Easy-Oar

This project explores the recorded memories and moments of a place, attending to the historical narratives that they reveal. Can we flip and reorder the past to establish an architecture specific to its context? The location is the lower Moonee Ponds Creek where a shadow of a canal cut in the late 19th century is still visible in the creek’s Broadwater. Its low-lying topography and lack of residents proving to be a primely positioned conduit for the city’s services.

What if this drain became a canal once more? A residential canal system coercing a level of accountability in an area obscured by a patchwork of zoning and jurisdictional boundaries. The architecture emerges from this overlap, connecting emerging growth precincts along the shores of the creek; a negotiation between the site’s past so that it may welcome the future.

The Boat, Home & Club are the first constituents of a new framework. Their physical forms are derived from three stories emblematic of the pervasive narratives of the site. Their silhouettes acting as a container for moments I have recorded along the creek. Reordering their composition and purpose to ground these three foreign typologies in a site that needs their soft infrastructure effect.

This project comes in before the end, asking what we might preserve before it is too late.

Easy-oar mate.