+ Shallow Fictions at ALkimos Beach 2017
This was the final design project of my master’s degree, extending research conducted in 2016, including other video works and writings.
The project is an enquiry into the state of the contemporary suburb. It is concerned with the role of urbanism and architecture as a way to reimagine the civic realm in the space of the highly controlled subdivision. The fundamental and arterial investigation of this proposal was largely methodological, insofar as it attempts to generate a narrative strategy, extracted from the context through the medium of film and photography. It was hoped that this mode of analysis would help generate a specific way of understanding a place assigned to the masterminded development.
It asks the question of what kind of architectural and urban form will constitute a collective symbol in this particular place. What could ‘centre’ mean in this context – might the idea of consolidation, as a collective mode of settlement and as a cultural symbol on the periphery be misplaced considering the local spatial narrative of dispersal? And importantly for us, as architects, what kind of architectural narratives can be found in this dispersion, and how can this inform the design of suburban centres to offer some resistance to the homogenising forces of the contemporary city?
This project offers a response to this widely governmentally adopted model of the New Urbanist inspired Liveable Neighbourhood. It rejects the application of a generic mastermind plan that serves only to amplify the ubiquitous attributes of the contemporary city, nurturing the profitable selling of ‘lifestyles’ and the corresponding proliferation of marketable identities, subjectivities and images.
This proposal does not reject the necessity or popularity of detached housing as the dominant mode of urbanisation. Rather, it accepts this housing model as an extension of the still dominant colonial imperative of individual home ownership, nor does it reject the generic programmatic requirements of a contemporary town centre. It aims merely to rearrange these elements to better reflect the experience of this constantly emerging peripheral realm.
The first intention for this proposal is a marking of limits for the current blanket of detached housing. A large central void responds to the false idea of centrality sold by developers.
Programmatically, all of the functions stockpiled from a similar development are inverted from the centre to the periphery. This voiding places new significance on the edge, where all of the functions of a town centre will be dispersed facing the suburbs which are allowed to grow to reach this line.
The ‘centre’ will remain the shifting sand on which the entire city is built. As an act of historical recollection this would link this final planted city with the genesis of Perth’s speculative suburban metropolis at Fremantle in 1829. Aligned to the axis of the Alkimos shipwreck, the proposal makes reference to the local and regional narratives of being cast ashore and subsequently dispersed.
The dunescape will retain its recent historical use as a non-prescribed regional open space. It will remain a field upon which the traces of 4WD tracks made by locals will are preserved, and where the traces of the developer’s plans are projected as to become gardens, cinemas and other spaces for the cultivation of change.
The filmic work Shallow fictions at Alkimos Beach takes stock of the context, illustrating the imagery of a certain place whilst at the same time scratching away at this surface to reveal certain place mythologies.
The video overlays myth upon myth, making analogous the thin fictions of the housing market and the superstition of ghost stories about the wreck that gives the suburb its name. Both of which are elements that contribute to the construction of a locally derived narrative.
The film provided the representational framework in which the drawings of this project emerge. The depiction of both dynamic fragments, emerging and receding, repeating, re-emergent memories, juxtaposed amongst the vast landscape are set against the static and scenographic images of the site.
These scenes are developed in the drawing of lines, as views within the project that are less about the depiction of an architecture, but rather a set of relationships between sites. Between a city in the state of continual flux, one that is made up of static fragments connected by the endless narrative of expansion.
