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.

Crinkle Cut .... Cling Wrapped, Adelaide Community Hub

The city is an archetype for creative collaboration and community. It draws people to it, proliferating interaction. Actions of the individual and the collective shape the city. The city is simultaneously forged by these arrangements over time, either incrementally or absolutely. Through accretion, aggregation and erasure, the urban fabric records certainty, ambiguity and change. In this project, urban form and structures of the city are both a reference and precedent. Our interest is in exploring the agency of architectural form in augmenting urban systems through process-based experiments and urban investigation.

The design and research traverse a sequence of scales and resolutions. The design process is deployed as a device for form finding as well as experimentally engaging with the internal organisation and orthodoxies of the building, superimposed with the hierarchies of the city. This does not mimic or supersede the city, but attempts to enhance its characteristics to uncover new dynamics in the programmatic arrangements. As the disembowelled city is assembled on the site through creases, folds and tucks, the axes of the urban can be read as a trajectory that emerges from the mangled fragments. Specific scales and typologies lend themselves to particular intensities of use, and appropriation. These are negotiated and played out through the floor layouts and sectional dislocation. Rather than sanitise the inherent ‘messiness’, the design amplifies this condition.

The ambition is for the architectural form and arrangement to be a protagonist and catalyst for adjacency, interactions and collisions of ideas within the creative community. The building envelope itself is an abstract reconstitution of public art from the city, expressed through architectural elements. The project also revisits the typology of the park, square and the cathedral, that manifests itself through the internal facades and articulation of voids within the building and layering of the floorplates. Through identifying and hybridising urban systems of the city and reframing them through architectural precepts, the outcome is unique to its host city. The desire is to expand the public domain of the city, with architectural identity as an armature to shaping a new social and creative dimension.

Project Team: Ian Nazareth, Kayden Lau.