Urban Planning + Design Portfolio Launched at carbonmade.com
Featured Projects:
- Interdisciplinary Studio: Transit Oriented Design (Auburn Station, Melbourne)
- Urban Design for Planners: Carlton United Brewery Derelict Site (Melbourne)
- Utopian History: Коммуна: Утопической жизни в университете Мельбурна
- Environmental Design: Project 2462 Regenerative Design Studio
- Freelance: Historic Square District Preliminary Modeling (Urbana, Ohio)
Photo: Left of Pushka Cafe, Melbourne, CBD (Joshua Beery)
Rem Koolhaas on Urban Planning
”The Generic City presents the final death of planning. Why? Not because it is not planned - in fact, huge complementary universes of bureaucrats and developers funnel unimaginable flows of energy and money into its completion; for the same money, its plains can be fertilized by iamonds, its mud fields paved in gold bricks… But its most dangerous and most exhilarating discovery is that planning makes no difference whatsoever. Buildings may be placed well (a tower near a metrostation) or badly (whole centres miles away from any road). They flourish/perish unpredictably. Networks become overstretched, age, rot, become obsolete; populations double, triple, quadruple. Suddenly disappear. The surface of the city explodes, the economy accelerates, slows down, bursts, collapses. Like ancient mothers that still nourish the titanic embryos, whole cities are built on colonial infrastructures of which the oppressors took the blueprints back home. Nobody knows where, how, since when the sewers run, the exact location of telephone lines, what the reason was for the position of the centre, where monumental axes end. All it proves is that there are infinite hidden margins, colossal reservoirs of slack, a perpetual, organic process of adjustment, standards, behaviour; expectations change with the biological intelligence of the most alert animal. In this apotheosis of multiple choice it will never be possible again to reconstruct cause and effect.They work - that is all.”
(Source: Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, and Hans Werlemann. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. 2nd ed. New York, N.Y.: Monacelli, 1998. Print. pp. 1255.)
Castro’s Kiosk - a true urban oasis. Formerly, the best cafe at the University of Melbourne, appropriately located near the Architecture, Building and Planning Building. Home of the Hawaii 5-0, Latte Soy Dandy (LSD) and vegan sour cherry muffins from the union co-operative. Castro’s switched ownership during 2009 leading to its unfortunate demise as best cafe, however, many of the former baristas can now be found at Ramano’s just outside the ERC Building. (Photo: Unknown)
