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Woods Bagot and Ralph Wheeler Architects have been appointed to redevelop the Caulfield Racecourse grandstand as the “cornerstone” of the wider Caulfield masterplan announced 2019. Works on the grandstand form part of the wider $570-million masterplan at Caulfield Racecourse, as the most significant upgrade in the club’s 150-year history. The new grandstand will serve as […] More
A new app by an existing materials consultancy, launching on 15 December, aims to create a trading market place for construction materials destined for landfill.
Created by Revival Projects, the app will empower the design and construction communities to afford their unwanted construction materials a second life.
The practice received the best event award at Melbourne Design Week 2022 for its Zero Footprint Repurposing Hub in Collingwood – a free storage space for the design and construction communities to keep salvaged construction materials before repositing them back into new projects.
The app, “Revival Cooperative”, is the next phase of the company’s mission, providing a platform for users to explore construction materials commonly deemed as “waste”, and finding them a new home.
Revival Projects founder Robbie Neville said his ambition for the app is to “introduce some cohesion among the industry and community to adopt a more sustainable approach to the materials we don’t need.” The app will be free to use and available nationally for domestic and commercial users.
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Revival Projects recently deconstructed two fire-damaged sculptures in Docklands. Every last stick from the sculptures has been salvaged. Image: Supplied
Revival Cooperative will be similar in function to Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace; however, no commercial exchange will take place on the app. “Nothing is bought or sold on the platform,” said Neville. “Its purpose is purely with the hopes of building a community of people that are motivated to avoid landfill.”
Items listed will have one of three possible statuses: “proposed”, “ongoing”, and “ready for collection”, and anyone who expresses an interest in an item – be it pallets, cladding, timber, tin roofing – will receive updates on the item’s status. Browsers will receive automatic notifications based on their searched items, alerting users to when an item is uploaded with a keyword that meets their checklist.
Revival Cooperative will be applicable on a domestic scale, disrupting the “hard rubbish” culture of leaving materials on the curb side. On a more ambitious level, “It’ll provide a mechanism for the broader design community to take accountability for the volume of material that they send to landfill,” said Neville. “I hope it will change the juncture at which we determine something as waste.”
Neville has also suggested renaming demolition plans to “existing material management” or “existing resources management plans” to reimagine the way demolition by-products are conceived.
“The app is the tool to help us benefit from the amazing variety, diversity and creativity that’s in our communities and our industries. The community’s hungry for sustainable alternatives,” he said. “You don’t decide what’s waste; your community does.”
The Revival Cooperative app will be free to download form the Revival Projects website from 15 December. More
Construction has begun on a vibrant new pavilion and public domain for a Western Sydney community. Designed by Chrofi and JMD Design, the project will be the first in a series of neighbourhood spaces for the Mount Druitt and Blacktown area, providing much needed community infrastructure. The Mount Druitt town centre was the first entirely […] More
The winning architectural design has been revealed for the Powerhouse Ultimo renewal after it was unanimously selected from a national design competition launched earlier this year.
The design team – comprising Architectus, Durbach Block Jaggers Architects, Tyrrell Studio, Youssofzay and Hart, Akira Isogawa, Yerrabingin, Finding Infinity and Arup – was selected from a shortlist of five finalists to deliver the $500-million transformation.
The design includes an improved urban domain on the 2.4-hectare site, expanded museum exhibition spaces, rooftop gardens and a multistorey annex along Harris Street. A new urban space will link the museum with the city by reorienting it to the elevated walkway The Goods Line, and connecting to adjacent precincts, creating a major public square to support outdoor programs.
The new Powerhouse Academy will provide a rooftop “camp” for secondary and tertiary students as an “immersive learning experience in the heart of the city,” arts minister Ben Franklin said.
Director First Nations at Powerhouse Emily McDaniel said the design is a “bold, defined approach to Country-centred design that is sensitive to the heritage of the site, and inspired by the memory of local sandstone escarpment.”
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Winning design for the Powerhouse Ultimo renewal by Architectus, Durbach Block Jaggers Architects, Tyrrell Studio, Youssofzay and Hart, Akira Isogawa, Yerrabingin, Finding Infinity and Arup. Image:
Courtesy of Powerhouse Museum
The competition jury included architect Wendy Lewin (chair), NSW government architect Abbie Galvin, Central District commissioner Peter Poulet, Walbanga and Wadi Wadi woman and film producer Alison Page, Create NSW chief executive Annette Pitman, and Powerhouse chief executive Lisa Havilah.
