Project title: Reimaging Victorian Police Office
Industry partner: Victoria Police
Project aim: The aim of this project is to develop design proposals speculating on the future of policing and re-imagining what a ‘police station’ of the future might look like.
Task: As a design studio, the students will look carefully at the above issues while thinking beyond the practical, and explore ideas around the future of the physical presence of the police. In order to assist students to think in an adventurous manner we will spend time thinking about:
- What is a police station and its purpose? How has this differed over time?
- What are the architectural origins of the modern police station and how are they different in different parts of the world?
- What are the cultural, technological, social, policy, economic and other trajectories of change that might influence the future of the police station?
- How does the police station of the future integrate technology?
- What does it mean to have a mobile presence architecturally?
- Precedent study around police stations with emphasis to those precedents that work cleverly with space and the urban realm.
Students will be allocated existing stations that are embedded in a suburban, urban context for them to rethink how they integrate the police presence in a unique and impactful way. This may involve a new police service delivery model and/or re-purposing the existing police station asset. Each group of students will work on developing a brief and narrative for this station and then individually work on their own proposition.
Students will begin to design and test their brief through a mixture of precedent based explorations, design process and digital techniques, model making and other explorative processes. Work will be presented in class weekly, and updates and adjustments to the brief made in conjunction with ongoing design and exploration
IMAGE: Mattinbgn. Police station at Sunbury, Victoria. Flickr.com. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunbury_Police_Station.JPG This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
