Wei Dong

MUSEUM OF LOST SWAMP

Shortly after Europeans settled in the area now known as Melbourne, attempts were made to remake and remodel the West Melbourne swamp.

Though the area’s indigenous people valued the swamp, and despite its stunning cobalt shimmer, the city’s settler inhabitants complained about the swamp’s smell, its mosquitoes, and the half-water/half land condition that made the site both ‘unproductive’ and un-trafficable.

Eventually, colonial planning and engineering efforts intervened. They attempted to make solid land from it, covering it, sculpting it and thus erased it from the map. This inevitably caused a separation of the physical from the regional memory and identity. A critical natural landmark lost.

This project, located in Docklands seeks to expand the personal sensations and formation of architecture by presenting a series of wet, muddy, smelly and humid gallery spaces to reconstruct the atmosphere – rather than the physicality - of the erased West Melbourne swamp. Its purpose is to evoke the consciousness and memory of the swamp by using a misting system, mechanical system as well as biogas generation system to rebuild a layer of essential experiences relating to space and system of the swamp. It visualizes the abstract sensations and manifests them as a set of complex interactive infrastructures. Surrounded by fog and mist and new, organic smells, the district would be infiltrated by a blurred and spatial new waterscape. The swamp cannot be rebuilt, but it can remain an essential part of the subjective and individual experience of the city.