all photos by Room 4.1.3.

Concept

Tangled lines formed by Boolean computation carve voids into architecture and set out landscape spaces. The threads of the tangle come from a playful negotiation of urban design guidelines extrapolated from the original Cartesian axes set out by Walter Burley Griffin.

The tangled or knotted condition operates as a metaphor of a nation's interwoven pluralist destiny. In particular, the design sets out a new axis between the nation's spiritual centre (Ayer's Rock-Uluru) and the nation's political centre, Parliament House. The whole site planning can be understood as making a complex emergent configuration between the two aforementioned referents. Contrary to modernist Canberra, the site planning makes use of its waterside location and also forms a large inner space for a garden.

The Garden of Australian Dreams is a micro-cosmic representation of Australian self-consciousness, based on virtuality and simulacra as opposed to mimesis of `nature'. It is also a project, which claims to be landscape design about landscape design, explicitly challenging orthodox landscape expressions. It is a space rich in meaning and is perhaps the world's largest built map!

details of water feature

National Museum of Australia

The site is a peninsula on Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, Australia's planned 20th century city and political capital. The National Museum of Australia is charged with documenting Australia's popular culture through the themes of Land, People and Nation. The building for the museum is pensively connected to the Gallery of First Australians, Australia's premier collection of indigenous culture. This whole museum complex shares the peninsula with the academic cultural institution, AIATSIS, The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

The Museum not only enhances its remarkable picturesque location, but also metaphorically reaches out to the broader cultural landscape of the nation. It does this through two noteworthy features, the Uluru Axis and the Garden of Australian Dreams. The Museum's buildings are to an extent structured by the former and they in turn generously create the space for the latter.