DOGA Awards – Shortlisted

The idea of everything being connected encapsulates a tension in traditional architectural practice: we have been raised within a discipline that often values product over process; output in isolation of social and cultural context. But little attention is paid to how architectural work responds to certain landscapes and places, especially in trauma-informed contexts. In the face of disasters such as the 2019-20 bushfires, reconstructing and rebuilding what was destroyed versus understanding the ‘particularity and potentiality of a place’7 before building anything at all continues to be a mired facet of recovery. Fracturing the design process in order to co-create and ensure that all “owners,” beyond only the fiscal ones, legitimately benefit from the work, felt like the most responsive way to operate. 

Shortly after concluding the fellowship, GLaWAC engaged my architecture practice to undertake the design commission for the Wangun Amphitheatre.
There is a counter narrative to recovery that is all too often masked by the dominant story, and responding to disasters is often not as simple as offering our services to affected people—for free or otherwise—without changing the modus operandi. It is simplistic to replace a building that has been burnt down with another one, as the Gunaikurnai perspective that all things work together highlights. For many Gunaikurnai communities, it was difficult to respond to the recent fires in isolation of the slow onset recovery so many were already enduring, across generations. The loss of culture, coupled with land management and cultural burning practices, has had to be reconciled with the immediate losses faced by their wider regional communities. While Wangun does not replace any of GLaWAC’s tangible assets, what it can offer is something intangible: a place for recovery to occur.

Wangun, meaning boomerang in Gunaikurnai language, is an important symbol for many of the Traditional Owners. Aspirations for the stage and its roof to be shaped, quite literally, like a traditional wangun, were made quite clear. We quickly understood that the ways in which culture could be translated respectfully into the architecture was diverse and non-prescriptive, hence also a rediscovery of sorts. It relied just as much on our design responses to the ideas of the Traditional Owners as it did on the ideas themselves, with a key ingredient being leaving our presumptions at the door. Striking a balance between the concepts we design and those we allow to emerge9 is what strengthens our offering as architects.