The Uncommon Room

A series of commons-related things I’ve been up to in the last year or so:

– this is another Masters design studio sited in regional Victoria where we are exploring building on the periphery of the periphery..….

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I wrote:

How do we build on the periphery: in the edge where urban becomes landscape?

In Australia accessible ‘green’ space is Crown land which is both a precious public resource and stolen Aboriginal land. But it is always Country.

How do we build on Country?

Much unreserved Crown Land was once a vast network of common land. These commons were, and where they still exist, are, different: their governance being more directly managed by local people. How do we build sensitively and inclusively in these places?

In this Studio you will leverage this relic of colonial land theft to propose ‘uncommon’ buildings…

…buildings which are inspired by and promote both Indigenous and non-Indigenous methods of sustainable land stewardship.

You will propose a building or group of buildings designed to debate and administer the common land of Ballarat….

…..a city which is the historical centre of Victoria’s nineteenth-century gold rush, as well as the site of a famous and bloody rebellion against excessive taxation and the demanding of democratic rights….

…but most of all a place that always was and always will be Wadawurrung Country.

The Uncommon Room is:

The design for a building or group of buildings to debate and administer the once common land of Ballarat for ‘commoners’ defined by you, bearing in mind the ancient stewardship of that land by the First Nations peoples of Wadawurrung Country.