Studio C/01

BRINGING THEM HOME…

Atha Tsakonas

Studio Description

This studio responds directly to the Australian War Memorial’s recent decision to address and chronicle the colonial frontier wars. It recognises that, historically, Indigenous communities have suffered dispossession, displacement, cultural disconnection, and untold trauma while defending Country. Its specific focus, however, is on the injustices suffered by returning Indigenous service personnel. These men and women who fought overseas on Australia’s behalf received little public recognition or support upon their return, were ineligible for land grants and in some cases lost their traditional lands to soldier settlers from white communities. These two intertwined lines of inquiry address different interpretations of Country.

This studio asks you to explore the idea of Country both as relational and symbiotic extensions of a lived environment and a broader idea of national territory. It asks you to consider both Indigenous and settler/migrant interpretations of place. Focusing on repatriation as its central theme, and homecoming as its emotive narrative, this studio asks how placemaking can engender social and cultural recovery. The studio’s specific focus covers two possible agendas – the memorialisation of deceased Indigenous service personnel missing or buried overseas, and the recognition and continued social support of those who returned to Australia. Using the southern gardens of Victoria’s Shrine of Remembrance around the new ANZAC railway station as the prospective site, it asks you to design a dedicated Community Centre and Clubhouse for Indigenous service personnel and their families.

Studio Outcomes

This studio asks you to develop a design strategy and material and spatial vocabulary for exploring the theme ‘Bringing Them Home…’ interpreted in the many ways illustrated above. You are encouraged to seek inspiration from the physical, environmental, material, and social histories and characteristics of your locality and its origins, including its connections to Country and its first peoples.

You will be introduced to critical place-making methods and story-telling through design narratives. Through an exercise in mapping the journeys of Indigenous service personnel, using drawings, models, and writings, you will be asked to critically reflect on how dislocation alters Indigenous relationships with place across time.

The Community Centre and Clubhouse is envisioned as a modest-sized civic facility connecting the ANZAC station to the Shrine that will offer a range of services to Indigenous communities enabling them to sustain the camaraderie critical for social and cultural recovery. While the design brief is modelled after the above approaches to public interest and socially-engaged design creation, it is by no means limited and you may propose a version further sensitised to local concerns. Exploring the theme of dislocation of people, place memories and materials, the studio will commence with a design esquisse for a memorial to the Indigenous Warrior to be located at or near Tynong Quarry, the historical source of the Shrine’s stone.

In proposing this facility, you are asked to design sympathetically, to respect the visual authority of the Shrine and its surrounding heritage protected landscape. The expectation is that you will enhance the urban connection to the Shrine through its south-eastern Terrace Courtyard whose landscape design aims to evoke the Pacific and South-East Asian theatres of Australia’s military and peacekeeping service history.

This studio will also include a field trip to the Tynong Quarry and Koo Wee Rup in eastern Victoria, as part of the background historical, cultural, and social context of this project.

Studio Leader/s

Athanasios Tsakonas is a practising architect, builder, and writer with an extensive professional career spanning Australasia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He is a partner in the Singapore based consultancy Tan + Tsakonas Architects, also running a small design & build studio in Melbourne. He holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Adelaide (majoring in Architectural History & Theory), along with a Master of Arts (Urban Design) from the National University of Singapore.

Athanasios’s research interests include investigating the spatial impact war cemeteries and memorials have upon commemoration and remembrance; and the architects of conflict. His book In Honour of War Heroes: Colin St Clair Oakes and the Design of Kranji War Memorial was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2020. https://amzn.asia/d/iWlmxjm

Athanasios taught Master of Architecture Studio C last year, and previously Design Thesis studio at the Melbourne School of Design. A student from his 2022 studio was nominated for the Bates Smart Award.

Schedule Tuesday 9am - 12pm in MSD Room 138 and Tuesday 12pm - 3pm in  MSD Room 138

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