The Sydney Royal Botanical Gardens works as a material economy driven by the exchange and absorption of nutrients. This cycle, akin to economic and commodity processes, involves extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. All waste materials from the Royal Botanical Gardens must be disposed of completely and sanitarily by incineration to prevent botanical pathologies infecting the thriving ecologies of the gardens. Incineration of the artefacts may take between 15 minutes (small leaf matter) to 12 hours (entire tree trunks) depending on their physical properties. The incineration time of this biological matter reflects the matters very longevity in the Royal Botanical Gardens. This project sought to develop a poetic response to this prosaic maintenance regime.
Architectural speculation tends to be classified into two distinct categories: discursive and material. The first responds to a presumed scenario of ideas to be tested against a logical framework. The second belongs to the realm of formal experimentation, either by exploring the possibilities of new materials, new encounters with old materials, new typologies for perceived or emerging needs, or the ‘material’ consequences of ‘immaterial’ forms of architectural representation. With the Sydney Royal Botanical Gardens as the locus of their design interventions, students reconnected contemporary design practices to the fantastic — a repressed aspect of the avant-garde — testing the relevance of this mode of practice today. In each studio session, students were required to address the class in character – as a kind of architectural method-acting – based on a fictional role they imagined for themselves, developing a critical attitude towards contemporary trends and their implications, in which a privileging of subjectivity and the imaginary realm increase the depoliticisation of architectural discourse and practice.
