Interfacing the Palimpsest Part 2 Project 2004 Davin Smith Deakin University Geelong | Australia Docklands is a postindustrial landscape with waterfront views, and proximity to the Melbourne CBD. The promenade’s relentless march around the waterfront is re-routed creating Dockland’s civic heart. The promenade is extended through the site to the Docklands Stadium, ramping up to create an urban piano-nobile, with access to three great urban rooms, library, gallery and cinema. The docks return to their role of cultural exchange. The architecture reappropriates strategies that are being razed from the site. A working port’s activity is distilled into a dynamic urbanism. The project provides contemporary urban spaces resonating with the spatial typologies that form Melbourne. Davin Smith's project is a grand urban scheme that revives an urban/architecture agenda contested in Australia and marginalised internationally since the late 1960s. A radical critique of the Docklands translates into a series of acts: urban/planning, infrastructure/building typologies, juxtaposed (non)ethical programs, poetic urban imagery which recall recently submerged Melbourne icons, and a revalorisation of spaces between buildings as a stage for humanity. Scales resonate between freeway/(carpark), railway, axial(bridges), urban(waterfront), site-edges, buildings, details, and Melbourne as a city. Each is engendered through program, and deepened through a rich language, simultaneously pragmatic and romantic. The conceptual agenda becomes limitless through the architecture.