Public Program and Education Hub

Full description

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Patrick Macasaet, through his architectural studio 'Superscale' was commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney to create its Public Program and Education (PPE) Hub, situated within the old Naval Store on Cockatoo Island over a 3-month period. The project was won through the Open Agenda competition. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The PPE Hub dwells into Cockatoo Island's naval history and taps into the Dry Dock typology - reimagining it as a stratified and folded topography for educational and public programmes. It creates a fragmented and shredded dry dock to generate a permeable space, creating continuous visual links and merging circulation with function. The work demonstrates Macaset's ongoing research into how contaminations of 'other' typologies can assist in re-inventing programmatic organisation, form and spatial arrangements. It investigates the amplification and exaggeration of the qualities and behaviours of precedent types through rule-based process methodologies as a catalyst for opening up new possibilities. This design methodology was pursued through the project's exploration of Cockatoo Island's naval history: the formal and spatial language of the dry dock typology where it exhibits a theatre-like quality capable of generating varying scales of social and gathering areas. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: Open Agenda is an annual competition by University of Technology Sydney and the Biennale of Sydney to support a new generation of experimental architecture in Australia and New Zealand. It focuses on young, experimental architects, to develop the potential of design research in architecture and the built environment. The Biennale of Sydney is Australia's largest contemporary visual arts festival. Superscale's research-based proposal - realised as a built project - was not only an opportunity to explore speculative research for architecture in built form, but was also seen alongside their contemporaries in a significant international art context.