Dancing Machines for Studio 07: Beneath The Gantry.
University of Melbourne, Master of Architecture, 10 June 2023.
_ Special thanks to my tutor, Henry Williams and Gumji Kang
_ This work was being exhibited at MSDx Winter on July 2023
This project rethinks the role of the factory in a gentrified Abbotsford, suggesting that the factory, liberated from its former obligations, can become an embodiment of utility, symbolism, and celebration, accommodating the persistent desire for collectivity. Within this production environment, machines operate autonomously, akin to a theatrical act.
The elements designed in this project are primarily driven by function, followed by circulation and atmosphere. This building is inherently designed for workers. A substantial, thick concrete wall demarcates the building into service and served spaces. Private areas such as toilets, research labs, offices, parking, and the loading dock are kept separate, while the farm, mill, and bakery are open.
Addressing the general public, visitors enter the building through a ramp that spills into the road, as a small public gesture. This ramp follows the alignment of the in-between garden of two car parks opposite the site. Visitors are then led into the bakery through a visual connection and a passage between two vertical farms—one for harvesting and another for growing.
A small gap between different concrete finishes and tones signal to visitors not to tread too close to the machines. The intentional misalignment of spaces guides visitors and workers around the factory, ultimately leading them to an exit that faces the Birrarung River, where they can finish their morning bread and coffee.
Operable fabric veils are laid along the circumference of the open space to prevent the general public from entering when the factory is closed for safety reasons. During the day, these veils dance with the wind, filtering soft light and casting shadows into the factory.
This project is a result of manifest forces, that remain inseparable from its industrial context, and work as improvised programmatic engineering, generating forms and implantations that are both congruent and irregular. The forms aim at formal purity and seek to challenge established factories, in terms of geometry as well as programs.
Through its programs of (a vertical farm, a mill and a bakery), it reveals a possible mutation of use that is the result of the composition of functions like Koolhaus’s Parc de la Vilette, where each program is “polluted” through the proximity of all others. In it, to find a culture of “invisible” congestion of disconcerting shapes and an almost monstrous building.
But at its core, this project is about machine autonomy driven by functional needs of bread.
