Depicting shelters through the ages

The Australia Gardens Shelters were an opportunity to engage with one of the nation’s most unique landscape projects. This is Australia’s only botanical gardens to feature solely Australian native plants. Rather than present a collection of plantings in a ‘museum’ type setting, the landscape is designed, reinterpreted and presented under a conceptual framework that is posed as a transition from the relatively unoccupied interior to the more constructed coastlines. In contrast to most Architectural commissions, the architecture responds directly to the landscape context both conceptually and physically. In fact, the landscape was most completed when the architectural process began. The designs for the structures explore notions of what shelter is and the history of shelter from its most primitive forms to the more contemporary vernacular.