RMIT Architecture Major Project Catalogue Semester 2 2025
Suraj Pandu Suvarna
Nicholas Philio
Nicole Markis
Jherwyn Hanne Roxas Torres
Lachlan Edward May
Lachlan James Buckley
Zhuohui Huang
Kejia Wang
Sam Andrew Friedrich Wilson
R Li
Jatan Shah
Cameron Lee Burnett
Isabella Shirley Konig
Ee Min Lim
Harry Richard Kingston
Carla Grace Valenzuela
Sayba Zaara
Chih-I Lin
Tugce Calis
Kun Dai
Tyler Ruby Feldman
Henry Joel Neil
Ella Johnson
Yimin Xu
Ruichen Liu
Liana Jasmine Del Campo
Shahriyar Ahmad
Luyao Jiang
Qianhui Li
Dale Manandic
Bailin Chen
Major Project Catalogue, Semester 2 , 2025
Dr. John Doyle
Ian Nazareth
Archie Todd Conway
Roberto Luis Monasterial Conde
Laura Kate Elizabeth Roberton
Carlos Alberto Trivino Daza
Hugh Alexander Williamson
Hong Quang Lam
Thomas Benjamin Abbondanza
Lachlan Christopher Caligari
Celine Olivia Hussein Blanco
Suraj Pandu Suvarna
Nicholas Philio
Nicole Markis
Jherwyn Hanne Roxas Torres
Lachlan Edward May
Nishadi Prasangika Malwatta Malwatte Gedara
Lucas Andrea Toppi
Tiffany Dang
Matthew Liam Donoghue
Amanda Zhuoran Chen
Manisha Abhisara Keshava Murthy
Andrew Graeme Wilson
Shamiso Oliver Shamu
Jianhua Huang
Natasha Wambui Wanjiru
Kritika Agarwal
Gemma Anne Robinson
Adithya Lal
Andrea Marine Dubois
Nanci Nassima
Shameera Vikram Hingmire
Louis Fernando Juan Untu
Vincent Anthony Spataro
Emili Shiraiwa
Jackson Le
Miriam Hanna
Joshua James Tao Allardyce
Ivy Wei Li Tee
Hari Prabhu
Tsz Ting Angie Chan
Alina Lim Vin Yian
Dominic James Concar
Nawanjana Sooriya Arachchi
Bao Phuong Nghi Nguyen
RMIT Architecture Major Project Catalogue Semester 2 2025
Lachlan James Buckley
Zhuohui Huang
Kejia Wang
Sam Andrew Friedrich Wilson
R Li
Jatan Shah
Cameron Lee Burnett
Isabella Shirley Konig
Ee Min Lim
Harry Richard Kingston
Carla Grace Valenzuela
Sayba Zaara
Chih-I Lin
Tugce Calis
Kun Dai
Tyler Ruby Feldman
Henry Joel Neil
Ella Johnson
Yimin Xu
Ruichen Liu
Liana Jasmine Del Campo
Shahriyar Ahmad
Luyao Jiang
Qianhui Li
Dale Manandic
Bailin Chen
Introduction, Professor Vivian Mitsogianni
What is Major Project?
Anne Butler Medal & Leon Van Schaik Medal, ( Amanda Zhuoran Chen) Antonia Bruns Medal, (Sam Andrew Friedrich Wilson) Peter Corrigan Medal, (Ivy Wei Li Tee)
RESTLESS DREAMS IN A DIGITAL FIELD, (Adithya Lal) AS IT UNFOLDS, (Adrian Alfa Sebastian) BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, (Alina Lim Vin Yian)
GIVE A MAN A FISH..., (Andrea Marine Dubois) HASTINGS A COMPANY TOWN, (Andrew Graeme Wilson) REFORMED, (Archie Todd) LIVING STRUCTURES, (Bailin Chen) VIET-NAARM//, (Bao Phuong Nghi Nguyen)
TILL DEATH DO US PART, (Cameron Lee Burnett) THE EMBRACE, (Carlos Alberto Trivino Daza) ALLOTROPES OF THE COLLECTIVE, (Celine Olivia Hussein Blanco) BETWEEN SCALES, (Chih-I Lin)
CIRCUMSTANTIAL ARCHITECTURE, (Dale Manandic) FUTURE PROOFING, (Dominic James Concar) GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM, (Ee Min Lim) COUNTERPUBLIC STAGE, (Ella Johnson) KARORI RE-IMAGINED, (Emili Shiraiwa) RISKY BUSINESS, (Gemma Anne Robinson) INFRA.CULTURE, (Hari Prabhu)
TAILORED BY CURRENT, (Harry Richard Kingston) RMIT CITY NORTH MASTERPLAN, (Henry Joel Neil) ALLEYSCAPE INCREMENTAL ADHOCISM, (Hong Quang Lam) ALONG THE EDGE, (Isabella Shirley Konig) THE IN-BETWEEN CONDITIONS, (Jackson Le) TECHNA-ORNAMENT MORPHOLOGIES, (Jatan Shah) A CHANGE IN PACE, (Jherwyn Hanne Roxas Torres) EYES WIDE SHUT, (Jianhua Huang) WARREENY BIIK, (Joshua James Tao Allardyce) BOTTOM-UP REFLECTIONS, (Kejia Wang) LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOK BACK, (Kun Dai) THE IN-BETWEEN, (Lachlan Christopher Caligari) HOW TO FIX A BROKEN BUILDING, (Lachlan Edward May) SNOWY MOUNTAINS, (Lachlan James Buckley) OUT OF THE ORDINARY, (Laura Kate Elizabeth Roberton) CASA SANA, (Liana Jasmine Del Campo) THE SPACE BETWEEN US, (Louis Fernando Juan Untu) RE-DISTRIBUTION, (Lucas Andrea Toppi) INTERLACED ADAPTIVE MODULAR HABITAT, (Luyao Jiang) UNBOUND GROUND, (Manisha Abhisara Keshava Murthy) THE WORSENING CASE OF ARCHITECTURE LYING, (Matthew Liam Donoghue) ON THE VERGE, (Miriam Hanna) CRIME AND ORNAMENT, (Nanci Nassima) IF & WEATHER IT COMES, (Natasha Wambui Wanjiru)
URBAN GRAFT, (Nawanjana Sooriya Arachchi) FOR GOOD, (Nicholas Philio) IN THE MEANTIME..., (Nicole Markis) AFTER OIL THE REGENERATIVE MACHINE, (Qianhui Li) 42, (Roberto Luis Monasterial) URBAN WEAVE, (Ruichen Liu) BLOOMING IN THE INTERVAL, (Ruitian Li) HOST: THE EDGE APPARITIONS, (Sayba Zaara) STATELESS ARCHITECTURE: A BANDAGE BLUEPRINT, ( Shahriyar Ahmad) THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING...,(Shameera Vikram Hingmire) FORT BE WITH YOU, (Suraj Pandu Suvarna) LOCALHOST, (Thomas Benjamin Abbondanza) WHO'S PUBLIC? WHOSE PLACE?, (Tiffany Dang) ARCHITECTURE - ERUTCETIHCRA MUSEUM, (Tsz Ting Angie Chan) PUBLIC ROOMS: A COLLAGED SUBURB, (Tugce Calis) THE NECKLACE AND THE NECK, (Tyler Ruby Feldman) WAA BIKK - REALIGNING WITH COUNTRY, (Vincent Anthony Spataro) THE MARKET OF MEMORY_A GENERATOR OF COLLECTIVE, ( Yimin Xu) ONE WAY STREET, (Zhuohui Huang)
Supervisors Semester 2, 2025
Students Semester 2, 2025
Introduction
Architecture schools should be concerned with experimentation that challenges the apparent self-evident certainties and accepted orthodoxies of the discipline (in its expanded definition), the underlying assumptions about what architecture is and can contain, and what it should do next. Architecture schools need to ensure that their graduates have all the professional competencies that are required for professional practice and registration, but Architecture schools should also lead the struggle to challenge the default conventions of the discipline. The architecture school should strive to point towards possible futures not yet evident within existing understandings of the discipline and wider cultural/political terrains.
Architecture is about ideas. It is part of a wider cultural sphere and a way of thinking about the world in a broader sense. Knowledge and learning in architecture do not finish in the academy but require continued learning and a level of receptive agility from the architect, throughout the architect’s life. The rapidly changing economic and cultural conditions in the extended fields that architects engage with necessitate this, requiring, but also opening up possibilities for, new types of knowledge, fields of engagement and practices.
The architecture student’s graduating Major Project – a capstone for the formal design degree – should not merely demonstrate the competence and skill they acquired in the course. These are base expectations on entry into the graduating semester. The graduating project is an opportunity to speculate through the work and to develop ideas that will serve as catalysts for future, lifelong investigations.
The project should lay bare considered attitudes, brave speculations and leaps of faith, pursuing these with rigour and depth. We would hope that the projects are ambitious, brave and contain propositions relevant to their time. We would hope that students experiment – in whatever form this might take – and engage with difficult questions, contributing not merely to areas that are well explored, but to what is yet to come. Experimentation though, in the graduating prWoject, as well as in the design studio, comes with the risk of failure. But failure can be cathartic – it is an essential possibility tied to innovation.
At RMIT Architecture we understand well the ethos and importance of experimentation and we have long-standing processes to reward it, importantly through our grading and moderation processes. In the RMIT architecture programs, we call this venturous ideas-led design practice. ‘To be venturous is to be brave and take risks. What we hope is happening here is that students are learning to establish their own explorations which they can constantly reconsider and navigate through future conditions that may not resemble present understandings of practice. Competencies and experimentation can happily co-exist.
We aim to educate students to engage with architecture’s specific characteristics unapologetically, and to not be afraid of its complex, uncertain and liquid nature. We aim to prepare our graduates to engage in and contribute to a broader world of ideas and to eventually challenge our ability to judge with new, challenging and meaningful propositions. This semester we saw some astonishing and brave projects and propositions from a student body deeply concerned with making a positive impact on the world around them and with contributing new ideas to their discipline. We look forward to following our students’ careers as they join our global community of practice and to seeing how the ideas seeded here are pursued and advanced.
Professor Vivian Mitsogianni Dean, School of Architecture & Urban Design
What is Major Project?
THE MAJOR PROJECT MEDALS
The Anne Butler Memorial Medal, endowed in honour of an outstanding emerging practitioner, is awarded to a Major Project that exemplifies the goals of Major Project.
The Peter Corrigan Medal, celebrates the project that is most critical, political and culturally engaged. It is awarded to a student with a strong independent vision in honour of Professor Peter Corrigan who taught successive generations of architects at RMIT for over 40 years.
The Antonia Bruns Medal, endowed to recall Antonia’s interest in the relation between film and architecture, is awarded to a Major Project that investigates the relationship between architectural representation, association and perception.
