Location: Melbourne, Australia.

Architect: MUIR+OPENWORK.

The NGV Architecture Commission for 2018, called ‘Doubleground’, is located in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The project aims to challenge the role of the garden in the civic realm and explore what it can be through architecture. Rather than being an object in the garden, the landscape generates interiors and rooms to be explored and occupied. The project is a collaboration between architecture and landscape, with the landscape being used as ballast to support interior spaces. The intervention seeks to introduce a sympathetic new language to the garden by echoing the formal architecture of Roy Grounds. The project creates a literal double-ground, with a new topography that provides spaces for the body to occupy. The synergy between architecture and landscape not only provides for inhabitable civic spaces to be explored but also frames tactics for revealing and presenting site narratives otherwise overlooked. The project challenges the role of small and ephemeral works such as pavilions and reveals the permanent potential of the temporary.

Photo credit: Peter Bennetts.