‘Cirque’ Is a prospective project sited in North Melbourne, Victoria.

Constructed from a system of reused concrete piping profiles and a uniquely designed ‘tri-grip’ joining component, Cirque presents a bombastic alternative to standard apartment complex construction and layout.

Designed for natural experimentation of a phenomenological condition, this proposal features a year-round rainforest at basement level with pedestrian pathways designed to provide an experience not unlike that of meandering through a rainforest.

Welcome,ladies and gentlemen, to Plastic Park

A mysterious and magical place to discover astonishing new possibilities, with deep dark crevices and mountainous highlands secreted away from civilisation on a forested archipelago of secluded remote islands. A place to wander and a place to wonder, a place to learn about all that is under.

Be amazed, as if every day within this jungle was your school, your university research facility, your gym and your pool. An archaeological burial ground of Tokyo’s skeleton plastics - fossilising beneath a wild unruly forest, how strange and yet fantastic.

Arriving on the rickety Plastic Park steam boat ferry, through tangled vines you will trek. Past an elementary school propped atop the trees across a timber deck. High above a rolling hill, the high school rears its head. When there is no wind, the bridge stops swinging, falling still across the river bed. Where students roam, collecting samples, and dead wood to build a fire. They fashion rafts to cross the channel out of recycled plastic barrels, sticks and old electrical wire.

On your way to the green house spot a golden eagle or wild Japanese macaque, then meander your way up to the botanical research facility, but never turning back.

To discover that beneath one lies an underground labyrinth of hollows, for within the islands themselves has been dug out to form linking caves along the Plastic Park ‘river Congo’ Islanded from a world that won’t quit burning its lamps, and racing to live on the moon, A dystopian future is not far away, in fact it will be here quite soon.

Plastic Park is an adventure pontoon, a redeemer, it is a place to grow and learn, it is a place whose inhabitants burn only carbon dioxide, it is a place for which we yearn. A peculiar isle of an experiential nature quite unlike any other, though both daringly adventurous and yet still educational, who can ever know what one may uncover.

Master-planned by overlaying the ‘Love Symbol’ O(+> across the entirety of East Melbourne, Victoria Australia- these three select locations situate a Home, Rehearsal/recording Studio, and Performance Space for the one and only Prince (also known as TAKFAP).

Strong geometric forms articulate these bold statements, much like their inhabitant. Three intersecting segments formulate the motion of the house, movement between wings and places for behaviours. Privileged views coming from all angles. Pop stardom stated in sticks, circles and triangles. A modern mighty mouse of a house.

Brazen geometries continue to dictate the lives of the Recording and Rehearsal studios- fragmenting these further to perform for their user. A home away from home, Prince’s own Paisley Park reflected in the eyeglass of this strange collection of treats.

The Performance space lives also in the realm of shape and wonder, however serves as a singular engine to house and showcase a world of unworldly talent. Subtle filleted edges direct audiences to the entrance, whilst the expression of the floating bar is clearly spoken to the outside world, inviting intrigue from the onlooker.

Theatre Bootery

This factory space daylights as a bootery manufacturing the finest of footwear, whilst moonlighting as a fully functional theatre space. This is achieved with modular architectural furniture design and fold-away cavities, loading dock that doubles as a bar, and an industrial semi-permeable glazed brick façade which illuminates in an emanating glow upon nightfall. It’s a party.

What if two full suburban residential blocks were designed based entirely off plastic sushi fish? Huh? Howaboutit? A playground of rescaled (pun intended) detritus surrounds a colossal Kikkoman Soy Sauce Factory…

In the middle of the ocean, they are found

Deep in the jungle, and burrowed underground

Their species in abundance in the heart of a city

But at no risk of extinction, which may become a pity

In the dark depths depths of the food court,

The museum of wonders,

A plastic fish waterfall,

To sit and debate under

Then swimming upstream back towards the ‘dead sea’

The soils are poisoned, There’s death of the trees

Blood at the roots, blood on the leaves

Extinction of mammals, bones in the breeze

A desert of sands, there is no relief

That leads up to the consumer,

Residing in the kikkoman Soy Fish Factory.

With walls and roof casted

In the same sushi soy fish you get handed for free.