The Leon van Schaik 25th Anniversary Peer Assessed Major Project Award, celebrates Prof. Leon van Schaik’s arrival as Head of Architecture at RMIT 28 years ago. It is decided by all Major Project voting for what they view as the most adventurous and future-embracing project of the semester.
In Major Project, students are expected to formulate an architectural research question and develop an articulate and well-argued architectural position through the execution of a major architectural design project.
RMIT Architecture values ambitious, adventurous projects; those that demonstrate new and pertinent architectural ideas or show how established ideas can be developed or transformed to offer deeper understandings. The best major projects take risks and attempt to see architecture anew. Major Project should form the beginning of an exploration of architectural ideas that can set the agenda for the first ten years of original and insightful architectural practice.
The nature of the project is not set, and the scope of the brief and site is established by the student in consultation with their supervisor as the most appropriate and potentially fruitful vehicle for testing and developing their particular area of architectural investigation. Typically, major projects proceed in a similar way to design studios – with the difference being that students themselves set their brief and topic of investigation.
The research question and architectural project will often develop in parallel and it is expected that the precise question and focus of the project will be discovered and clarified through the act of designing. This process is iterative and develops through weekly sessions. Projects are also formally reviewed at two public mid semester reviews before the final presentation.
Major Projects have ranged from strategic urban and landscape interventions with metropolitan implications, through to detailed explorations of building form, materiality, structure and inhabitation; to detailed experimentation in the processes and procedures of architectural production. It is expected that Major Projects will develop a particular and specific area of interest that has grown during a student’s studies, rather than merely complete a generic and competent design. Often these specific interests will develop in relation to those of supervisors – we encourage students to work closely with their supervisors to build on mutual areas of expertise and interest.
It is understood that major projects will differ in scope, scale, kinds of representation produced and degree of resolution; with these factors depending on the nature of the architectural question and accompanying brief. Emphasis should be placed on producing a coherent and complete project, where proposition, brief, scale, degree of resolution and representation work together to provide a balanced, convincing and focused expression of architectural thought.
There is no expectation that Major Project be ‘comprehensive’ in scope. Rather, the aim of the subject is to establish, through the completion of a major design work in a rigorous manner, a well-argued architectural experiment that has the potential and richness to engender future explorations and that will sustain the student for the next ten years of their architectural practice.
A high level of skill and a demonstrated knowledge of existing architectural ideas is an important component of a successful major project, however the goal should not be to demonstrate a professional level of accepted best practice. Rather it is an opportunity to demonstrate new kinds of knowledge and ideas through architectural form.
_Excerpt from Major Project Briefing Notes 2023
Enough is Never Enough
AMANDA ZHUORAN CHEN
SUPERVISOR: DR. ANNA JOHNSON
Enough is Never Enough begins with a ruin and imagines a tower that never ends, a building that breathes, erodes, and grows with the city through time.
Using 85 Spring Street, a decayed twentieth-century office tower in Melbourne, as a testing ground, the project critiques the city’s culture of demolition and replacement and, inspired by Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn and its theory of shearing layers, proposes a strategy of ever-changingness: a layered system that learns, adapts, and grows through time.
It develops the concept of Parametric Adaptive Reuse, integrating algorithmic design with ecological and urban systems. Through computational tools, the building adapts to climate, structure, and policy, creating a framework where reuse, growth, and transformation coexist.
Across five acts, the tower evolves from a forgotten relic into a reinforced structure, a living vertical city, and finally a rewilded park, each stage redefining the relationship between architecture, climate, and city, turning demolition into renewal and decay into design.
Rather than viewing the fall of a building as its end, the project embraces impermanence as continuity. Echoing the myth of Babel, it redefines the architect as a Babel maker, not one who completes, but one who continues, sustaining the dialogue between ruin and rebirth, memory and possibility.
SUPERVISOR STATEMENT
In the context of city towers, reuse and profit driven cycles of building and demolition, Amanda’s project asserts architects are Babel makers. Following Immanuel Kant, the fall of Babel is not seen as an end but an opportunity, where the architect’s role is not to complete but continue a critical dialogue between city and ecology, public and culture. An existing tower is mapped for its embodied carbon and material lifespan determining what is retained. Then a climate-responsive context aware structure parametrically grows outwards with algorithmic abstractions evolving into a language reflecting the city and unfolding the public realm. Across 5 acts of becoming and working with existing conditions and digital scripting, the tower is an infrastructure of social and ecological connection. A vertical street organically evolved in response to public needs, the changing climate and the life of the city. Over time the tower unmakes itself—an undoing where architecture dissolves and the body of the tower is gradually dismantled – leaving a public park. Here decay is not an end but a transition—its vacancy, reclaimed by the public, is a pause between demolition and construction with the building’s fragments returned to the city.
- Dr. Anna Johnson
LEON VAN SCHAIK MEDAL SEMESTER 2, 2025
ANNE BUTLER MEDAL &
One Hour and Forty Three Minutes
Sam Andrew Friedrich Wilson Supervisor: Dr. Mark Jacques
Australia is embracing electric vehicles at full throttle. This project speculates on the change in typology of service stations when they grow their EV charging limbs. Fast charging is essential for long routes and averages thirty minutes - a six fold increase in the conventional five minute refuel. Consequently, the lingering time at service stations will also increase six fold and the experience of stopping will be drastically altered. There is now an opportunity to use these thirty minutes - to get up out of one's mediated environment (the car) and away from one's closest companion (the phone) and learn something about the world and something about themselves.
Along the M1 westbound freeway, seven service stations have been equipped with EV charging. Although the surrounding condition from Kings Way to Colac is always different, the service station along the way stays the same. This project rejects the copy and paste corporate strategy and suggests an architecture that enables a confrontation with something larger than yourself. There is an access to knowledge and an encounter with phenomena specific to place that would otherwise remain unknown.
PETER CORRIGAN MEDAL SEMESTER 2, 2025
SUPERVISOR STATEMENT
Sam’s supervisor Mark Jacques suggests that ultimately the project is about how architecture can be warped by the bigger landscape that hosts it. Seven electric vehicle charging stations are proposed from Kingsway to Colac, each containing a proxy of the wider site that engages the body for the thirty-minute recharge time. This is an architectural argument against the screen. It is an invitation for people to leave the mediated environment and (in his words) “learn something about the world and something about themselves”. The project speculates about an architecture of encounter and phenomena that is firmly set against the generic and the place-less.
- Dr. Mark Jacques
Where The City Listens
Ivy Wei Li Tee
Supervisor: Dr. Patrick Macasaet
Where the City Listens is a documentary driven architectural project that explores the tension between Malaysia’s rising skyline and the silenced voices beneath it. Set against the emergence of Kuala Lumpur’s new financial district, TRX (Tun Razak Exchange), the work questions how national progress can coexist with economic inequality and political opacity. Through the lens of filmmaking and spatial storytelling, the project reimagines three civic architectures, a City Gallery, a Political Media, and a National Archive, as instruments of transparency and public participation. Markets, balconies, and everyday conversations become democratic stages where truth circulates beyond official narratives.
The film and proposal together act as a mirror to the nation: documenting lived realities while proposing new civic spaces where dialogue, memory, and accountability can coexist. Standing beside the TRX tower, the reimagined oil rig like National Archive becomes a monument to remembrance, reminding citizens to learn from past corruption and to keep seeking truth.
Through film, drawing, and narrative reconstruction, the project becomes both observation and intervention, a self-reflective act that blurs the boundary between filmmaker, citizen, and architect. By documenting lived spaces and reimagining civic instruments, Where the City Listens positions architecture as a form of participation rather than power. Each proposal becomes a fragment of a larger system that listens, from the balcony that invites conversation, to the market that hosts political exchange, to the archive that safeguards truth. In doing so, the work argues that transparency is not built through walls of glass, but through structures of dialogue, a nation that listens before it speaks.
ANTONIA BRUNS MEDAL SEMESTER 2, 2025
SUPERVISOR STATEMENT
‘Where the City Listens’ is a fearless civic experiment using documentary film to question architecture’s role amid corruption and the erosion of truth. In Kuala Lumpur’s TRX, Ivy transforms the financial district into a living civic instrument that listens, records, and amplifies public voice. Architecture here becomes active, speculative, and political, fracturing monolithic power into new typologies of transparency and participation; not as backdrop to politics, but as a catalyst for democracy and collective trust.
- Dr. Patrick Macasaet
Restless Dreams in a Digital Field
ADITHYA
LAL
SUPERVISOR: DR. PATRICK MACASAET
In the far-flung future of 24XX, cyberspace is not only a realised phenomenon but a physical place. Innumerable cyber metropolises speckle the surface of the .NET. Among them, one stands apart: a city older than the .NET itself, perhaps older than time. A place that has taken on new life, serving as the surrogate for humanity's future ambitions. It once went by a name now lost to history, but today it is known by a new designation: netcode MARS.
This project uses the game as a spatial medium for architecture. Mechanics, physics, textures, and controls all become architectural elements. The project imagines the "Game Space" as a new reading and perception of architecture. Systems typically treated separately are synthesized into a single, cohesive outcome.
As It Unfolds
ADRIAN ALFA SEBASTIAN
SUPERVISOR: LAUREN GARNER
This project begins as a critique of Fisherman’s Bend, a landscape of erasure where culture and place are buried under constant reinvention of its own identity. Top-down approaches to planning have reinforced this linearity, treating land as asset and resource results in an array of stagnation and vacancy.
“As it Unfolds” explores a speculative method of urban transformation for a former GMH precinct, whose stalled masterplan invites reimagination. It reframes emptiness as grounds for repair, positioning architecture as a transitional medium that empowers the public to actively shape the site’s future. Unfolding through three acts, each operates at a distinct scale within the precinct.
Ground rules retain the industrial traces that defined the site. Methodical unsealing and short-span planting restore an ecological rhythm, anchoring the site before the next cycle of development.
Industrial fragments are purposefully retained, resisting the default erasure. Their slow deconstruction enables collective use, providing infrastructural needs within the transition.
Lastly, temporal initiators are arrayed across site. Undefined and open to redefinition through spontaneous cultural exchange, interrupting the trajectory, allowing a counterculture to grow in tandem with the site’s hypothetical development.
Time literacy provides a new metric of success, challenging the dominance of bureaucratic measures, reshaping how we read and value place.
Best of Both Worlds
ALINA LIM VIN YIAN SUPERVISOR: PROF. GRAHAM CRIST
Best of Both Worlds is a major project exploring threshold conditions within a new perimeter block inserted into the existing suburban fabric of Broadmeadows to increase density. Rather than demolishing existing buildings, the project investigates how the new and old can coexist, how their edges, corners, and in-between spaces can interact meaningfully. The challenge lies in not throwing the baby out with the bathwater: avoiding isolation through walls, and instead transforming these boundaries into generators of community connection.
