Our practice’s early interest in working with history in this way emerged in a winning proposal for the Hanover Design Competition, about twenty years ago. We used the grand Victorian era Fish Market that previously occupied the site as a template for a similarly proportioned presence on Flinders Street, Melbourne. 

In its heyday before demolition in the late 1950s, “between four-thirty and eight in the morning, the place was raucous with haggling fishmongers and hawkers – a byword for lusty lungs” (Robyn Annear, A City Lost & Found – Whelan the Wrecker’s Melbourne, p.158). For us, the market acted as a metaphor to bring a large variety of interests together under the one roof, prompting us to create an ant farm of extreme mixed-use complexity. Although unrealised, it mapped out areas of interest – being playful rather than reverential with history, sampling and exaggerating.

The Holme Apartments in Wellington Street, Collingwood, have been designed around another observation of place. This area was once the home of many breweries and distilleries. Concrete silos for storing hops and grain were commonplace, highly visible local landmarks.

We started by considering the old circular silos, but then we inverted the form to give the apartment building a scalloped perimeter edge, as if it had used the silos as a mold or formwork. Local history is like a buttress for the new.

Our design, with NADAAA, for the Melbourne School of Design (MSD) incorporated an important historical fragment, the old Bank of New South Wales stone façade. We treated it like a found object, akin to the classical notion of ‘spolia’ when stone elements from old buildings were repurposed in new ones. Its neoclassical language, ornament and detail offered an example for students of the built environment to consider. Behind this restored façade we framed its windows as skewed portals, as departure points to generate new perspectival forms and as a place for students to occupy.

A winding street runs through the MSD at ground level. Along its edges are long seats bent to follow the street’s course. We knew that very close to our site a picturesque ornamental lake had existed for some time before being replaced by the Union Lawn. And so, we imagined our street to be like the dry creek bed of a former stream - students occupy its edges like a riverbank and flow easily along its length.

Within the increasingly dense cities we inhabit, each of these examples make an argument for meaningful connections between architecture and its context, for revealing momentarily the invisible cities that surround us. For our practice, the context of history is a productive constraint – another layer in the story and a departure point for new ideas. In this way, we search for continuities as well as disjunctures, aiming to achieve both complexity and coherence. Through design we make observations about our memories of the city and what its future might be.