"The project was a paper architecture project that was also aimed at been floated as a crowd funding opportunity and one that could occur in either Australia, New Zealand, America.
Extent of design has resolved much of the issues of the design for buildability, but would require final specifying of local materials to ensure the message of the building and intent is maintained - in that its drive is for a regenerative Architecture - designed as a high performance building that can give back to the community it will exist in."
The design intent was to look at an residential and pottery / art studio insertion to a bare inner city lot, surrounded by a motley crew of existing industrial buildings. The concept evolved into designing an oasis, abundant with nature within such a concrete and brick clad environ for the interface of Architecture to the intimacy of a garden. The concept of the Green Cage is a contained ideal of the greening of one’s own backyard. In-short, a blurring of the boundary between the landscape and building through a sharing of space. No thought exists of a secreted walled garden but reversed with the garden forming the walls and secreting the house and studio. The Green Cage has been designed for what will over-grow it. Designed to sit proudly; upright within furrowed earthen mounds covered in creeping ivy; undulating like frozen emerald waves and amongst the sudden splash of exploding tall native grasses. The Green cage is designed for the past, now and the future. Purposed as a functioning house and studio, existing as a part of the fabric of urban Melbourne and yet alien, existing as both a familiar and yet an unfamiliar edifice.
Three parts, three functions, serving as one entity. The greening of the physical and mental scape: The Green Cage. “Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free – It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with predators – What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage, or an uncertain life of freedom.” – Going Out, written by Scarlett Thomas, 2004.
