Stolen, Disrupted & Regrown: Upside-down Country

Castlemaine’s wounded landscape has been ripped apart and left to bleed within the space between.

A park proposal harnesses time to represent the unresolved tension between unlike things. This site brokers many complex layers held together through a range of key fragments and aims to simultaneously repair the landscape and unite the community in embracing the native flora and fauna that grows through the cracks of the destruction of the past.

The architecture and overall planning of the project are influenced by a generative design strategy using rocks and doors that were stolen from the site and disrupted to create new forms from the existing. A way of piecing together the past. This led to resurfacing the site’s past and taking elements from the previous gasworks, the original tent city, and the unique features of the eucalyptus buds to adapt them to encourage planting and habitation across both civic and private interventions.

An end formula is assembled in which the site becomes a collection of scales, programs, actors, and ecologies that utilise past imprints to generate future changes.