TRAFFIC is a collaborative design practice working across architecture, urbanism and computation.

We are interested in behaviour, form, the behaviour of form and patterns of occupation of the city and its architecture through the lens of procedural and process-driven experimentation.

This methodology is deployed as a mechanism to engage with the real, the hyper-real and the counterfactual. We observe, research, lecture, analyse, design, speculate, make and exhibit.

TRAFFIC is located in Melbourne, Australia with global projects, interests and collaborations, primarily in Australia, Europe and Asia.

Flinders Street Station - Everything, All Together

We believe that this Station, and its city, can be transformed through careful addition, not radical intervention. Our proposal responds to the particular physical and programmatic possibilities of the site by providing an architecture of interconnection built around, and across, the site’s perimeter.

Connection

Three new bridges cross this perimeter. Habitable bridge-buildings, they contain transportation, commercial, public and administrative activities.

They link the edges, and overlap their functions with others, drawing a range of activities across the site.

Further enriching this mix, atop each of these intersection points is a tower, a vertical laneway of entertainment spaces and public viewing terraces. From the towers the flow of activity, of both the station and the river, can be simultaneously enjoyed.

Convergence

Flinders Street Station is Melbourne’s place of meeting. Our proposal dramatically extends this history, transforming the station into a meeting place of metropolitan, regional and global communities.

This centers on the Administration Building. Rather than see it as a series of discrete functions we propose it as a place where aspects of all the Station’s activities intersect.

The result is a spatial network combining occupancy with circulation, formality with informality—a scheduled meeting with a chance encounter.

In addition to improved transport operations and urban design, we propose that the station hosts a relocated CAE and City Library, together with a contemporary shared workplace and a suite of seminar, function and workshop facilities; an innovative centre for work, learning and making of international standing.

Into this campus we propose something small-scale and generous—an international residency program within the Administration Building that provides creative researchers and practitioners with the opportunity to stay at the station. The Station is a creative resource and venue for their outcomes.

Image

Our design celebrates the iconic form of the Station, its surrounding buildings, infrastructure and urban grain. The architecture draws upon these elements in complex and surprising ways, providing an image at once familiar and new. At the western end near the dome and Princes Bridge, across from Hamer Hall, it is elegant and theatrical. Beside the exposed steelwork of Sandridge Bridge and the viaduct its imagery is tougher, infrastructural.

Our design vastly improves the transport performance of the Station, at the same time providing a multitude of situations for people to meet, by plan or by chance. We have taken institutions and facilities that are well known and well loved, carefully connected them and expanded them, transforming the Station into a place that not only connects people to the city but also to each other; for learning, working, or for fun, and from central, metropolitan, regional and international locations.

What distinguishes the design are the rich combinations of spaces and landscapes created, the positivity by which they add to the Station’s form and connect to the Yarra, and the quality of how all these things occur, together. 

This project was undertaken in collaboration with Workshop Architecture

Project Team: Simon Whibley, Ian Nazareth, Aaron Robinson, Amy Snoekstra, Bernadette Zajd