500 Nooks

There is a plethora of valuable small spaces hidden in Melbourne’s urban nooks. These spaces exist as a by-product of structures in the laneways. In the distinctive, discarded atmospheres of back lane services and graffiti, this project uses these cracks and gaps, aiming to preserve, insert into the existing, and remove nothing.

500 such nooks were identified, and five were prototyped with small designs, notionally for a resident tenant with a public function - an activating business and a caretaker for the lane. The buildings squeeze into the nooks, tighten up the lanes and hang over roofs and parapets. These objects aim at melding forms of a foreign nature with more familiar or prosaic architecture; to be carefully contextual and utterly alien. Pushing the standard elements of architecture such as windows to become something other than a void or a component.

The five nooks make completely custom and yet entirely unprescribed spaces; the tenants (anyone from a book binder to a goldsmith or fishmonger) bring a next level of intrigue to the nook. Using mystery as an architectural tool, inevitably they pop up and appear wherever these unseen moments occur.