Broadmeadows, with its population largely composed of immigrants from the Middle East and Pakistan, becomes a fertile ground for a cultural “mesh-up” architecture. To amplify its identity as an emerging immigrant city, the project draws inspiration from diverse global building types, using them not as replicas but as catalysts for new design strategies across the perimeter block, shopping streets, and corner shops. Guided by the idea that “it is not what you take from that matters, but where you take it to,” the project argues for an architecture that embraces cultural hybridity, where elements from various traditions are reinterpreted through the lens of local climate, urban context, and material availability, to create an inclusive, adaptive, and socially engaging urban fabric.
Give a Man a Fish...
ANDREA MARINE DUBOIS
SUPERVISOR: DR. CHRISTINE PHILLIPS
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
This project puts that saying into action - by returning agency to the fishermen of Mauritius and giving them the tools to shape their own spaces. It challenges the role of the architect: how can we step back, resist paternalism, and act as facilitators of local knowledge and autonomy?
For generations, the fishermen have sustained the island, fed its people and preserved coastal culture. Today, however, they stand at the margins, facing declining fish stocks, industrial pressures, and a loss of control over their craft.
Across Mauritius, sixty fishing sites lie in disrepair. Rather than repeating the pattern of isolation, the project proposes a network of connected sites, linked through a kit of parts and buoy-like structures. Each village gains two places: A Resting Site and an Exchange Site- reflecting the rhythm of a fisherman’s day, the balance between work, rest, and movement.
This framework extends across all sixty sites, forming a living coastal network.
It is an act of reclamation - of place, craft, and dignity. A reminder that the sea still belongs to those who know its rhythm.
This project stands with the fishermen. For their autonomy. For their resilience. For their future.
Hastings a Company Town
ANDREW GREAEME WILSON SUPERVISOR: LIAM OXLADE
‘Hastings A Company Town’ looks at the social constructs and cooperative housing models of company towns that were birthed in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as analysing company towns of today. The Introduction of The Victorian Renewables Energy Terminal forces change on an already heavily industrialised town and its workers, posing the question does the urban spawl continue? Instead, the densification of the central business and residential district of the town. Urban Voids that have been identified within the towns centre and transformed and repurposed into workers housing that attempts to fill the ‘Missing middle’ that Australian suburbs are so desperately in fear of.
A missing middle that related to its context, its ‘Australian Ugliness’ and its unique architectural quality and familiarity.
By combining and strengthening identity and community with the introduction of hybridised site typologies, we hope longevity is bound for these sites and they live on if industry does advance, quite the contrary to its predecessors.
The inevitability of obsolete natural gas will intern decommission the natural gas site and create a path of travel through a newly recognised and continuation of the protected RAMSAR Wetland site. Linking this modern-day company town to its thriving industrial network.
ARCHIE TODD CONWAY
SUPERVISOR: CAITLIN PARRY
This project reimagines the Nylex Silos in Richmond, a structure caught between ruin and landmark, as a public building that makes its construction visible and its purpose open to change. It starts from a frustration with how architecture has become closed off and overly polished, and asks instead for buildings that are generous, adaptable, and honest about how they’re made.
A new mass timber ecoskeleton wraps around the existing silos, using their cylindrical geometry as the metric that generates a new grid across the site. The timber structure acts as both frame and facade, allowing panels, balustrades, and walls to be reconfigured over time. Openings align with key urban axes, connecting the project to its surroundings and extending public paths toward the Yarra River.
The design takes cues from Francis Kéré’s use of local materials and Thomas Heatherwick’s belief that architecture should provoke curiosity. It treats the act of building as something civic and something people can see and understand. Rather than preserving the silos as a monument or erasing them entirely, the project turns them into a living structure that can evolve with the city, inviting interpretation, participation, and change.
Living Structures
BAILIN CHEN SUPERVISOR: PROF. ALISA ANDRASEK
This project investigates the evolution of highdensity living systems within Shipai Village, one of Guangzhou’s most complex urban fabrics.
The proposal explores an AI-driven architectural framework that redefines the logic of co-living and co-working through a high-density discrete system. By learning from the organic vertical growth of the urban village, the design introduces a “Vertical Metabolism Frame”, a structural and ecological scaffold that integrates modular living units, shared working platforms, and vertical agriculture.
Rather than demolishing and rebuilding, the system embeds new architectural metabolism within existing urban fragments, allowing gradual densification, adaptation, and self-organization. Each module operates as both a social and ecological cell, capable of responding to changing population, material flows, and environmental conditions. The project aims to reveal how algorithmic and material intelligence can regenerate urban villages as resilient ecosystems, balancing collective life, resource efficiency, and spatial complexity.
Through AI-generated spatial prototypes, diagrammatic workflows, and tectonic studies, the proposal envisions a new typology of adaptive highdensity architecture rooted in the local material and cultural context of Shipai Village.
Viet - Naarm //
Bao Phuong Nghi Nguyen
Supervisor: Prof. Graham Crist
Viet–Naarm breathes life back into the long-silent walls of the John Darling & Son Mill, where flour once drifted through the air like morning mist and the rhythm of labour once echoed through red brick and timber beams. The dust of industry now gives way to the pulse of memory, a living museum for the Vietnamese diaspora, poised at the threshold of the new Melbourne Airport rail.
This is not architecture as division, but as a curated in-between. Neither wholly Vietnamese nor entirely Australian, Viet–Naarm becomes a terrain for the third culture: a ground of translation, adaptation, and quiet resilience. It draws upon the familiar geometries of home: the narrow hẻm alleyways, the layered terraces, the gathering spaces, and lets them breathe anew within Melbourne’s open laneways and civic landscapes.
Through poetic homage, the project transforms lived experiences into spatial memory. A place that remembers the scent of morning food stalls, the chorus of market chatter, and the slow hum of trains passing nearby, each gesture folded into architecture. Here, heritage is not preserved as relic but enacted as evolution, reshaped by every step, every gathering, every story told beneath its eaves.
Viet–Naarm is a vessel of becoming, a home in motion, where belonging is neither fixed nor lost, but continually rewritten in the heart of Melbourne’s journey.
Till Death Do Us Part
Cameron Lee Burnett
Supervisor: Dr. Mark Jacques
Till Death Do Us Part explores how architects might extend their role beyond design and delivery to become active custodians of the built environment, maintaining, adapting, and caring for buildings as they evolve over time. The project asks what would need to change for architects to remain engaged in the everyday life of architecture, collaborating with owners’ corporations, facilities managers, and residents to deliver ongoing design value.
Drawing on research by Stewart Brand and Frank Duffy, and inspired by practices such as These Are The Projects We Do Together, the project imagines the Temporal Architect as a custodian of a portfolio of existing buildings. The Temporal Architect uses design to add value to repairs, coordinate budgets, and consult with owners’ corporations. These narratives reveal how design interventions, from small details to large-scale changes, move beyond the reactive, like-for-like replacement approach typical of business-as-usual maintenance. By leading with design value, the Temporal Architect enhances both property value and liveability for residents.
Looking back on these stories, the radical idea of expanding practice beyond the point of handover can only benefit the profession. Being part of a building’s daily life is far more meaningful than a post-occupancy evaluation. As the Temporal Architect learns with buildings over time, this ongoing relationship brings new knowledge and opportunities to change, improve, and innovate the way we design and deliver projects. In this way, maintenance and repair becomes not a constraint, but a framework for new forms of design, whether big or small.
The Embrace
Supervisor: Simon Whibley
The Embrace is not a building, it is a living ground for collective expression and personal restoration. Born from the streets of Footscray, it transforms public space into a sanctuary for youth, artists, and voices often unheard.
The open plaza acts as a canvas of flux, a space in constant motion, shaped by music, graffiti, protest, and performance. Containers become murals of social reflection, ramps spiral as ribbons of free movement, and walls turn into stages for expression and change.
Beyond the plaza, the architecture opens inward, to spaces of learning, creation, and healing. A student residence and a mid-scale auditorium form the inner heart of The Embrace: places for introspection, dialogue, and art therapy. Here, young performers live, create, and rebuild their sense of belonging through community.
This project is both extroverted and intimate, a public celebration and a private restoration. It listens to the city, responds to its chaos, and transforms it into connection.
The Embrace is a social organism, where art becomes resistance, and architecture becomes care.
Allotropes of the Collective speculates on a new condition of living, one where housing is no longer conceived as a singular, enclosed dwelling but as a constellation of fragments, interdependent, intergenerational, and continually evolving. The project imagines the domestic realm as a collective habitat that is layered, porous, and experiential.
The matrix of clusters is disrupted by a central promenade that threads through the site, connecting to the Merri Creek green belt through the integrated water catchment, while its sequence of public amenities draws the scheme into dialogue with the broader landscape and community. This axis binds together a network of courtyards and voids. Here, voids operate as instruments of connection and perception, existing not as absence but as living thresholds that mediate between body, dwelling, and landscape. They dissolve the static idea of the home into gradients of intimacy, privacy, and collectivity.
The scheme forms a syncretic composition, a coexistence of differences where cultural practices, generations, and sensory ideals intertwine. Each cluster becomes its own allotrope, an alternative form of domestic life within a larger, evolving ecology of relationships and proximities. Architecture here becomes a weave of thresholds, voids, and sensory choreographies rather than an assembly of rooms. It asks what it means to live together without erasure, to be private without isolation. Through its interplay of light, material, and atmosphere, Allotropes of the Collective proposes domesticity as a dynamic field of relations, a speculative landscape of coexistence, emotion, and spatial reciprocity.
Between Scales
Chih-l Lin
Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao
‘Between Scales’ is set in the Kaiyuan Port on Lanyu Island, proposing a coastal architectural strategy that lies between sea, land and sky. In response to the symbiotic relationship between the Tao people's marine culture and the fragile ecosystem. This project is not about creating a single landmark, but rather by means of a series of coherent spaces - walkways, fish markets, ship storage, marine laboratories and cultural settlements - it constructs a journey of "arrival - understanding - respect - coexistence", allowing visitors to learn before experiencing, and understand before appreciating.
The design is based on the island cosmology: the sea as the source, the land as the sustenance, and the sky as the spirit. Through the translation of the plank boat structure, wind corridors, and tidal rhythms, the architectural space presents a light, open, and harmonious state with nature. Tourists walk slowly along the seaside path, witnessing fishermen at work, coral restoration, and the operation of cultural workshops. Here, they understand the daily life and sacredness of Lanyu.
