-imagine the docklands.
Before our lunch break, we spent some time to put our discussions down on paper. Visualizing our ideas gave us a better sense of what we are trying to accomplish and re-oriented a very tangent prone collection of ideas building upon each other.
