Colourama

By ASPECT | OCULUS & Broached Commissions

Curator: Broached Commissions Location: TiTree Park, East Tower Residential Apartments, Flinders St Melbourne Photographer: Peter Bennetts

Designed by ASPECT | OCULUS and Broached Commissions, the design of the pavilion combines a high modernist line with a playful heart. The overhanging eaves and square core reference a traditional Japanese tea house. This traditional design has been given a Western modernist treatment by being made entirely rectilinear. The sliding dichroic glass screens represent a blending of traditional Japanese shoji screens with a Bauhaus inspired sense of colour play.

The pavilion invites people to gently engage with the sliding panels to create a vast array of colour, shadow and pattern contrasts. Depending on the locations of the panels, the pavilion can be experienced as a playground, maze or sanctuary.

OCULUS is a cross disciplinary design studio specialising in urban design, landscape architecture, and horticulture. Since 2015, OCULUS have been the landscape architects for Melbourne Quarter.

OCULUS are award-winning built environment designers, committed to connecting people with their environment and each other, with studios in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Washington.

Deeply creative in their approach, the studio designs civic and commercial public precincts, focusing on high levels of amenity, along with social and ecological sustainability. Established for over 25 years, OCULUS’ clients include MoNA, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne University, Australian National University, Milieu, Charter Hall, and governments. Design outcomes range from large precincts to small-scale parks, gardens, and streets, through to pavilions, folly architecture and furniture design.

OCULUS and Broached Commissions are long-time collaborators, having first worked together on Hotel Hotel by Molonglo in 2012. Their work together at Melbourne Quarter represents these studio’s first collaborative foray into public art, and is connected in narrative to Grace Lilian Lee’s Embodied sculpture, located nearby. 

Established in 2011, Broached Commissions is one of Australia’s leading narrative and applied arts design studios. Broached Commissions is a research-led studio, developing creative direction strategies for applied art collections, public artworks and commercial interior spaces by interrogating the key narratives underpinning the site or project and connecting these themes to global history and cultural theory. The objects created by the design studio are intended to critique the role of design, especially its largely baseless claim to a progressive legacy. This preoccupation serves as a springboard for the development and materialisation of deeply informative and intriguing objects, exhibitions and spaces.

In 2018, Broached Commissions was honoured with a retrospective of its work at the National Gallery of Victoria, titled Design Storytellers. Objects by Broached Commissions are included in public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida. Broached has also exhibited at major international fairs including Design Miami (2019), Salone de Mobile, Milan (2017), and Jingart, Beijing (2021). Since 2017, Broached has provided creative direction and design services for the public art collections of major Australian commercial precincts by Lendlease, Mirvac, Charter Hall and Caydon.