The core intention of the project is to transform tourism from an expendable activity into a process of learning and conservation, allowing outsiders to enter the island's culture and ecosystem with a humble attitude. Architecture here becomes an ethical practice: preserving cultural dignity, supporting the local economy, restoring the ecology, and ultimately enabling Lanyu to continue to exist in its vibrant, sovereign form.
Circumstantial Architecture
Dale Manandic Supervisor: Lauren Garner
In many Asian cities, from Manila to Ho Chi Minh City, one square metre rarely holds a single function. In the Philippines, a grave can be transformed into a home and a cavity upon a wall could house a store. In Vietnam, a room can be a shop by day and a bedroom by night; a sidewalk can host commerce, gatherings, and circulation all at once. These are not accidents, but strategies: spatial economies that respond to necessity, evolving through everyday acts of occupation.
It creates a series of interventions within the existing built form, attaching to what is already there or creating architecture in spaces you’d think were not possible, this is what I call circumstantial architecture, architecture which is not premeditated by continually negotiated.
The project aims to study these spaces, extracting strategies which enable ingenuity within scarcity, developing architecture which is conducive to multiple uses. This further questions how the pressures of density, limited means, and how circumstances can generate architecture, which is flexible, adaptive and evolves with time.
circumstantial architecture.
Future Proofing
Dominic James Concar
Supervisor: Lucinda Mason
This project explores alternative ways that urban development can support climate adaptive architecture and its relationship to infrastructure in the city, particularly addressing the pressures faced by Townsville, Queensland. Townsville is susceptible to extreme weather events, existing on a natural floodplain, resulting in massive flood insurance premiums and a current housing vacancy of only 0.96%. The project focuses on high-risk land along the Ross River, which was recently inundated and yet designated for residential housing development. The strategy integrates flood mitigation with water preservation. Drawing inspiration from the Tokyo G Cans system, it proposes a large underground water reservoir to hold floodwaters. This stored water can then be pumped back into the Ross River Dam, providing support to residents during Townsville’s perpetual dry season water restrictions. The resultant material byproduct – an estimated 2-4 million odd bricks from the excavation – is recontextualised to create a climate responsive medium-density suburban model. The architecture applies principles of the Queenslander typology, utilising a think structural brick core made from the excavated soil. To allow water to egress freely when inundated, the design lifts the first floor to 2.95 meters above ground level.
Medium-density housing units are designed for passive cooling, featuring centralised flood plans, shared community verandahs, and grill plates to maximise air circulation and combat tropical heat. The site utilises the required excavation volume to create large, stepped terraced landscaping components made of rammed earth. These terraces densify the waters edge to extend the cultural outdoor living ideals of Townsville residents, allowing for gardens, outdoor recreation and shade to exercise in, while a natural pool uses the adjacent river water to provide a central community asset.
Gently Down The Stream
Ee Min Lim
Supervisor: Vei Tan
This project extends the trajectory of communal infrastructures and their programmatic shift through decades of evolving needs by reimagining how the Abbotsford Convent precinct might transform through a renewed understanding of care. It acts as a counter-proposal to the planned demolition of a defunct two-storey aged care home and its replacement with a new four-storey private residential building containing 64 apartments for the ageing community.
Drawing from the intertwined histories of care that have existed along the Yarra River-indigenous, institutional, and industrial-it aims to offer broader public benefit in a much-loved cultural precinct through re-kindling care as a relationship and labour as a form of socialisation.Testings involve a speculative reimagination of industrial bygones resulting in five dispersed dwelling and maintenance machine hybrids, each catered to a unique caretaker type.
The next phase of the project attempts to integrate hybrid testings and situate them within the context of the Abbotsford Convent’s existing buildings and landscapes. The current twelve buildings within the precinct can be categorised into three spatial and temporal conditions-vacant and awaiting restoration, low-use or partial vacancy, occupied and active. Using Joan Tronto’s five-phased schema of care as a design framework, a series of interventions demonstrate how architecture could nourish, amplify, and contaminate acts of care across these conditions.
Counterpublic Stage
Ella Johnson Supervisor: Hannah Zhu
Counterpublic Stage imagines Architecture as choreography for counterpublic life. It rehearses an alternative mode of public architecture for Phillip Island, a landscape already saturated by image, capital, and ecological performance. Situated on the foreshore of Cowes, at the old Isle of Wight site, the project locates itself within a field of contradictions, embracing complexity as material rather than problem.
Four interwoven strata; ecology, agriculture, tourism, and activism, frame the island’s identity not as a stable image but as an active negotiation. Architecture operates here as both medium and mirror: a stage on which social, political, and environmental tensions are performed rather than resolved.
Through the methodologies of theatre, allegory, and weaving, design becomes dramaturgy. The Tarot functions as a speculative apparatus, each card a prompt for program, scene, or dialogue. From this process emerge five archetypal buildings: The Sinner, The Pilgrim, The Guide, The Divine Presence, and The Witness. Together, they weave a new cultural fabric at the island’s entry; part museum, part stage, part collective assembly performing publicness as disagreement: playful, plural, and unresolved.
Counterpublic Stage positions architecture as choreography: an infrastructure of participation where conflict, humour, and care coexist. It renders visible the unstable stage upon which the island continually performs itself.
Karori Re-Imagined
Emili Shiraiwa
Supervisor: Dr. Laura Szyman
Karori Re-imagined explores a new approach to suburban housing, creating an alternative for first-home buyers in Karori, Wellington. The project addresses suburban exclusivity and housing affordability by transforming existing houses into multi-unit dwellings, increasing density while retaining the familiar suburban character.
By removing traditional property boundaries and introducing shared ownership of land and communal spaces, the design encourages more efficient use of space and promotes a stronger sense of community. New floor plans are designed within the existing housing frames, making use of previously underutilised space. Creating smaller units that respond to contemporary living needs.
This approach allows the suburb to evolve, offering diverse housing options without demolition or loss of identity. It demonstrates that density and domesticity can coexist within the existing suburban fabric.
Adapting the suburban frame guide supports the project as a replicable model to be used around the country. Creating a new option in the property market for first home buyers.
Risky Business
Supervisor:
Anne Robinson
Dr. Laura Szyman
This is the story of the Risky Architect, revealing the quiet rule of insurance as it seeps through every project. In West Footscray’s proposed data center, where risk and demand entwine, three voices narrate: Fear, catastrophe personified; the Risky Architect, bending risk toward generosity; and the Building Surveyor, grounding all in compliance and liability. The project asks: if insurance already shapes architecture through fear, can its logic be rewritten toward public good?
The data center becomes both stage and experiment, exaggerating insurance’s spatial mechanisms - duplicate, contain, exclude - to expose and redirect them. Inverted, these logics redistribute risk, turning untouchable buildings into parts of the community. The structure grows safer, more insurable, yet unexpectedly civic.
As technology advances and redundancy sets in, the building enters its afterlife - transforming a site of extraction into one of repair and rehabilitation, from data servers to architecture and landscape alike.
Here, fear is not erased but rewritten, from corporate defence into civic possibility. The project reveals how insurance constructs risk aversion, proposing instead an architecture that redistributes risk away from the community, and projects a post-data future for the building that remains when all systems fail.
It’s time for some Risky Business.
Gemma
Infra.Culture
Hari Prabhu
Supervisor: Steven Chu
Infra.Culture is an architectural proposition that redefines infrastructure as a cultural connector rather than a mere utilitarian system. Located in Richmond, along the banks of the Yarra River, the project emerges as an inclusive civic platform that reconnects fragmented communities and cultural networks once disrupted by urban development. Conceived as both a piece of social infrastructure and a living cultural organism, the design operates on multiple layers.
The ground plane serves as a fluid cultural landscape integrating art, learning, and performance. At the same time, the roof transforms into an accessible public plaza that overlooks the river, encouraging gathering, dialogue, and exchange. This architectural proposal seeks to reconnect people and cultural communities once divided and disrupted by the city’s infrastructure development through a new form of infrastructure that integrates cultural programs and public recreation spaces. It aims to foster social interaction and collective engagement by supporting community-driven art, learning, and cultural exchange.
Through this integration, Infra.Culture enables communities to share their heritage, sustain their practices, and shape a collective future together. Ultimately, the project envisions infrastructure as a civic and cultural framework, one that restores connection, continuity, and coexistence along the urban edge of the Yarra River.
Tailored By Current
Harry Richard Kingston Supervisor: Charlie Boman
Tailored by Current is an amphibious structure that nurtures and homes a native marine and coastal ecosystem through architectural forms and explorative spaces. It combines artificial reefs, mangrove growth, ground stabilisation and the wonder of those who find curiosity in a rockpool. This project investigates the opportunities in architecture when you embrace the local environment as part designer.
Stemming from material research and experimentation, the project uses the process of natural erosion to carve out the architecture. The architectural formwork is 3D printed with sandstone, located onto site, and then filled with oystercrete. Whilst the oystercrete cures, the sandstone begins to erode, slowly revealing the structure within. The erosion rate of the formwork is influenced by its thickness and binding glue.
To establish a healthy and grounded native ecosystem, the structural elements that offer shelter for animals, or substrate for both marine and land fauna are exposed first. Having thinner formwork concealing these features will allow the structure to be engaged with native flora and fauna before the architectural components are revealed for human access.
Once the architectural elements are later revealed, allowing a higher capacity of visitors, the design relies on the change of tides to control the accessibility. As high tide approaches, less space is available for visitors, resting the ecosystem from disturbance.
The network of structures provides a place of exploration, curiosity, wonder, growth and connection. It is a design with the intention of growing with its landscape.
Harry Kingston
RMIT City North Masterplan
Henry Joel Neil
Supervisor:
Dr. Michael Spooner
The project accelerates RMIT's City North Masterplan, uncovering a prophetic will for the university's potential. A premonition interested in an unfinished union building under building 8 and the university's ability to change its mind. It recasts the campus's history into a coded object, one that might slowly unfold across the city north site.
The project continuously reorients its inhabitation, designed as a professional union, and in the process of becoming a social union, it is eventually situated as student accommodation at the centre of the city block, slipping onto what was cardigan St. From its failures it attempts to gather what it might be like to live on campus in proximity to the city's strange intelligence. The anthesis of a masterplan’s stabilised form, the building attempts to be to agent of disruption, aware that the university might change its mind again.
An archetypal geometry like the holographic principle emerges as a method to imprint the projects accelerated state. Its temporal disruptions and shortcomings become a productive catalyst for the next thing. After 15 weeks, it appears as an urban object willing to undergo another inhabitation, knowing it will never be complete.
Alleyscape Incremental Adhocism
Hong Quang Lam
Supervisor: Dr. Jan Van Schaik
Ho Chi Minh City's informal alleyways (hẻm) are semi-public, semi-private, multi-functional spaces created by residents to address their living needs. Despite challenges with hygiene, fire safety, and access to services, they possess important qualities such as human scale, distinctive character, everyday usability, and cultural value.
