Architecture of the Weed
I propose that we re-propagate the City of Darwin. Not in an attempt to counteract its current lush and verdant landscapes but in an attempt to disrupt the conflict between the current states of the natural and built environments.
When contemplating Darwin’s urban landscape I am drawn to the phrase ‘Don’t water your weeds’ and yet it sits incongruously with me. This short statement is meant to both nurture and empower, however it provokes a tense sense control within me. Perhaps it’s this element of control that makes me uneasy. An uneasy control which I see mimicked within the unravelling urban landscapes of Australia.
Our borders and boundaries extract the natural and re-populate with the foreign. Within our quasi European lawns what was once native flora is now declared a weed and war is waged on this indigenous pestilence.
Our built environment often creates alien barriers between landscapes. Roads, fences, houses, factories, airports, dams all manufactured to sit in opposition to its neighbour. In many ways these are the weeds. These are the elements that keep surviving, existing without being, multiplying without control.
Soon we will have produced an environment that is so overgrown with urban sprawl that it will become uninhabitable. This is of course unless we start watering the weeds, allowing the natural to propagate and develop, managing, maintaining and mitigating our future cities.
It is with this ethos that I intend to re-propagate the city of Darwin, to overlay what was once the natural with what is now the weed. Attempting to disrupt the built form with enough variability and fluidity so as to enable a new form which lives in the environment as opposed to next to it.
The idea of watering a weed intrigues me, particularly when I frame it architecturally. After all a weed is just a plant that we don’t want. It is often deemed ugly or invasive or a nuisance, all of which can be said for architecture. Sometimes a weed can be a flower depending on the viewer. Sometimes the weed is no longer a weed depending on how ugly the plant is next to it.
