Charles Deicke

The project seeks to mediate on the embedded histories of the former Corkman Pub site on the corner of Pelham and Leicester St in Carlton, proposing a dual programme of a pub and public office for the University of Melbourne Law School, powered by the Biomass of construction waste.

Subsequent proposals for the site’s configuration include either a ‘brick-by-brick’ reconstruction of the original building, or more ‘economically viable’ proposals such as transforming the site into a residential tower. The building co-opts the so call viability of the proposed tower by the vertical duplication of the pubs original form, with each replication subtly transforming internally, calling into question the idea of a linear narrative within architecture.

The proposition of a pub and office seeks to provide a platform for the mediation of both the legal and social turmoil that have engulfed the site since the pub’s demolition in 2016. The use of Biomass as energy system, particularly focussing on the combustive process due to its inherent destructiveness and toxicity, references both the sites tumultuous past and proposed productive future.

Key to Biomass as energy system is a recognition of material as containing energy; the combustion of flammable material is thus wedded with the storage of non-flammable material, arranged and catalogued in the posterior material library. This arrangement of disparate architectural materials and assemblies feeds the collective ‘puzzling’ that the project aims to engender, through arrangement and duplication, but also through the storage of energy itself in the form of rising heat.

Presentation

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