William Shaw
Wallace Stevens, the American poet, began his poem ‘Man Carrying Thing’ with the enjambed line: "The poem must resist the intelligence/almost successfully".
In Stevens’ poem we are brought to contemplate the difficult comprehension of part and whole in the perception of a man carrying a thing in the winter night. the "thing" he is holding, is obscured from our intellectual clutches, our rational minds left to ponder the partially articulated silhouette that steps away from us.
This proposal addresses the Vacant Job Warehouse building at the top of Bourke Street.
It marks a foothold on Bourke Street deeply important to the establishment and presence of diverse multi-cultural communities and identities in Melbourne.
Within the context of the heritage site, the proposal seeks to invert the sentiment of Wallace Stevens poem. It relies on the implications of preserving both mundane and architectonic “things” and employing partial circumstantial gestures in a dialogue of bricolage with the building and site, to motivate and articulate the whole of the project. At once striking at programmatic resolution, whilst seeking poesis in fragmented "uncertain particles", as Stevens put it.
This is established through the retainment and acknowledgement of human-scale heritage debris within the spatial reconditioning of the site: a sink, a mirror, a staircase, the elements you might touch... These function as coordinates of memoryand aid in realising the programmatic and symbolic intent of the project as a refuge for those who might need it.
As John Hejduk has explored, architects, willing or not, are subscribed to the “social contract”. This being the idea that we must engage with one another in society in good faith to establish cohesion. This project explores a socially efficacious program, through the vehicle of an idiosyncratic heritage language and rationale, to express and resolve relationships between distinct communities.
If as John Hejduk has stated, “erasures imply former existences...”, perhaps the retainment of some memories, however fragile, imply future existences.
