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(Re)Collecting Rural

Part 2 Project 2022
Jeremy Bonwick
 University of Melbourne | Australia
In a climate of expansion and homogenisation of culture and the built environment, the continuing urban bleed of Melbourne into its surrounding rural towns threatens to supersede and suppress idiosyncratic local identities.

This scheme examines the role of architecture and the museum typology in maintaining the local identity of Warburton — a peri-urban town on the outskirts of Melbourne — through interactions with heritage, relic and artefact. The former Sanitarium Health Foods Factory, Melbourne’s manufacturer of Weet-Bix until its cessation in the 90s, is taken as the existing architectural condition, imprinted with traces of past events, practices and paradigms, and transformed into a factory of identity.

A Transept of connectivity, between symbiotic morphologies — armatures of the main street and the Birrarung (Yarra River) — holds a new bridge form which engages with existing built fabric and the land to houses programs of museological display, practice, craftsmanship and community.

Through an experiential sequencing of spaces, exhibits and contextualising views, the scheme seeks to make sense of and re-collect past traces of industry, settlement, water and power — edifices of a rural identity considered at the scale of the wider ecology, the town, the plot and the brick.

Tutor(s)
2022
On the banks of the Birrarung, a museum bridge stretches away from the heritage form of the Sanitarium Health Foods Factory
Symbiotic relationships; connectivity between Melbourne and the peri-urban town of Warburton, connected by the armature of the city and the river
A transept between two datums; a connecting museological bridge between the morphology of the rural highway and the meandering river
Interventions in heritage; the existing form of the Sanitarium Health Foods Factory from 1926 gives way to an internal phenomenological courtyard
Internal skin; the factory skin becomes container for a new entry sequence to a museum programme
Portal decent; moving from olfactory forecourt, through polycarbonate portal, heritage is blurred as the visitor defends into the bowels of the building and the collection
Community; useful work and engagement returns to the factory with internal spaces put to use with scarred surface as backdrop for new community function
Museum; a bridge arranged around connection to views, framing themes and artefacts in relation to aspects over the landscape
Museum pods; forthright assemblage of the bridge in an infrastructural style embodies a sensibility for making and crafting River banks; finer-grain pavilions of power generation and community programme arranged along the banks of the flowing Birrarung
River banks; finer-grain pavilions of power generation and community programme arranged along the banks of the flowing Birrarung
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