Reed

Strawberry Fields Parkland Project and Matthew Moore led a competition to design a park within the Heart of Fortitude Valley. As Brisbane continues to densify, there must be accompanying high quality greenspace and Fortitude Valley is already falling behind in this regard. The proposed site involved a reclaiming of privately owned car dealerships and a conversion to a public parkland. The site is in close proximity to a diverse array of users from office workers, to residents whilst also holding hands with Brisbane’s primary nighttime entertainment district.

Open to students (myself at the time) and graduates we had to express our ideas and design as one A1 panel for public viewing. My panel shows the design.

As the first design I’d done intended for true public consumption, it shaped the way I presented information. The birds eye plan of the park felt the most natural to me to communicate division of space. Many people have been in tall buildings and understand looking down on space, less people have been in a helicopter and asked it politely to hover so they can view the ground directly from above. As such, I excluded a traditional plan. The competition was also an chance to continue to experiment assembling collage digitally, taking inspiration from the renders of Point Supreme and the work of Yves Brunier. I believe the layering of images in collage makes it extremely suited to competition and allows viewers to pin their own interpretations of abstract shapes and textures to a design. If I was told I had to reduce my entire submission to one image, it would be the simple looking collage to the right of the text on the panel.

Isometric diagrams look great and I had tremendous fun making one for the floating melaleuca forest. I found it by far the best way to communicate what I was envisioning with the interaction between the metal grated floor and water underneath. I will continue to do them because they are fun.

Designing the poster is of course another challenge in and of itself but we were kind enough to have some assistance from the competition’s organisers who sat down with us as a group and individually to improve upon our layouts.

I thoroughly enjoyed the entire competition process and was thrilled to receive a commendation for my efforts, presented by Dame Quentin Bryce. Thank you to the competition’s organisers- I would love to see more of these.