Melbourne’s Western Plains is a hybridised territory – a product of the exertion of civil engineering, land management, and the pressures of urbanisation. How public space is designed and planned within this territory, whether built or regenerated, is critical to city’s future edge. Building from the last 2 semester’s foundations, this studio will return to this context for another design project for large scale public landscapes and infrastructures.

Focusing on an expanded notion of site – The Map and the Territory begins with a close reading of the Western Plains via mapping, photography and simulation. A careful and detailed survey is developed using photographs of places across the Plains, transformed into simulated reproductions using advanced gaming engine environments. These virtual reproductions of site create a blur between real and fictional, allowing for stories of past, present and future to imbue the design process.


Together with GIS digital mapping data, these constructed images and models serve as a portrait of site and contain symbolic and formal inclinations that later become the elements and assets we use to construct the design project with.

Studio Outcomes

1. The Field – an ‘anti-park’ - a spatial project that speculates on alternative cultural relationships within the plains.
2. The Line – a pathway infrastructure that provides access to and from the field.
3. The Shed – a commercial seed production facility.