Economy of Means

Less bound up in the fanciful and more interested in the prosaic, my project addresses the current housing crisis in Victoria, seeking to reassert the architect as a figure capable of meaningful social change.

Categorised into elements and spaces, collectively the proposed architectural language aims to provide the maximum through the minimum of resources.

With the increasing privatisation and demolition of inner-city public housing blocks, less affluent demographics are banished to the outer suburbs of the city, alienated both geographically and socially. The housing is therefore conceived as a model to be deployed across 3 scales - the outer suburbs, the inner suburbs and the CBD, reflecting the argument that affordable housing should be available to anyone, anywhere.

Underpinning both the urban and architectural concept is a proposed financial model that aims to remove the home, that is to say, architecture from its current position as an instrument of capital accumulation. As Carol Willis notes, Form follows Finance, and so my proposed architectural logic is inextricable from the ideology of a co-operative Community Land Trust.

From the financial structure to the banality of the everyday, from the letterbox to the downpipe, and from the outer suburbs to the inner city, each scale is as important as the next, making the project a bricolage without hierarchy. A model that in time can serve as an exemplar of design for the common good prevailing over private gain.