KEW / IVANHOE by OFFICE

Project Statement

Aqua nullius focuses on an alternate future where water and lands within the Birrarung’s catchment are managed by Traditional Owners. The video work uses archival maps and images, combined with new landscape architectural modelling, video footage, interviews with Traditional Custodians and speculative illustrations to propose a vision that responds to First Nations sovereignty of water and land.

The focus of this design research is a collection of golf courses in Kew and Ivanhoe that are built across a system of ancient billabongs. This project proposes reclamation of these privatised spaces through reintroduction of flood, fire and care cycles, allowing these environmental conditions to return to the care of Traditional Custodians. The Birrarung is now legally recognised as a single living entity. Strategies for the future management of the river must treat it as such. Many advocate for a water and land-back strategy that allows Traditional Custodians to help the river reclaim lands it has been seperated from, such as floodplains and billabongs.

About OFFICE

OFFICE is a not-for-profit multidisciplinary design and research practice based in Melbourne. Their projects span built work, research, discourse and education. As a registered charity, the studio’s operations, processes and outputs are bound by a constitution to make projects for the public good. This alternative mode of practice interrogates their relationship to the built environment as architects and landscape architects. Through their work, OFFICE considers how they practice within the limits of the profession to develop ethical projects that hold social, cultural and environmental integrity.