According to Havilah, iconic objects from the collection – including the Boulton and Watt steam engine, Locomotive No. 1 and the Catalina flying boat – will be presented in the renewed Powerhouse Ultimo.
Lewin said the jury was “confident” with its decision, which will deliver a “truly exceptional building” that ensures the longevity of the Powerhouse Museum for future generations.
The Powerhouse Ultimo renewal is part of the New South Wales government’s record investment in cultural infrastructure, and marks the first major investment in the museum since 1988. The design competition saw more than 100 registrations of interest received from across Australia.
Following the announcement, the architects will develop their concept plans. A detailed State Significant Development application is expected to go out for public submission in early 2023, with construction anticipated to begin in December 2023. More
The National Gallery of Victoria has opened an exhibition of the architectural schemes submitted for the competition to design Australia’s largest gallery of contemporary art and design. The Fox: NGV Contemporary will be a key part of the Victorian government’s $1.7 billion transformation of Melbourne Arts Precinct. The design competition, held in 2021, was open […] More
Anchor Ceramics
Architect turned ceramicist Bruce Rowe has released a new series of vessels that are made using materials that would have otherwise gone to landfill. The Vas collection comprises 48 pieces that combine fired ceramic with CNC-cut reclaimed timber.
Rowe is founder and director of Anchor Ceramics, a ceramic design studio that also makes lighting, tiles and garden pots.
Read more about Bruce Rowe here.
Marta Figueiredo
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Marta Figueiredo’s Elementary Abacus is a side table with movable parts invites interaction. Image:
Jonathon Griggs
Portugal-born, Melbourne-based designer Marta Figueiredo is another former architect who has now established a practice of creating objects. Her works are colourful, tactile, anthropomorphic, have a strong sense of narrative and invite interaction from viewers.
The Elementary Abacus, for instance (pictured), is a side table with movable elements, creating a playful and inclusive piece of furniture.
Read more about Marta Figueiredo here.
Elliat Rich
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Different Thoughts (2020) by Elliat Rich uses colour and form to express interrelationships. Image:
Haydn Cattach
Elliat Rich is an award-winning object designer based in Alice Springs. Her practice seeks to spark connection between things, with a design process that is a “creative translation between materials and culture”. She has three arms to her practice: the first is centred around cultural questioning through objects, the second around service (responding to a brief), and the third, Elbow Workshop, is an enterprise she shares with her partner, shoemaker James B. Young.
Read more about Elliat Rich here.
Five Mile Radius
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Waste Terrazzo by Five Mile Radius, originally created as a concrete side table, can now be ordered as a custom slab. Image:
Callie Marshall
Inspired by the philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi, Brisbane-based architect Clare Kennedy established a studio that rethinks and redefines the process of making. The studio’s ethos is expressed in Waste Terrazzo, a robust and crisply modern concrete side table made entirely from local construction waste. Another product, Telegraph Stool, is a rustic piece made from decommissioned telegraph poles.
Read more about Five Mile Radius here.
Dean Norton
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Containa by Dean Norton is an encased furniture series that explores the narrative of the vessel and its contents. Image:
Spot Studio
This English-born, Melbourne-based designer creates furniture and objects that connect on an emotional level, with refined detailing and harmonious materials. Originally a graphic designer, Norton pursues a minimalist approach underpinned by strong graphic expression, exploring the creative tension between art and design. Containa, for example (pictured), is one of several pieces designed as emotive reactions Melbourne’s pandemic locksdowns. The piece explores confinement and protection, featuring a wood-turned form encased within a frosted glass shell, while Daylight is a light therapy lamp intended to boost wellbeing and creative energy.
Read more about Dean Norton here. More
Some years ago, I found a recollection from artist Rachel Whiteread, in which she described a lengthy process of making a piece of work resembling the safe, black, furry, childhood hiding space inside a wardrobe. She was seeking to abstract that experience through sculpture. Rachel is an artist whom you might categorize as a “seeker.” Rather than polish the same stone, seemingly making the same piece over and over in different ways, she seeks continually, through different materials, scales and contexts, to express abstract ideas, relationships and thoughts that hover – sometimes for years – just out of reach. Elliat Rich is also a seeker. While Rachel pursued the representation of a sensual, bodily experience, Elliat seeks to express and spark relations. Human to human, human to other-than-human, and, perhaps most importantly, connections between all things. For Elliat, it is the reorienting nature of the relationship stimulated by the object that is the desired outcome. She speaks of this as “designing mythology.”
