The brief? Form a group, choose a site within QUT Garden’s Point campus and make a ‘place’ out of it using a bamboo structure. I approached this by sitting in the space and observing and documenting the movement of people through, in and around the site. There were 3 key areas each with their own character:
- Seating – sheltered by trees, still, private, individual, used for pauses between uni life, symmetrical & repetitive arrangement with seats, trees & bricks
- Pathways – main thoroughfares through uni, transient, multidirectional, surrounding, passing & entering places, moving between uni life
- Platform (the Site) – void, vacant, elevated, on display, open, disused, exposed, sightlines to platform from adjacent buildings which house offices and a gallery
The opportunity? Play on the exposure and harness the existing conditions rather than trying to mask them by trying to create enclosure and shelter. We ended up with a bamboo seat that didn’t really respond to the exposed site but did somewhat play off the symmetry of the seating area that the platform looks over. An accidental press of the wrong button on the photocopier did produce an interesting view of the bamboo seat showing the permeable structure with sightlines maintained to and from the adjacent building.
Good Bad Ugly 