Semester 1: In Landscape, People and Place Studio, we worked through a process of redesigning the prime site of QUT's Garden's Point Theatre and X Block into a proposed new Currumba Institute Law and Justice Precinct.  

Central to this future building is a new Oodgeroo Unit, QUT's Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Support Unit.

The design brief asked us to understand the historical colonial design that underpins the campus, and to explicitly acknowledge and reconnect the university to country - Meanjin - the Turrbal word for the spike of land upon which the Garden's Point Campus sits.  

The design aimed to enable "Country as Classroom" by providing options to  focus teaching away from the inside built environment towards the landscape where rich, complex cultural and spiritual systems of knowledge reside for First Nations people. 

My design achieved this through reorienting the outside spaces to face the gardens and winter sun to the north. Central to achieving this was an amphitheatre, an acknowledgement of the importance of performance in First Nations oral storytelling and knowledge creation. By following the hillside topography, users step down from the formal, hard university spaces into the alternative 'natural' spaces offered by soft gardens and open skies.  This offers a transformative understanding of space and this part of Meanjin.

Plants and surface materials were chosen to engage with the hardy landscapes of Queensland, evoking resilience, survival and adaptation.