Contemporary planning approaches typically demolish these neighbourhoods entirely, often involving forceful evictions and unfair compensation. This destroys everyday practices, collective experiences, and knowledge of the city while reducing local housing supply and simply moving informal issues elsewhere. These aggressive strategies have created deep distrust between communities and authorities.
"Alleyscape" proposes rebuilding this trust through a catalogue of interventions across multiple scales: tiny, small, medium, large. They range from simple infrastructure elements to adaptive building components. Each intervention operates independently, allowing residents to choose what works for their needs. This bottom-up adoption process demonstrates expert value to the residents while maintaining their agency.
After trust has been established through successful small interventions, the project proposes a more substantial architectural intervention. This mixeduse structure incorporates market, civic office, and gathering functions. It represents my architectural interpretation developed through the study of local conditions, community needs, and architecture. It is about adding to rather than replacing the existing fabric.
Along The Edge
Isabella Shirley Konig Supervisor: Tom Muratore
Along the edge, adjacent to the Birrarung and above the train tracks stands 6 sisters, tall in their presence. Their reflection creating their 7th sibling - a celestial chase.
This project proposes an evaluation of the cities edge. The edge of the Hoddle Grid, The edge of the Arts Precinct and the edge of the Birrarung. An act of value management. One not as a source of apprehension but one of affirmation and hope — a means of discerning what the city holds valuable today.
It is an act of architecture which platforms and gives space for progress. A home for a First Nations Assembly and 65,000-years of art, cultural production and moments of reflection.
The project unfolds elements of the city and past iterations of itself to then interiorise them again. It blurs the threshold between exterior and interior, public and institutional, allowing the sisters to act not only as a vessel for display but as an extension of the civic realm. A civic gesture, an urban affirmation along the edge.
The proposition aims to serve as a medium for engaging with this discourse, showcasing architecture’s role in establishing the cities values generationally. A repository of memory with the city at its centre.
The In-Between Conditions
Jackson Le
Supervisor: Dr. Patrick Macasaet
This project is a counter proposal to the new tram depot currently occupying the site in Maribyrnong. Once a former hostel home for migrants during and after World War 2, the site housed thousands of people who arrived in Australia escaping war and political upheaval. It stands as a significant chapter in the nation’s transformation into a multicultural society.
The suburb of Maribyrnong is known for one of the largest shopping centres in Melbourne: “Highpoint Shopping Centre”. The conflict of the suburb is mostly absent in its cultural identity, where Maribyrnong is being overshadowed by the Highpoint shopping centre, which becomes an attraction beacon. This proposition reimagines what could have been if civic and infrastructural programs were designed to coexist rather than erase history.
This new building proposes a new hybrid building combining civic and infrastructure, where clashing programs become a new experience. Through site exploration and experimentation, the design develops a language shaped by three experimented frameworks: civic and infrastructural typologies, contested ecologies and film as a moment. Together, these approaches seek to transform the former migrant hostel into a dynamic civic and infrastructural building with the programs of a cultural centre and tram depot.
JACKSONLE|S3781094|PATRICKMACASAET
Techna-Ornament Morphologies
Jatan Shah
Supervisor: Charlie Boman
Techna-Ornament Morphologies reveals an alternative method of façade renewal for modernist buildings at the end of their 60-year life cycle. The alternative is not to demolish them or replace them with a new, flat curtain wall, but to propose an additively manufactured, AI-driven façade that redefines the boundaries of contemporary architectural expression.
It seeks to return depth, identity, and spatial experience to high-rise façades by employing digitally generated geometries that merge ornamentation and performance. The project integrates AI generative design, computational modelling, and robotic fabrication to develop façades that are efficient in production, precise in assembling, and expressive in form.
This system enables new modes of habitation-typical balconies, external walkways, and transitional spaces-which transform the façade into a more inhabitable extension of the building than a passive surface. As such, ornament becomes a functional and generative element emerging from material logics, fabrication strategies, and environmental responses.
The final proposition puts the ICI House as a testing ground to show how existing modernist frameworks can adapt to contemporary technologies while providing a vision of what the next era of façade design could be, one in which AI, robotics, and human creativity work together to produce intelligent, performative architecture.
Techna - Ornament
Revival of Vertical Ornament
Techna-Ornament Morphologies explores an alternative approach to the renewal of façades that are reaching the end of their 60-year performance lifespan.Rather than resorting to demolition and replacement with a generic curtain wall system, the project proposes a more ornamental, AI-driven, and additively manufactured façade — one that redefines the boundaries of contemporary façade design.This new architectural skin aims to create opportunities for external habitation, accessibility, and motion, transforming the façade from a passive enclosure into an active and expressive extension of the building.
A Change In Pace
Jherwyn Hanne Roxas Torres
Supervisor: Claire Scorpo
At approximately 20 km from Melbourne’s CBD, Epping North is a growing precinct of Epping that branches into Wollert. In 2024, the much-awaited intersection between Edgars Road and Rockfield Street was completed, easing entry into the area in its south-western boundary. Today, there stands a hushed reminder, a sign to establish Epping North’s final (major) town centre. But to what effect? With its proximity to The Village, the popular Costco and the well-rounded Epping Plaza, what cause is there to make another? In the current foot traffic hostile suburb there is little reason to visit, condemning the area to be just another short stop.
A change in pace challenges the structure of the suburbs, questioning its role in shaping how communities express themselves against its rigid and efficient construction. Evaluating how zoning stifles individual expression and encourages reliance on cars. It proposes to reshape these unproductive patterns by creating a walkable environment designed to unite rather than separate. Introducing slowness to promote engagement between neighbours and agricultural research to insert seasonality into the area and form a connection with its native landscape. All in an effort to overcome the road for first we design the road, then the road designs us.
Eyes Wide Shut
Jianhua Huang
Supervisor: Adam Pustola
The unique grid classification of Melbourne in the last century and the region's continuous cycle of speculative development have led to a large number of buildings having dull and monotonous functions in the current environment. This has caused these buildings to be forgotten by people gradually.
These vacant buildings will be connected and gradually occupy the central grid of Melbourne in the future. Why don't we make use of these spaces and achieve the greatest mutual benefit with the renovation? Local disadvantaged teenagers and Chinese international students will become fresh blood injected into these vacant shells and establish a new balance with the original occupants.
This project aims to establish new student housing for teenagers in vacant commercial buildings, creating a new form of public building. International students and local teenagers come into contact with each other, learn about each other and help each other in this space, so as to adapt more quickly to future studies and work. there is also a contact zone between students and adults, and a third space for outsiders and local residents. These young people will bring new vitality to the area and reactivate the entire region. Ultimately, this architectural form represents the beginning of restoring and revitalising Melbourne’s central grid in the future.
Warreeny Biik
Joshua James Tao Allardyce Supervisor: Dr. Christine Phillips
This project situates itself at the convergent expression of First Nations and Western colonial history. Titled warreeny biik, meaning ocean and land, bestowed upon the project by Boon Wurrung Elder N’arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs AM, the proposal aims to further the memory of country.
The project asks: What is an architecture of collective memory and history? What does this look like when Port Phillip Bay has flooded?
Amongst new wetlands and swamps the former South Melbourne Town Hall is left to decay and act as an historical anchor from which past, present and future histories of South Melbourne can be expressed. This project reframes the concept of preservation to be beyond environmental and historical. Using artefacts of past and present South Melbourne not as perfectly reclaimed objects but as echoes and memories of what stood before. New economies sprout from these ruins, a Boon Wurrung Research and Discovery Centre as well as the Willum Warrain Seaweed Nursery now serve to rewild and foster future knowledge.
Here, South Melbourne becomes an island of memory and renewal. Exploring how designing across deep time must reckon with sea-level rise and the shared history of Indigenous and western knowledge as pathways into the future.
Bottom-Up Reflections
Kejia Wang
Supervisor: Claire Scorpo
This project begins by challenging the limitations of a top-down, policy-based understanding of Huaxi Village, a perspective that reduces the place to traffic, zoning, and functional mapping. Through the insights of Jan Gehl, Jane Jacobs, and Simon Sadler, I shifted toward a bottom-up, human-centered reading of the village, focusing on everyday experience, human scale, and the relationships that shape social life.
From months of observation and documentation, I identified five forms of bottom-up change, health, social, habitat, economic, and cultural, which became the foundation for five interventions at different scales. These are ultimately consolidated into one architectural project located at the Pink Apartment block, integrating the garage, apartment, and moat into a residential–economic–cultural complex.
The design draws from the lived memories, cultural characteristics, and small improvisations created by villagers: fishing along the moat, potted plants at doorsteps, informal chess sheds, and even illegal stalls that inject energy into public space. My aim is to celebrate these spontaneous acts as forms of resistance against monotonous collectivity, and to reconstruct this socialist legacy through architecture that amplifies vibrancy, fosters spontaneity, and encourages people to spend more time on the street.
Looking Forward to Look Back
Kun Dai Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao
In cities where memory is often overwritten by progress, the Kowloon Walled City stands as an unresolved fragment-an architecture of survival, density, and contradiction. This project reconsiders its legacy not as an object to be reconstructed, but as a living organism to be reinterpreted. Through the act of retrofit, the design proposes a new form of urban continuity - one that builds w ithin the rem ains, rather than upon their absence. The intervention operates through a tri-layered strategy of retaining, recasting, and inserting. Existing concrete cores and tim ber frames are preserved as the city’s structural memory; selected walls are reconfigured to form open corridors and collective thresholds; while lightw eight bam boo and glass structures are inserted to accom modate new programs such as capsule hostels, communal cafés, and rooftop gardens. A new network of bridges and ramps enables vertical circulation, allowing residents to move across towers without returning to the ground - reviving the fluid connectivity once embedded in Kowloon’s informal fabric.
Socially, the project embraces the resilience of community life; culturally, it reclaims a site long stigmatised as chaos; environm entally, it demonstrates regeneration through reuse and minimal intervention.Ultimately, the proposal is a meditation on how cities remember - a layered architecture where the past is neither erased nor frozen, but continually rewritten through the lives that inhabit it.
The In-Between
Lachlan Christopher Caligari Supervisor: Lucinda Mason
Set within Coburg, this project reimagines the role of the library in an increasingly digital and autocentric age. Rather than a single monumental building, it proposes a distributed network of civic nodes that merge libraries with transport and social infrastructure, transforming transient sites into civic grounds for connection, learning, and exchange.
Drawing inspiration from the Social Impact Bond model, the project positions the library as both a civic anchor and an investment in human connection and support, where the value of architecture is measured not in profit, but in the strength of the community and assets it sustains. The proposal hybridises three urban conditions, the library, fragmented social infrastructure, and transport nodes, across architectural, urban, and micro-urban scales.
