Speculative Project
The Atherton Gardens Housing Estate in Fitzroy, has for many years been in desperate need of revamping and at the time of this design project, the Estate had no master-plan for redevelopment. Rather than approaching this problem with simplistic infill development, this project implemented landscape infrastructure to act as a spine supporting a four stage master plan.
The first stage is designed to establish a benchmark for subsequent stages to follow, establishing several key criteria which respond to context, and address the existing spatial issues that contribute to perceptions of social difference, particularly amidst processes of gentrification: urban grain / density / building morphology /continuity of street networks.
In response to these phenomena, this project privileges reinforcement of the urban grain, pedestrian networks, contextual materials and morphologies to build affiliations with existing urban and social fabrics. Perhaps most importantly, it refrains from the imposition of architectural zeitgeist as a means of ‘heroic redemption’.
New medium density apartment blocks comprise three types, and are intended to employ a ‘salt & pepper’ mixed tenure pattern whereby the sale of privately owned strata titles partially funds government subsidised housing.