Section#6: On Heritage - The Patina of Paradox

A building changes, cities around a building change, modes of inhabitation change.

Yet, ‘heritage’, as a framework for recognising value, favours tangible matter over intangible significance and use. Effecting change continuously, inhabitation resists the singular point that heritage is predicated upon.

This is the paradox of patina: the accreted markers of use and age are valued for the history they embody yet they are often discouraged from further development, at odds with the continuous flow of history.

This thesis proposes a reconception of the heritage object into a self-evident signifier of its own history, key themes of display and amplification have been explored as a means of bringing forth the patina of a building whilst facilitating its continued development.

The idiosyncratic history and occupants of the Nicholas Building (built 1926) has here been dissected, its internals exposed to bring the building and its occupants into productive confrontation. Resulting in a frictional yet generative tandem: With each other and their own tangled histories.

Key Info

FRANK BURNE THOMPSON is a soon to be graduated Masters of Architecture student at the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne School of Design. Prior to embarking upon his architectural studies, Frank completed a Bachelor of Science (Zoology) also at the University of Melbourne.

Drawn to design by a deeply engrained passion for making and physical craft, Frank has chosen to pursue architecture for its unique position that straddles creativity and artistry, and science, philosophy and engineering. This keen interest in junctions and how materials come together form the basis for Frank’s design approach, with an awareness of making carried from concept through to detail with a continuous reciprocity throughout.

This project, as a culmination of his Masters degree, has used a juxtaposition of new against old tectonic systems as a means of examining how our cities too often reduce historic buildings into untouchable and overly simplified objects, instead proposing an amplification of unseen histories in order to preserve buildings whose age threaten obsolescence.