At Coburg Station, a new civic typology mediates the movement of transit with the stillness of reflection, creating spaces that invite pause and interaction. A secondary, more notional, intervention at the Bell Street tram stop extends this framework through accessible public space and community-curated micro-libraries.
Together, these interventions challenge the MeriBek City Council’s brief for a single centralised monument, instead repositioning the library as a distributed, living civic connector that amplifies existing social bonds, embeds moments of exchange within everyday movement, and redefines architecture as infrastructure for connection, civic renewal, and collective well-being.
How to Fix a Broken Building
Lachlan Edward May
Supervisor: Dr. Mark Jacques
This project explores how broken architecture can be repaired through adaptive interventions rather than demolition. Using the German Club Tivoli as a test site, it proposes five steps that identify and respond to architectural neglect, focusing on buildings that have lost purpose, adaptability, and connection to their surroundings.
The design opens the building to its community, revealing what was once hidden and transforming the façade into a living surface that engages with the street. Layers of space are reconfigured to encourage movement, visibility, and participation, replacing isolation with interaction. Inside, once rigid layouts evolve into adaptable, shared environments that can host new forms of activity.
These interventions act as a guide for repairing architecture that has been over refined or forgotten. Rather than erasing the past, the project works with existing typologies, translating their structures and materials into a new kind of openness. Through small but deliberate acts of transformation, the building is reconnected to its place, its users, and its future, demonstrating that broken architecture can be reimagined through care, visibility, and reuse, not replaced.
Snowy Mountains
Lachlan James Buckley
Supervisor: Charlie Boman
This project explores a new form of tectonic architecture grounded in the alpine landscape of Thredbo in the Snowy Mountains.
Conceived as a central ski centre, it establishes a much-needed hub for the region while simultaneously operating as an experimental platform for AIassisted design and advanced manufacturing. The architecture is generated through a synthesis of additive and subtractive fabrication techniques, employing on-site mobile manufacturing hubs to produce components that respond directly to the environmental and material conditions of place.
Drawing its formal and tectonic logic from the surrounding alpine terrain, its fractured granite, twisted snow gums, and layered sediment, the project translates these local characteristics into structural and spatial systems that are both expressive and performative. Each element of the building becomes a nreflection of its making, where digital fabrication processes are not hidden but celebrated as part of the architectural language.
Ultimately, the Thredbo Ski Centre situates itself as a prototype for site-specific digital fabrication, merging technological precision with environmental intuition. It proposes an architecture where the act of making and the form of place are inseparable, redefining how construction, landscape, and technology converge within the Australian alpine condition.
Our experience of the world differs dependent on our visual perception which is informed by experience and memory.
This project is centered around a process of grafting and merging. Three precedents; The John Soane museum, Heidi II and The Boyd education centre informed the decisions about circulation, structure and distribution. These successful examples of buildings which fit the narrative of homes turned institution are the building blocks of a hybrid plant nursery and gallery where art and nature grow together. This project lands in a pre-existing context where biodiversity education exists.This is a contribution to the public; reflecting a sense of self where art is significant.
Currently Artland nursery occupies a plot of land south of the Woodside Biodiversity education centre. This project presents an art gallery where plants are grown on site to regenerate and bring back life to a former site of extraction. Quarry bay has historically been extracted from for it’s granite resources. Bringing back art to the site of it’s construction extraction is a gesture to the land. An artist studio sits at the heart of the building above a collanade an out of the ordinary place where inhabited exhibition spaces blend nature with art.
Laura
Liana Jasmine Del Campo Supervisor: Lauren Garner
Like anyone, women deserve to feel safe, cared for and supported. Domestic violence victims deserve to be guided to a place of comfort and ease, where they can adjust and reach for support to move forward. Currently, victims are denied choice and sent into inadequate, temporary housing that provides little support and no safety measures.
This project aims to end this. It is a highly specific project investigating the finer details of women’s needs, providing support and offering a range of options to support each unique scenario. It aims to end the cycle of sending women to inadequate housing due to the shortage of domestic violence housing in Australia and gives women a chance to feel considered and cared for in a space designed for women.
The design works from the inside out. It offers six home type options that caters to a range of living scenarios. These home types then dictate the outcome of the building, while achieving concealment through a strategic facade design. This then connects to an urban strategy that can be implemented to further support these women. This strategy aims to stitch together the site’s community, to contribute to a hopeful support system for these women.
Casa Sana
THE BETWEENSPACEUS: REIMAGINING
EVERDAY ENCOUNTERS IN COLLECTIVE STUDENT LIVING.
The Space Between Us
Supervisor: Helen Duong
Reimagining Everyday Encounters in Collective Student Living addresses the issue of social avoidance and isolation among international students in student accommodation.
The new typology critiques the Purpose Built Student Accommodation models of individual living and dining spaces to smaller living units with distributed shared programs for daily routines and connection. The design focuses on the space and encounters between, in elevator landings, open staircases and corridors, the transitional zones where informal interactions naturally occur. Through distributed communal kitchen, dining, laundries, lounges for games, music, study, making, reading and spirituality, the project reimagines how architecture can nurture spontaneous exchange and build emotional wellbeing incrementally. The socialising preferences of students from different cultural backgrounds is explored such as study habits, spiritual and celebration preferences, drawing inspiration from the spatial characteristics of Asian communal life such as alleyways, courtyards, and thresholds. These elements are reinterpreted to create an environment where diversity triggers memories, links to home and enhances the shared experience. These encounters are extended to the ground floor laneway/carpark and upper-courtyard, where night market and cultural festivals occur and student related commerce is shared with the wider Hawthorn community and nearby Swinburne campus. An extension of the impact international students have made on the vibrancy of the Melbourne CBD is envisaged here in Hawtorn. It is hoped that this will encourage timid students to interact with locals and intensify commercial trading through the shopping strip.
Louis Fernando Juan Untu
Interlaced Adaptive Modular Habitat
Luyao Jiang
Supervisor: Prof. Alisa Andrasek
Kesennuma, a coastal town in northeastern Japan, faces gradual submersion as sea levels rise, challenging the long-standing relationship between settlement and water. With its population aging and economy declining, the city becomes a testing ground for an adaptive architectural system that redefines human coexistence with the sea.
The project develops a polydirectional modular system capable of expanding outward across multiple axes and continuously evolving through spatial and structural adaptation. Drawing from Japanese timber tectonics and principles of prefabrication and dry joinery, it forms a self-reconfigurable and iterative framework that transforms architecture from a fixed object into a living, adaptive system.
The Adaptive Waterfront Living System provides self-sufficient modular spaces for shared living, integrating habitation with small-scale production and local resilience. Beneath the surface, the Submarine Habitat System extends this network into the sea, where textured structures and interlaced frameworks create protected habitats for marine species and stabilize local fisheries, ensuring the continuity of Kesennuma’s primary economy.
Together, they form a symbiotic architecture that integrates habitation, production, and ecologyblurring the boundary between land and sea through continuous adaptation.
Unbound Ground
Manisha Abhisara Keshava Murthy Supervisor:
Simon Drysdale
Unbound Ground is a healing and second-living place for Aboriginal veterans nestled among the Lara RSL and the Mittagong Reserve, beneath the You Yangs' looming horizon. It challenges traditional commemorative architecture by focusing on Country rather than monuments or symmetry, using movement, material, and story. The notion that unbinds the rigid geometries of colonial planning, instead drawing from the fluid pathways of the eel and the wide span of Bunjil’s wings.
Architecture here becomes a living contour. Curved buildings rest low to the earth. Curved structures are low to the ground, connected by a looping landscape grid inspired by Roberto Burle Marx's impressionistic terrains. Porous rock walls, reminiscent of Lara's medieval basalt limits, gently define thresholds rather than divisions, while yarning circles rise from the ground like the vast expanses in the flower fields beyond. Timber, stone, and subtle tones of ochre, gray, and green integrate the project with its surroundings.
Unbound Ground is more than a building; it is a cultural act that reconnects veterans to their country and the country to remembrance. It invites architecture to listen, heal, and make room for stories that have never had walls but have always belonged to the land itself.
On The Verge
Miriam
Hanna
Supervisor: Dr. Laura Szyman
In a suburb where garages double as studios and fences double as shopfronts, this project asks: what if the verge, that leftover strip between house and street, became the architecture of the neighbourhood?
On the Verge rewrites the familiar patterns of home and commerce through a series of small, playful interventions. Boutiques spill from bedrooms, cinemas tuck beneath roofs, and cafés open where carports once stood. Each piece works with what’s already there, driveways, fences, lawns, and verges, turning them into shared civic ground. Together they form a distributed shopping centre, one that belongs as much to the street as to the house.
This isn’t about replacement, but reorganisation. The project draws from Reservoir’s everyday improvisations, the lash studios, tailoring rooms, and backyard gyms that already blur domestic and commercial life. Through small architectural acts of incision, spill, and overlap, On the Verge evidences and builds upon these existing suburban logics to show their potential as real and ongoing forms of urban organisation, revealing how local acts of adaptation can collectively reimagine the structure and identity of the suburb itself.
Crime and Ornament
Nanci Nassima
Supervisor: Dr. Laura Szyman
Crime and Ornament reimagines one of Sydney Road Coburg’s fire-bombed shopfronts as a microcosm of the street itself, condensing its scars, memory, and order into a community facility. Emerging from the street’s unique orders, the project transforms what is typically overlooked, the damaged, dirty, and mundane, into the foundation for community life.
Through the lens of Dirty Theory and informed by the writings of Helene Frichot, Christine Hawley, and Irénée Scalbert, the work treats ornament not as decoration, but as a tool for spatial and social repair. Fragments of the existing street including its wiring, signage, brickwork, and decay are gathered and reinterpreted into a new architectural language.
As a response to the street itself, the community hub operates as both a microcosm and a framework; a place where Merri-bek Council’s priorities for social inclusion and active living are embedded within a broader logic of repositioning. Every surface bears evidence of its making, trauma, and past; exposed and layered to reveal process and memory.
Crime and Ornament proposes an architecture that grows through time; one that positions Sydney Road’s orders of vacancy and wear not as obstacles or ugliness, but as sites of possibility for opportunity, adaptation, and future life.
If
& Weather, It Comes
Natasha Wambui Wanjiru Supervisor: Liam Oxlade
‘If & Weather, It Comes’ begins with the illusion of accuracy and ends closer to weather itself, restless, plural, and resistant to capture. It moves through towers, fields, and the people who read between them, tracing where knowledge slips from record into rumour. The architecture holds this drift, giving shape to the misbehaving instruments, the data that hums in dialect, the public folding into the forecast. Here, deep time and the body return as instruments of knowing, where Indigenous and local readings of the sky unsettle the certainty of measure.
