Tiny Patches - Melbourne Design Week

GLAS Landscape Architects was engaged to provide landscape design expertise for the Warrnambool Learning and Library Centre in 2019, working as a sub-consultant to Kosloff Architecture. The scope of the project focuses on the external spaces surrounding the hub, with a design aimed at integrating the new facilities into the existing TAFE campus and connecting them to the surrounding town, all while reflecting the local coastal environment and historical conAt the heart of the landscape concept is a desire to create spaces that not only function well but also connect people to nature and each other. The design takes cues from the coastal landscape, with its sand dunes, rock outcrops, and indigenous plant life, to inform everything from the material choices to the arrangement of planting and seating. The iconic Norfolk Island Pines that frame the entrance stand as sentinels, welcoming visitors into a civic plaza where the boundary between hard surfaces and soft greenery is intentionally blurred, encouraging exploration and casual interaction.

Biodiversity loss is a major concern for the survival of the planet. Australia has the largest decline in biodiversity of any continent. Despite policies targeting a ‘Net Gain’ of habitats, in Victoria in 2020 8200 HA of Native Vegetation was lost. (Biodiversity 2037 Annual report by DEECA 2020). Urban development is a major factor in habitat loss, resulting in fragmentation and with it, an inability for species to move to different areas. And yet, 46% of Australia’s threatened animals live in urban environments (Australian Conservation Foundation, 2023). What if urban environments could be part of the solution and improve biodiversity?

As a part of 2024 Melbourne Design Week Program, GLAS hosted an exhibition, Tiny Patches that fuses new research with a playful provocation. To design the built form with better species habitat and connectivity, perhaps it’s time to throw out the rulebook. The exhibition explores our relationship to biodiversity in an urban context, the restrictions and complexity and asks us to design the world we want for a biodiverse concrete jungle.

This exhibition aims to inspire a more biodiverse Brunswick. Although the Eco Trolleys are only temporary they suggest patches that could be built. The trolleys are mobile and were used to trace an imagined ecological corridor from Moonee Ponds Creek and Clifton Park and the site of the exhibition. The journey of the Eco Trolleys has been recorded in the five photographs in the exhibition. The photographs record the Eco Trolleys as they stand in places where the habitat that they represent would once have dominated the view.

We invite you to embrace these tiny fragments of habitat and consider how you can restore these and others to Brunswick and urban Melbourne.