Borders, Signature, Unfolding Rose
2020
In 2017 Lyons (architects), Rush Wright (landscape architects) and Material Thinking (cultural interpretation & program) were commissioned to design and build the Springvale Community Hub (client City of Greater Dandenong).
In dialogue with the Spirit of Enterprise Group, Material Thinking developed a proposal for a four part interpretation strategy that not only foregrounded Springvale’s important multicultural heritage but located this within a deeper temporal landscape of Boonwurrung, Wurundjeri and early colonial encounter.
For political reasons, this latter ‘grounding’ work was eliminated.
The realised works are integrated into landscape and architecture thematically and spatially. A key episode in the Spirit of Enterprise narrative, a 1970 mayoral speech welcoming migrant, occurred at the old Springvale Town Hall, adjacent to the new Community Hub. Borders is a suite of corten walls inscribed with phrases drawn from migrant accounts of their journeys - the continuous border inscribed into the work weaves together relevant geographical coastlines.
Signatures is a text-based work in over a dozen community language scripts that translate the essential points of the mayoral welcome and turn them round so that newer immigrant communities now take on the role of hosts to those coming to Springvale in the future. The two walls of text are designed anamorphically; the spots where the characters appear ‘normally’ locate the visitor on two important axes or lines: one going to the grove of river red gums around whose presentation and celebration the new Hub is bult, the other creating a connection to the old Town Hall.
The theme of entwining the past into the future also informs the design of Unfolding Rose, a collaboration with Artillion. Impressed by The Spirit of Enterprise initiative, a commercial rose grower created a special ‘double pompom’ red rose for the organisation. Material Thinking transformed this into curving staircase of petals that hang like a Calder mobile from the central column of the new Community Hub’s exhibition room.