Built Landscapes

 Gadigal and Wangal Country of Eora, Iron Cove Creek, Sydney

*This project will feature in the next edition of PLAT Journal, 2024

PLAT is an independent architectural journal whose purpose is to stimulate relationships between design, production, and theory. It operates by interweaving professional and academic work into an open and evolving dialogue which progresses from issue to issue. Curating worldwide submissions in two annual issues, PLAT is a projective catalyst for architectural discourse. 

Shimmer is a translation of the Yolngu term ‘bir’yun’. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose first learned of this Aboriginal concept in the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory, so-called ‘Australia’. Shimmer announces deep time, present, and eco-futures that connect with ‘lively, powerful, interactive worlds that ride the waves of ancestral power’. It is a ‘gleaming ephemeral moment of capture’, and showcases the well-being of Country. 

This project utilised three instruments: 

Coir log

Coir logs are placed, and place themselves, over areas of concrete rupture, diversifying the canal skin. They are thirsty, fibrous, super-carriers of moisture and nutrients. We poke seedlings into their flesh. We play, moving their porous bodies to become flow interrupters, to catch and slow matter in the incessant flux. 

Seed bank garden 

We plant the creek edge. Their blooms seed the cracks with endemic beings intertwined with sediment and water. Mass planting here conjures a seed bank for the creek, with pioneering species chosen for their rapid growth and robust bodies. Marsh and sclerophyll take root and ride the flush of flood and tide, interrupting sterility with thick, potent shimmer. 

Concrete cut 

We soften the belly of the creek by carving into concrete fractures and lifting crumbling pieces. Crack ecologies evolve and establish in the slow decay of infrastructure. Cuts enhance this decay, providing wider, deeper opportunities for the glimmer of kin, dissolving the binary between wet and dry.

Kathryn Morgan and Kirst Willis with UTS 

Awabakal and Worimi County, Coquun Hunter River, Newcastle

“The river and the weather are telling us the Country is unhealthy, not just here but globally because temperatures, rainfall and other indicators are changing more rapidly and to greater extremes.”

Bundjalung man Oli Costello, Living Lab Northern Rivers

Conversations with young people under the Hexam Bridge gave us a glimpse of life growing up along the Coquun - the desire to be outside, to interact with the river through fishing and cooking by the shore with friends. They also gave us a glimpse of the constraints. One young person told us he’d rather be at Ash Island where there's more biodiversity but “you need a car to get there”. 

Investigating the adjacent warehouse ruins, we observed evidence of other local ways of being by the river - graffiti art, skateboard and bike tracks, all evidence entangled with the presence of occasional flood events that presented debris of the Coqqun into the built environment. Our design is a multi-use youth space for ecological learning through autonomous play and outdoor learning, built sustainably with recycled steel from the site as well as nutrient rich mud bricks made from material typically

dredged from the Coquun River and dumped out at sea.

The project draws on precedents such as Mike Hewson’s “risky playgrounds” (Melbourne) and lo-fi community-centric gardening like that of Wagon Landscape Architects (Paris) and Terremoto (Los Angeles)

 Jade Begang and Kathryn Morgan with UTS