What gathers is neither resolution nor report but a choreography of attention, an architecture that listens, lingers, and lets the sky speak in its own time.
Urban Graft
Nawanjana Sooriya Arachchi Supervisor: Steven Chu
This project began as an exploration of middle space and spatial justice within the dense urban fabric of Pettah, Sri Lanka. It questioned how architecture might mediate between production and public life in a city where spatial access and value are unevenly distributed. This inquiry evolved into an examination of productive urban precincts, frameworks where industry and community can coexist rather than exclude one another.
The proposal reimagines Pettah as a site for a visible, civic form of production centred on hemp as a sustainable material and cultural practice. The design consolidates four existing urban blocks into a single continuous structure, dissolving boundaries between work and public space. Circulation routes, voids, and open thresholds create degrees of transparency between the processes of making and the surrounding city.
Here, production is framed as performance: the act of making is both functional and communicative, unfolding as something to be observed, understood, and shared. Through this, the project speculates on how urban industry can remain civic and accessible, transforming Pettah from a site of consumption into one of collective participation and knowledge exchange.
For Good
Nicholas Philio Supervisor: Prof. Graham Crist
For Good asks what it means for a ciy to survive time.
In Ballarat, a place where history is preserved to the point of stillness, the project argues that true preservation lies not in freezing the past, but in allowing the city to change. For Good therefore embraces the double meaning of its title: for the better and forever gone. Every act of renewal becomes both an act of loss and of continuity.
Throughout the framework of a 10-minute city, For Good reclaims. Ballarat’s inner ten blocks as a self-sufficient urban core where living, working, and making co-exist. Land-use overlays dissolve, and mixed use interventions emerge accross vacant sites and within existing heritage structures. New buildings grow from old ones, filling temporal gaps rather than physical voids. Additionally, streets are acquired, reducing car-dependency, promotes micro-businesses, and increase intimacy between building and environment.
Finally, a single network of sky roof connects these fragments, transforming the everyday journey into a continuous exhibition, a city where the Foto Biennale never ends. Rejecting the ambition to become another Melbourne, Ballarat redefines itself as a living archive, a city that remembers through reinvention. For Good envisions a civic theatre where the old and the new perform side by side, proving that permanence and change are not opposites, but partners in the making of a resilient city.
In The Meantime...
Nicole Markis
Supervisor: Brent Allpress
Disruptions or breaks in between scale found in the urban fabric of our cities are either a small scaled soft edge on the street level, or a big scale; hulking monolith plonked haphazardly onto a generous site. The middle scale is ever missing, and the break between the surrounding urban catchment and the monoliths creates a disorder.
One such example is the Public Housing towers such as those in the North Melbourne Housing Commission precinct. The towers are due to either demolished or redeveloped due to lack of accessibility, light and ventilation, and residents must be able to be relocated during the demolition and new works. By introducing a modular prefabricated unit that is generous in space, porosity, light and materiality but can be dismantled easily, residents are able to live in these units whilst being relocated and freely shift and move across the site in accordance with the built works and new conditions that arise. This irregular figure-ground creates a fictive or provisional urbanism and brings forth new opportunities for interference patterns or thresholds of space within the small and big scale of the city that can be explored in multiple sites of similar conditions.
After Oil The Regenerative Machine
Qianhui Li Supervisor: Matthew Stanley
What if the city were built to give back, and the refinery's legacy became the engine of that return?
This project reimagines the architecture in the post fuel era not as a consumer of resources but as a living machine that regenerates. It takes the Altona refinery, once a symbol of extraction and depletion, reconstitutes it as an architecture of repair. This is not nostalgia. It is a question: how do we confront the carbon architectures of the past and transform them into assets for future use?
The proposal establishes a new urban paradigm in which the ruins of extraction become regenerative engines of renewal by pushing remediation to its extreme. Design is framed as choreography, a practice that orchestrates repair across ecological, social and technological systems so the city can heal together, faster than time alone could achieve. The site is scaled to healing: industrial scars are repurposed into ecological infrastructure, and architecture becomes an active force accelerating the land's recovery while everyday life is braided with the processes of repair.
Roberto Luis Monasterial Supervisor: Simon Whibley
The Major Project positions itself as a fantastical vision of our future, yet one rooted in a reality that will unfold within our lifetime.
What once belonged to the realm of science fiction films and novels are steadily becoming tangible.
The project acknowledges its speculative character but grounds its propositions in evidence drawn from the work of physicists, scientist, Astronauts and engineers. Every structural element is based on highly probable scenarios and technologies already developed and used and undergoing further innovations.
It is precisely in this tension between the fantastical and the factual. that the project finds its imagination and seriousness. Our world is transforming so rapidly that the boundaries between imagination and lived reality are dissolving, and what was once conceived as fantasy now emerges as possibility.
The proposition is a self-sustaining mining settlement located at Jezero Crater (Mars). With an economy built on mining rare minerals from the nearby asteroid belt, the town serves as both a hub of production and a symbol of human endurance. The vision is set in the year 2075, with an initial population of 500 citizens.
42, it’s not about the answer, it’s about the question.
Urban Weave
Ruichen Liu
Supervisor: Prof. Alisa Andrasek
Urban Weave confronts one of inner-city Melbourne's most challenging sites, a low-density, noisy, fragmented industrial block, and asks a radical question: what if the solution to the housing crisis wasn't a taller box, but a deeper, more intelligent fabric? The project proposes a prototype for urban living: a porous, high-density ecosystem woven entirely from recycled timber.
Conceived as an artificial, inhabitable landscape, the architecture is generated by a rule-based system that translates the site's constraints into a rich tectonic language. This language carves out three interconnected zones: a productive landscape of vertical farms and workshops that buffers the freeway; a bustling market and co-working zone that forms the social heart; and tranquil residential 'nests' that offer sanctuary and refuge.
Life within Urban Weave is defined by connection, not isolation. Residents sacrifice redundant private living rooms for the shared beauty of vast communal kitchens, living rooms, and rooftop gardens. The architecture itself becomes the furniture, with walls extending to form benches and floors rising to become desks. This is a prototype for a denser, more social, and more sustainable future, proving that high density and a profound quality of life are not mutually exclusive, but can be systematically designed to coexist.
Blooming In The Interval
Ruitian Li Supervisor: Vei Tan
This project sees the university dormitory district as an engine of collective life. When daily management rules prescribe routines, access, and social scope, the campus runs on a fixed rhythm and life becomes confined between bed and corridor. The interest here is not in improving rooms, but in studying how architecture can grow new forms of collectivity within an outlined order.
The project is located in the dormitory zone of Guangdong University of Technology in University Town. Dense, orderly, and clearly managed housing blocks provide a highly constrained environment, and also an ideal place to observe and test spatial micro-shifts. The design is neither a forceful breakthrough nor an escape. It allows architecture to root in gaps and expand within permitted boundaries, giving daily life more layers, softer breathing, and spontaneous encounters.
Three strategies guide this growth: rooftop extensions, light attachments on the facade, and micro public nodes on the ground level. These new spatial tissues wrap around the buildings, forming reading corners, marketplace, small courts, planting frames, and temporary gathering platforms, attaching and winding like climbing vines.
They offer students another path: outside the dominant rhythm, to act, meet, and continue relationships in their own time. The project does not highlight opposition, but cultivates life through subtle and steady growth, making it vivid, shared, and grounded in human presence.
Hosts: The Edge Apparitions
Sayba Zaara
Supervisor: Hannah Zhu
Hosts: The Edge Apparitions is an architectural investigation into the in-between - the spatial, temporal, and ethical interval that exists between place and non-place, between the visible city and its infrastructural unconscious.
Situated along the Moonee Ponds Creek between West and North Melbourne, the project resists the logic of urban erasure by engaging the neglected edge as a latent field of order. It unfolds through a series of Hosts - the Folly, the Bridge, the Billboard, and the Calibration Centre - each revealing how fragments of infrastructure can become instruments of awareness.
The final Host, the Material Reuse Centre, gathers these encounters into one architecture of renewal: a civic infrastructure that reactivates the city’s discarded matter while accommodating the non-human agents of rust, vegetation, and time.
Formed by the three velocities of the site - train, car, and pedestrian - the building becomes both machine and lens, choreographing perception as much as process. At its upper level, an observation deck turns back toward the city, completing the circuit of looking.
Through this, the project proposes architecture not as object, but as host - a medium that holds open the fragile space between disappearance and beginning.
Stateless Architecture: A Bandage Blueprint
Shahriyar Ahmad
Supervisor: Matthew Stanley
Geneva Camp in Mohammadpur, Dhaka, is home to more than 50,000 Urdu-speaking Biharis, descendants of refugees who migrated from India during the 1947 Partition and became stranded in Bangladesh after 1971. Confined within just 60,000 square metres, the community has endured decades of spatial marginalisation, inadequate sanitation, and a lingering struggle for identity and belonging.
Stateless Architecture investigates how architecture might operate as a medium of repair within this confined, self-evolved urban organism. Through sitebased spatial analysis and typological mapping, the project reimagines the camp’s ad-hoc structures as a framework for participatory transformation rather than complete demolition or total displacement.
The design proposes micro-infrastructural interventions, incremental housing prototypes, water and sanitation nodes, and shared civic spaces that both strengthen the camp’s cultural fabric and address its infrastructural deficiencies.
Situated between realism and speculation, the project tests how architectural practice can engage with the politics of statelessness, where space itself becomes a negotiation of identity, resilience, and survival. Ultimately, the work seeks to translate the endurance of Geneva Camp into an architecture of dignity, continuity, and collective adaptation, an alternative model of transformation emerging from within the community rather than imposed upon it.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Shameera Vikram Hingmire Supervisor: Dr. Christine Phillips
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird interrogates the role of architecture in the affordance of hope and how it might contribute to broader cultural and political imaginaries of care infrastructure.
The project is situated in the context of Victoria’s escalating domestic violence crisis, where the provision of refuges far outpaces demand. Austerity driven, and designed to minimum standards, refuges are forced to operate on strict confi dentiality to ensure safety. Yet, this culture of invisibility can reinforce the perception of refuges as sites of crisis and exile, deterring women from seeking essential support.
The project speculates on the future of crisis accommodation, and how an architecture of hope might deploy delight, humour, and joy as strategies of care. Tested across two sites on the Victorian rail line, Collingwood and Wodonga, the urban and regional contexts are utilised in negotiating scales of housing and public space. The architecture of hope unfolds as a succession of materiality, light, scale, texture, colour, and play, articulating thresholds between the public, communal, and private. Guided by Tchumi’s methodology, this sequencing centralises the experience of the body, structuring a narrative from arrival to retreat.
