tyrrellstudio's winning "Street 14" urban design entry in Melbourne

tyrrellstudio from Sydney, Australia recently won the Street 14 competition in Melbourne. The open Australian urban design competition sought the best proposal for a new commercial center in Melbourne's Moorabbin Junction.

Out of 53 submissions and rigorous discussion amongst the jury, tyrrellstudio's 'Easy Street' won first prize with a cash award of $20,000.

Scroll down further to see tyrrellstudio's entry.

Project description:

"The tyrrellstudio scheme involves the invention of new combinatory typologies of open space and built form. These typologies are urban catalysts for the emergence of unknown economic and social systems. The scheme creates new hybrids from the mundane ingredients of the ‘big box’ shopping centre and the surface car parking lot."

"The scheme focuses on the varying speeds of urban development and the typologies of city form associated with fast and slow urbanism. For every fast paced ‘big box’ development, tyrrellstudio proposes a ‘slower’ edge. In this way Moorabbin Junction is encouraged to develop at the pace that the market de mands, yet these fast paced improvements also sow the seeds for future spinoff urbanisms of a smaller scale to emerge."

"The humble surface car parking lot is the other typology reinvented by the scheme. tyrrellstudio have explored a high tech infrastructure including digital line markings and programmable signs. This layer of digital semiotics allows the distortion of the car park identity at different times. A co-working/workshop space is located as a pavilion within the car park bringing experimental program to the centre of the city and encouraging the temporal space of the car park to become a flexible generator for street life. A playful field system results."

"The car park model proposed by tyrrellstudio illustrates how readily available technology can be reinvented in the urban context to create high performance space taking on multiple roles simultaneously. Beneath the surface lot are several levels of underground parking. Through the center of these floor plates, a spiraling circulation ramp and small-scale retail tenancies extends the activity of the street into the subterranean realm. The open core be comes an extravagant garden housing a collection of ornamental plants that allow slight, life and fresh air to penetrate the parking structure."

"The ‘Street 14: Moorabbin Junction’ competition asked entrants to design the street of the future. The winning scheme produces a street as a by-product of its surrounding form. At one end of a reconfigured Taylor Street, rather than tucking it away, the tyrrellstudio scheme places the flexible car park as the central focus of the city, where one would expect to find the grand public plaza.

The scheme contrasts this heterotopic space with the typical composition heavy design of the modern privately managed ‘public’ plaza at the other end of Taylor Street. The two opposing public space typologies become the polarities of a new urban dumbbell structure embedded in the town centre, which charges the new Taylor Street with programmatic tensions and a resultant mix of street life desired in a city centre."

All images courtesy of tyrrellstudio.