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The Urban Field

The city is not perceived as a series of sites for heroic objects or as an underlay for the imposition of a formal order; we respect it as a place of uncertainty, of change, and composed of variables that are outside of our control. We search for the systems and processes already at work, similar to the longer cycles that form landscape. These we arrange and reorient with often subtle shifts of energy to dissolve the figure into the urban field. We start small, from the bottom-up, with the minutiae of everyday life, specific to time and place.

We engage directly with our subject matter through field-based research, whether it be the physical detritus of a marginal site, or with the narratives of the people that live there. Emerging patterns raise issues that delineate larger scales of investigation and action. Design methods and representation tools are invented to shift seamlessly between these scales; our interventions sit between the grit of the built and lived of the site, and the abstraction of the larger system.


Sand Helsel. Five walks. 2002

Walks 1 to 4 include: map and guide; audiotape and headset; site markings

The five walks describe the same part of the city in five different ways. The guide at the beginning of each walk describes the content of the walk, the duration, and the degree of difficulty. Each walk caters for a different type of visitor to the Melbourne Festival.

The walks use the language of the museum – audio guides, brass plaques and postcards – as the vehicle to frame the reading of the city. A status is consequently given to Bowen Lane and the adjacent marginal spaces, formed by the backs of buildings and similar accidents. They become worthy of our inspection. These spaces are formed by accretion, the continual layering of outbuildings, pipes, storage, signage, etc. onto the built fabric over time. The site markings ascribed to each walk continue this tradition. Several of the walks involve the active participation of the festival visitors in this process.

The aspiration is to enable those who inhabit the city to become active generators of their environment – to overlay their own stories. The city is dense, and is capable of supporting an infinite number of narratives. As citizens (and architects), I believe we ‘curate’ our cities from this rich material. I am interested in this process as differentiated from design. The walk has the ability to transform the perceptions of those who know how to look. It has a similar structure to the narrative; it is a simultaneous reading and writing of the space. The walk has the ability to fill a space with meaning rather than things.


Richard Goodwin. The Porosity Project.  2003-5

The Porosity Project tests the functional boundaries ascribed to the physical dimensions of public space in the city and envisions new possibilities for urban metamorphosis. It aimed to do this via the device of public art and a methodology of comprehensive mapping of both internal and external spaces in Sydney. Porosity Indexes, measuring the potential  ‘publicness’ of buildings in conjunction with a tri-part series of chiastic models produced evocative images and animations exploring the possibility of connection between internal zones of public potentiality. These projections constitute a sketch for projecting urban metamorphosis based on existing buildings and a philosophy of parasitic-prosthetic architectural interventions


Formalhaut [Goetz Stoeckmann and Gabriela Seifert]. Outback. Kay Farm, Guildford Plateau, Victoria, Australia, Installlation, April 2004

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word out is expressing motion from direction from within space, or from a point considered as a centre. Furthermore, out in combination with – back: referes to the back settlements or back country. The enlargement and the reconfiguration of the single letters of the adverb  O U T  creates a mega sign in the rural landscpe. Assembled or written by the siting of 60 tents  O U T  forms the plan of a camp: a simple form of settlement.The graffiti on the O – tents labels 24 spatial connotations connected with the word out – for example outside. The graffiti on the U – tents labels 24 social connotations connected with the word out – for example outsider. The layout of the † – tents and their spatial and social location render the letter  †  as the central symbol of the cross within the whole set up. The temporary installation  O U T  memorialises the fleeting frontier of White Australian civilasation in the Victorian OUT-BACK.


Stephen Neille, Curtin University. Speed_Space : Architecture, Landscape and Perceptual Horizons

Speed_Space is built as a coiled sequence stretching out to collect the linear sequence of towns and landscapes located along the Perth to Kalgoorlie Water Supply Pipeline in Western Australia. The entire journey can be considered as an experiential sequence, an experience held in the mind as a ‘constellation’, a system of meanings held by the person who has progressed through the necessarily sequential process. What is recalled, remembered or imagined is this journey as a united constellation of highlights bound together as a whole. As with all architectural works, once the whole is complete a weakening shakes our perception, a tremoring occurs and at this moment there is a recoiling at the limit. What was complete unravels into the world and we once again find ourselves in the realm of the ‘unbuilt’…. waiting to gather new parts and again make new worlds.


SueAnne Ware, Cassie Lucas, & Bridget Keane.  Pillow Talk

So much of what we do and experience in our lives every day is consciously or unconsciously edited out of existence.  We are too busy, too distracted, too much in a hurry to really see the landscapes that we travel through daily.  As urban dwellers we are inundated with stimuli. We simply forget to notice the richness that surrounds us.  For this installation we hope to produce pillows which act as ‘memento mori’ and attempt to capture and further create and capture, experiences and people in our daily landscapes.

Pillow Talk is about not just unearthing existing memories and layers but succeeding them with new contributions. Essentially, over the course of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, pillows will begin to appear on Smiths Street’s urban furniture.  Each pillow will have images and text both familiar and new. Then as the festival progresses and hopefully the pillows are interacted with i.e. sat on, appropriated, stolen, etc. we will make another series of them… recording the pillows’ pasts.  One aim of this project is to expose or reveal various narratives within a site.  Another is to consider invisible and visible forces which shape our public places.  A third is to celebrate the everyday world using an ordinary object, the pillow.

This work explores the agency of images and text as narration and devices for designing collected pieces of past, present remembrance and future memory. Pillow Talk celebrates those things and people we tend to really miss when they disappear from our everyday lives.

[1] Christophe Girot, “Four Traces Concepts in Landscape Architecture.” in  James Corner ed. Recovering Landscapes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) pp.59-61.