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A portrait of Elliat Rich taken on the traditional lands of the Arrernte people. Image:
Martina Capurso
Elliat trained at UNSW in object design, and her career has been framed by a series of awards offering her time, space, promotion or other critical resources for practice development. These include being a finalist and people’s choice winner in the Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award (2008), winner of the Australian Furniture Design Award (2017) and recipient of the Northern Territory Creative Fellowship (2018). She has three arms to her practice: the first is centred around cultural questioning through objects, the second around service (responding to a brief), and the third, Elbow Workshop, is an enterprise she shares with her partner, shoemaker James B. Young. Elliat has continually resisted definition and has not settled within one area of design, developing works from the scale of a delicate glass set for brewing tea (Urban Billy, 2013) to a weighty, one-off chair, rough-hewn from sandstone (Strata Stratum Stratus, 2019).
In 2017, Elliat’s piece Place won the Australian Furniture Design Award. The prize included developing a collection with Stylecraft. Different Thoughts was launched by Stylecraft in 2020, encompassing a credenza, light and rug. Branching out from Place, Elliat also developed a collection for Sophie Gannon Gallery. Here she consciously left her linear working process behind and worked with creative intuition to create Other Places, which captured something of that which she seeks. She describes these pieces as having a kind of sentience, a quality that is impossible to design in, but is alchemic when it happens. Her current search is for a way to develop objects that reflect the “shimmer” in everything, a concept she connected with through an essay by anthropologist Deborah Rose Bird.
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Marta Figueiredo’s colourful, tactile creations provoke joy and delight, inviting viewers to interact, engage and play. But beneath the architectural and anthropomorphic forms is a strong sense of narrative, as Marta explores themes such as sustainability, waste and inclusion. “I’m intrigued by the idea of pushing the boundaries of what an object is traditionally thought to be, and I am particularly interested in elements that contribute to a more rich and layered interaction between the individual and the object,” Marta says.
Born in Portugal and living in Melbourne since 2013, Marta has always been interested in making things. She studied architecture in Porto and practised in Paris, London, Portugal and Melbourne, before establishing her own design practice in 2016 to follow her passion for creating objects that present a narrative and viewpoint.
Marta’s first collection, Prima Familia (2018), emerged from her desire to use burel, a traditional Portuguese wool fabric. Local burel factories have recently been revived in the Portuguese mountains, and the fabric’s vibrant colours and tactility inspired Marta to create life-size totems that abstract the human form. In 2019, The Cossack and Queen joined the family, their exaggerated forms and flamboyant colours prompting people to touch, feel and even hug them. “I was surprised by the emotional connection people had,” Marta says.
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Marta Figueiredo uses design to explore sensorial experience. Image:
Jonathon Griggs
This connection inspired her to think about the relationships people – including her sister, who is autistic – have with objects. Marta created Elementary Abacus (2020), a side table with movable and sensorial elements, to offer a playful, inclusive way of interacting with furniture.
The conceptual narratives of Marta’s designs originate from a topic, question or moment in time. In collaboration with musician and sound designer Jonathon Griggs, Marta developed Windgate during the Melbourne COVID-19 lockdowns, representing the “otherness” of architecture in a desolate urban environment. Like a twisted skyscraper, Windgate has tactile surfaces and interactive soundscapes, and it was performed at MPavilion in 2021.
To use the resin waste from Windgate, Marta designed the Stardust lamp (2021). Similarly, the Assembly chair, which was shortlisted for MPavilion 2021, is made with recycled household and industrial plastic.
Marta’s latest piece, Creatures of Light (2022), is an illuminated sculpture offering a narrative about climate change. The three-dimensional tapestry creates the effect of lichen, while black textured surfaces evoke volcanic rock. The vibrancy diminishes from top to bottom, pooling on the floor as a symbol of extinction. Like all of Marta’s work, it invites viewers to interact and engage with both the object and the topic.
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