ABSTRACT

A new place-making project in Perth, Western Australia, offered a real-world laboratory for exploring the nexus between interwoven memory and movement or, in this instance, the amnesia and territorial theft that tore apart the social contract. Yagan Square is named for an Aboriginal (Noongar) man, brutally murdered in the early colonial period. The conjunction of a government-sponsored meeting place and a legacy of historical non-meeting demanded a new approach to public space design, one that incorporated the still unresolved experience of thwarted encounter, reflected in the competition-winning design proposal by Lyons Architects (Melbourne). A process document called the “creative template” was commissioned from Material Thinking (Melbourne). Devised as a catalyst of bicultural engagement in conceptualizing a desirable sense of place, it explored convergent story traditions and environmental associations, translating the movements and actions they related into a symbolic dramaturgy of encounter. In contrast with the planning orthodoxy, which defines public space purely in terms of unreflective congregation and its regulation, the spatial arrangements influenced by the “creative template” emphasized gaps, trajectories, and unfinished traces. In terms of interweaving, it drew attention to the “holes” in any crowd, eddies of “unfinished business” that are both psychic and physical. The designer became in this revisionist circumstance a public space dramaturg.