I ask, if we envision safety as confi nement, what do we risk losing? Might we instead see privacy and access as degrees of exchange enabling gradual reconnection? Can an architecture of hope be critical in reimagining refuges as public and legible spaces of care?
Fort Be With You
Pandu Suvarna
Supervisor: Steven Chu
The Fort Be With You reimagines the historic Vasai Fort as a living communal ground that restores the relationship between heritage, livelihood, and people. Once a colonial outpost marked by power and exclusion, the fort is reinterpreted as a space of belonging designed for the fishing and agrarian communities of Pachubandar, whose lives have long been intertwined with its walls yet displaced from its grounds.
The project transforms the fort’s buttresses into storytellers each narrating a chapter from Vasai’s layered history while supporting spaces for markets, workshops, learning, and reflection. The northern dry land, once neglected and misused, becomes a network of shared infrastructures: a seasonal fish and vegetable market, a fishing school, a communal amphitheatre, and spiritual zones like the Baobab shrine and Teertha pond.
For Pachubandar’s congested settlement, the project provides a vital extension an open, breathable, and inclusive environment that redefines monumentality through everyday use. “The Fort Be With You” transforms a site of defence into one of dialogue, turning ruins of empire into architecture of community, where heritage is not frozen in time but lived, worked in, and celebrated as a symbol of resilience and collective identity.
Suraj
Localhost
Thomas Benjamin Abbondanza Supervisor: Simon Drysdale
The rapid development of data centres in Victoria reflects Australia’s growing dependence on local digital infrastructure. As the everyday governmental services we rely on (from banking, healthcare and legal systems) migrate to the cloud, the need for data storage has become urgent.
Data sovereignty is the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance of the nation in which it is collected and stored. It asserts a state's right to control its own digital infrastructure and protect information within its borders from foreign influence or access.
As our Australian government embraces data sovereignty and the rapid development of digital infrastructure, how can the architecture of data centres reflect the same principles of transparency and trust as our democratic and legal systems?
Through the development of a data centre for The Supreme Court of Victoria, this project investigates the future role of data centres within our cities.
It examines how architecture can challenge the current model of data centre beyond a building for the machine, but a new civic architecture of trust and transparency.
Who's Public? Whose Place?
Tiffany Dang Supervisor: Simon Drysdale
The mish, the towers, the blocks, many names for the same idea, but never considered a home.
On the 20th of September 2023, Daniel Andrews declared these 44 eyesores as undesirable and fit for demolition. To be replaced with a token promise of more ‘social’ housing while gifting 60% of these public assets to private interests. Public Housing is no longer public. But when was it?
It is not for the public, and the public doesn’t benefit, right? It sits on public land, is that land for the public? Is Social Housing more social than a share house? Does Community Housing have a better community than a subdivision? Do these names mean anything? Do they matter? Whose place even is it?
Public Housing is a typology that is inherently not experienced by the public. There are no open homes or auctions on the weekends. The communities are often isolated from the surrounding suburb. And the residents are only becoming more out of touch with the neighbourhood they share. In a world that sees Public Housing as a statistic and not a home. In a world that sees demolition as the next step. What happens now?
Who’s Public? Whose Place? is a speculative exploration that redefines amenity within an urban, civic and cultural context. The project seeks to provide insight and answers into the future of Public Housing, defying those in power. It is an architectural aspiration to stronger ties between the tower communities and the places that surround them.
Architecture - Erutcetihcra Museum
Tsz Ting Angie Chan Supervisor: Lucinda Mason
The Museum of Architecture is a building that looks inward, a mirror turned toward the discipline itself. It reframes architecture not as the act of making, but as the choreography of processes that bring it into being the negotiations, codes, consultations, and iterations that quietly construct the built world.
Set within Melbourne’s Arts Precinct, the museum occupies a site where the city’s surface frays between front and back, spectacle and service. the project reveals what is usually hidden. In this inversion, the architecture performs its own anatomy, exposing the systems that sustain it.
The museum unfolds through four gestures framing, consulting, testing, and mechanising, each a spatial reflection of how architecture thinks, questions, and reforms itself. Within these rooms, the public encounters architecture as dialogue, as negotiation, as experiment.
More than an archive of artefacts, it is a civic instrument returning land and knowledge to collective ownership.
Public Rooms: A Collaged Suburb
Supervisor: Hannah Zhu
This project is a version of itself it yearns to be.
Public Rooms steals fragments of the city, rescales them, distorts them, and returns them back as tactical gifts, a deliberate act of theft and collage that reworks memory, ornament and precedent into new civic devices.
This project argues that the urgent task for growing suburbs is not more housing but the defence of conditions that sustain ritual and civic life in the fragile hours between work and home. And that the greatest thing we can build, perhaps, is connection. Whether that connection requires one room, many small rooms, or a single large room is the experiment at the heart of this work.
My gift to Greenvale is five rooms: modest in scale, insistent in purpose. They do not pretend to fix suburbia; they are tactics, provocations that invite repetition, care and claim. In a culture of accelerated sameness, Public Rooms proposes a simpler test: assemble rooms that protect memory, provoke meeting, and hold difference long enough for community to form. These proposals ask only to be used. Showing how architecture can make places where people might interrupt their routines and, slowly, begin to belong, one room at a time.
Tugce Calis
The Necklace and The Neck
Tyler Ruby Feldman
Supervisor: Dr. Michael Spooner
The Necklace and the Neck imagine a city where civic life is inseparable from housing, decentralising culture from institutions and into dwellings, scattered like pearls strung along the urban landscape. The project envisions these jewels as inherent possibilities woven into the fabric of domestic space that appear both inevitable and unexpected. The civil structure is anticipated and disruptive: participation is integral, invoking wonder, creating a distributed field of cultural intensity, where the ordinary apartment becomes a vessel for collective life - and living adjacent a gallery becomes commonplace. The polemic asks: what if every building has a library and theatre where occupants can marvel at Picasso on returning home?
Opposing the centralised institutional model by radicalising decentralisation, diffusing cultural capital from the NGV to a suite of regional spaces. Civic life is no longer optional, but a given condition of urban dwelling. The Ladies Lounge at MONA tested whether one room could bear the weight of legal, civic, and aesthetic obligation. What happens when apartment blocks are tested similarly? Wonder distributed: the invagination of the institutional surface bound to abode. Redundancy becomes the point - the excess of cultural jewels prompts wonder, and their mere presence makes them valuable. The city emerges as a series of spatial experiments - buildings with more margins - what Miessen calls “spatial practices in the margin of opportunity” or Deleuze and Foucault might call “folds and invaginations of the surface”. Not an absolute solution but a critical fiction - a vision of Melbourne imagined through generosity and inclusion, instilled with wonder.
A city without excess has no soul - architecture without wonder, no purpose.
Waa Bikk - Realigning with Country
Vincent Anthony Spataro
Supervisor: Dr. Christine Phillips
Excuse me, Mr Speaker — let us realign with Country. To quote N’arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs AM: “If I am one with Country, I cannot own it.”
Realigning with Country calls for a fundamental shift: to recognise waterways and wetlands not as mere resources, but as living entities with agency, memory, and life, granting them personhood. Following Victoria’s path toward Treaty, this proposal embeds First Nations presence at the very heart of governance, within Parliament House. A new Caring for Country Department (Wa Bikk) and First Nations Assembly take form within Parliament’s chambers, ensuring First Nations directly oversee all matters relating to Land and Water Country, while providing a platform for continuous research, cultural transmission, and teachings for generations to come. Parliament now aims to listen, to move and harmonise with the rhythms of Country. Its possumskin–inspired cloak drapes over the building, rooting the architecture in the ceremonial landscape of Corroboree Hill. Its internal typology opens outward, inviting Country and people in, dissolving the perception of a previously gated institution, and reframing governance through a First Nations lens. This transformation extends into Bourke Street, renamed Eastern Kulin Boulevard, a living urban spine for reconciliation, renewal, and sustainable city design. An underground water plantation revitalises the Elizabeth Street catchment, supporting native plantings, visible water flows, and eel migration corridors, integrating conservation, ecological education, and cultural knowledge into the city’s core. Here, business, Country, and culture converge through native landscapes, markets, and shared governance. Parliament evolves from monument to living landscape, a civic organism where governance grows with, and through, Country.
The Market of Memory _ A Generator of Collective
Yimin Xu
Supervisor: Dr. Nic Bao
Located on Guiping Road in Xuhui District, Shanghai, ’Memory Market’ reinterprets the traditional Longtang typology within a contemporary urban context. It transforms the concept of a “market” from a mere place of transaction into a spatial vessel that carries collective memory and everyday life. The project begins with a dynamic simulation of both pedestrian and vehicular circulation, generating two primary traffic routes for logistics and public movement. These flows naturally define the site’s spatial organisation, dividing it into market, commercial, and public activity zones, thereby creating an architectural form that closely responds to human behavior.
The entire project consists of two main parts: the market and the commercial zone. The market is composed of a series of modular sheds and adaptive components that accommodate different functions throughout the day. During the day, they host stalls for vegetables, seafood, and daily goods; at night, they transform into temporary night markets or social spaces. Certain sheds are strategically elevated to improve natural ventilation, enhance daylight penetration, and form continuous visual corridors across the site.The commercial area reinterprets classic longtang architectural elements, such as corridor bridges, folding louver doors, recyclable brick walls, and solar-tiled roofs, integrating them into a modern structural system. This design approach not only preserves the essence of local memory but also embodies a sustainable and flexible architectural logic.
Memory Market is more than a commercial complex; it is a form of social infrastructure. It captures the rhythm of everyday life, preserves the city’s cultural heritage, and retells collective memory through architectural space, a place where the past and the present coexist and intertwine.
One Way Street
Zhuohui Huang
Supervisor: Vei Tan
This project reconsiders copying as a critical act within contemporary architectural production. It begins from the observation that copying has always been a part of architecture’s history, once understood as continuity, apprenticeship, and transmission of craft. Yet, in the modern pursuit of originality and spectacle, replication has become a stigma, particularly in China where large-scale themed developments and nostalgic reconstructions have turned copying into cultural caricature.
The project situates this condition within Enning Road, Guangzhou, a site of layered preservation and displacement. It interrogates how architecture can move beyond superficial replication to engage copying as a way of negotiating memory, loss, and identity. Through careful intervention, it transforms acts of repetition of façades, circulation, and thresholds into a framework for recovering lived experiences erased by urban renewal.
Rather than rejecting copying, the project reframes it as an architectural methodology: one that questions authenticity, critiques spectacle, and reactivates the everyday spatial intelligence embedded in historic fabric. Copying here becomes both resistance and renewal, an instrument for rethinking how cities remember, and how architects might design not through invention, but through conscious repetition.