To look out again, across the Dead Sea,

The Forrest, the desert- And the fish bone bridge

A skeleton Connecting all Three

Ornament is not reserved for the aristocrats or the wealthy

It is ‘patternation for every nation’, and plenty is healthy

Ornament doesn’t need to be gordy and gold

Ornament doesn’t even need to be new nor old

Ornament is found in the everyday

In the food that we eat

And found in what we throw away

It is found in the material world of the domestic

In containers, wrappers and fish made of plastic

A pattern made by these free sushi fish

Creates an effect as bold as you wish

And when they are stretched in scale and weight

They make for fine form, bazaar and ornate.

Today you can find ornament in the banal

In an afterthought of design, moulded in the decal-

But better to find casted in the wall of a building

Than floating forever in a river canal.

This school runs in a procession, stating year groups in a linear fashion through the body of an elevated ‘train’ formation. Sky-bridges, floating classrooms with 360 degree privileged views provide the young adults with encouragement to learn deeply through observation.

Taking inspiration from the train ride through Brooklyn, height gifts its onlooker with knowledge and wherewithal, street smarts and worldly knowledge all constantly available outside the classroom. This school model could run for kilometres, hanging above industrial complexes, corner beats, red light districts, freeways and farms.

This colossal opera house exists in the form of an inverted cranium, of course. It boasts a wildly ornate interior, and is situated in a circular cut-out of the earth, 50 metres deep and kilometres wide.

Submerged below ground, this desert oasis hosts operas, ballets and theatrical performances 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Transmission is a reimagining of the ‘Auction House’ format- it places emphasis on the procession, and through its loose compilation of industrial componentry and stage infrastructure questions the very nature of object, ownership and identification.

All artist visualisations are collaged with the painted works of Rick Amor.

This spattering of strange drawings takes found objects, images and happenstantial influences and some-how some-way translates them into unresolved architectural follies.

What fun it is to discover the wild world of patternation, texture and form within the found. Everyday object and imagery can provide such wonder when observed under a different light or at an alternative scale.

Ornament in itself is a crucial element of object understanding, and yet can express infinite meaning and application.

This towering Bio-Diesel plant screams into the skies of Melbourne’s western CBD above Queen Victoria Markets- producing natural bio-fuels for a brighter world of lighter energy footprint into the future. It’s a good time.

Its hyper-expressed exoskeleton lends itself to a machine like anthropomorphic humanoid form- whilst continuously running Koi farms process and fertilise the lupine plants growing vertically up a sweeping framed cape featuring the ability to ‘find the northern sun’ for maximum growth and so completing the energy production cycle.

Penny lane is a simple lazy little wooden pleasure-yacht. She features a beautiful interior cabin, just big enough to live and sleep two comfortably out on the bay, with all possible storage needs- a fantastic exercise in joinery and ‘finding the right fit’. Read a book, play some cards, listen to Frank Sinatra.

This rather dramatic amphitheatre cascades down below a small community of strange and delightful architectural follies- and crashes up against a giant glazed curtain wall of a submerged half-moon underground convention centre.

Another project that lives in a hole- a meandering procession of stainless steel leads a protagonist deep underground passing hundreds of thousands of rose forms perforated into Core-ten retaining walls towards an abandoned colosseum.

Two spheres form this central ground, while flanked by offset rectangular skeletal galleries.

In the act of memorialising an event, a time and a place-we are posed with an intriguing question of the manner in which a social contextual condition is to be represented reimagined and remembered through architecture. The appropriation of an ideology in memorium makes cause for an extremely wide contextual understanding, which must be based on a foundation of site origin and use, as well as an investigation into demographical precedent of both past and present contexts.

Based in suburban Hobart, the Cascades Female Factory was the first female prison in 1846 and is now listed as a world heritage site. The site has had a tumultuous treatment over the past century, shielding the site’s dark and desolate history from that of its surrounding progressive world. To appropriately memorialise this site and the events that occurred there, this potent memory must be unlocked and unpacked, making direct use of the remaining existing archaeology across the three yards. The following work explores the dualities in making memorial of events from a wildly different time, and creating new public civic engagement.

It seems that there is an implicit danger in architecture that claims to represent certain emotive or gender-based assumptions, as these are thematic and metaphorical approaches that prove difficult to quantify and therefore difficult to put forth as supportive argument. In response to this, all contextual considerations must be made, and an informed approach is the basis for an appropriate starting point.