Jury citation
Using Melbourne’s Metroshed as a case study, this proposal challenges the current use of temporary construction infrastructure. The jury commended the exploration into how these spaces can offer more than they take from the public realm. The scheme proposed four alternative modes of the Metroshed that reinclude pedestrians in the site and, in turn, seek to transform the temporary “waiting period” for the new station into memories of a moment in time. There is potential for this architectural experiment to be applied across the nation’s many developments. With the Olympics returning to Australia in 2032, the strategy should be seriously considered for the sake of the economy and community camaraderie.
Entrant’s description
Melbourne’s City Square has been closed to the public since 2017, replaced by a temporary multistorey concrete and steel shed while the new Town Hall Station is constructed on the site. Soon, they promise, there will be “more trains, more often.” Our willingness to tolerate the inconvenience of the Metroshed – and to wait for nearly a decade – is predicated on two things: the promise of something proportionally worthwhile at the end, and our incremental desensitization to disruption. Still, what shall we do while we wait for City Square to become Town Hall Station? What shall we do in this spatiotemporal terrain vague for 3,195 calendar days? Could better infrastructure help us wait better?
This project offers four design alternatives to the impenetrable under-construction infrastructure of the Metroshed. In the first option, the public realm is gently – but decisively – expanded, gifting us more places to be while we wait. In the second, the existing site office program becomes hybridized with a makeshift hotel, in a wry effort to reduce transit time while we wait for transit time to be reduced. In the third, a conventional workspace program hosts unconventional aspirations for civic oversight: a rectilinear volume escapes the Hoddle Grid to pivot and punch through precast concrete, allowing us to see inside the Metroshed – to see what
we are waiting for.
In the fourth design – a monstrous amalgam of its predecessors – Metroshed transforms into an event space to host “Metroshed at Night × Melbourne Fashion Week.” The reinterpretation of infrastructure-as-fashion-catwalk marries the strategic ambitions of the City of Melbourne’s newly formed Night Time Economy Advisory Committee with the around-the-clock functionality of the Metroshed in its current form.
By putting the “event” into “eventually,” this project conjures an alternate urban reality in which the spatiotemporal terrain vague of waiting for infrastructural projects to be delivered – and for political promises to be fulfilled – is both plausible and chic. While we wait for “more trains, more often,” we are invited to take ownership of the Metroshed – our Metroshed.
