Frank Burridge

Supervisor: Professor Hélène Frichot

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Ecologies of a Community Centre
in a Rural Victorian Town

The local government of a small rural Victorian town are considering an upgrade of the community hall. I was approached by some members of the community to get involved in organising a community-led approach to a new community centre.

This thesis is shaped as a series of invitations to wider community members and groups to get involved in the project of a future community center, cultivating a robust, embedded ecology of collaborators. Several pages here present a fragment of the community centre as an invitation.

Inviting collaboration means relinquishing some of the architect’s usual control over the project, but with a robust network of collaborators, each operating in their own way to further the project, the project is more likely to be successful. I call this approach to architectural practice ecological because, as in ecosystems, it creates multiple paths through a network to a desired outcome – otherwise known as the principle of multiplicity.

My research into the landscapes, plants and animals of Deans Marsh have formed stories about ecological “ghosts” and “monsters” of the Anthropocene, stories which connect the project to the complex histories and entanglements of this place, and which could stitch the possible future community centre into the local imaginary through narrative and symbol.