Most of our perceived identity comes from bastardised sketches of the Sydney Opera House, or a jar of Vegemite, but this is not the true nature or an accurate representation of what Australia looks like. The purest form of identity, particularly to represent regional Australia is the landscape. Australia is full of differing regions, harsh terrain, unique flora & fauna and intangible beauty found only here. An architecture designed to represent these remote areas of Australia, as such should reflect these characteristics, through colour, form, materials, play of light, and how they blend in to their surroundings. The following are collection of landscape paintings and aboriginal artworks which I felt best capture the feeling of the areas we are intending to design for. These cover tropical forests, bushland, farming towns, snowy mountains, desert and coastal regions.
As beautiful as these images might be, we will perhaps be left with a plethora of mobile architectures which read immediately as the region from which they came, but may not form as an appealing collective whole. In my research to find something that may help to tie these regions together, I suddenly remembered the work of Bernard Tschumi - the "Parc De La Villette". This public space contained a series of follies laid out in a square grid throughout, linked by a series of parks, ramps, bridges and walkways.
Each of these follies, while differing in form, read as a single entity due to the simple idea of a common primary red colour scheme. The space between the individuals merely creates excitement at the thought of getting to discover the next one. I thought about appropriating a similar idea, where these national follies might become the infrastructure nodes used to disperse the mobile architectures, but also the place where they can come together in one location. Tourists crossing our plains may witness the regional parliament assembled in the Kimberley's, and then reassembled a week later along the Nullabor Plain, housing a collection/collage/museum of modern australian mobile architectures which respond to these landscapes I have looked at.
The following digrams show the idea of relating a similar system, less obvious than the standard grid, and more responsive to local regions. This will tie the mobile units together and be identified as a base point for
the "travelling circus" of parliament.
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