MAJOR PROJECT

LOVE MACHINES

major project 2015?
M.Arch thesis project
Supervised by Michael Spooner
RMIT UNIVERSITY

Love Machines is about the East West Link. I am not proposing to build it. Rather, I am giving a presence to something – a leyline – that has never quite existed
It begins with a highly prejudiced exploration of the East West Link site, using the link as a lens to experience the city. This is an archaeological process to find intersections and conflicts in micropolitical form. The provocations left an indelible mark prompting the establishment of a spontaneous false memory – an archaeology of individualist, anti authoritarian, spontaneous communities and all the continuing neurosis and celebrations as a catalyst.

These investigations converge on the actual geography of the site creating a leyline of synchronous architectural moments. Four specific site have been pinpointed for architectural intervention. Four resultant architectural interventions plug the leyline – to keep things from spilling out and begin to reframe our relationship with the city. Within the framework of trouble making, a found history of ‘shit-stirrers’ and exploiting conditions of uncertainty I attempted to establish pockets where the real is experienced concurrently with the virtual and the imagined.

This is not necessarily about finding new formulations of space but re-establishing ourselves, the Architect, on a new rhetoric of stewardship. We are stewards of the mundane, the excema and the ridiculous – the 90% of buildings that have been built without architects that exist in a kind of purgatory. These foundations privilege an antagonistic narrative approach to try and create, as much as negotiate, uncertainty.

When architecture is embedded within a series of concentric catastrophes that gives the world its timing, qualities and disposition, each catastrophe is an event that radically modifies the possible, opens up previously inconceivable futures and halts the inevitable in its tracks.