Urban Islands Workshop ♦ Flores i Prats

circular quay – ferries to cockatoo island

the first visit to the island with budi and catie

first mountage of the island map brought from barcelona

four meters of section in 1 to 200 scale

second review on the initial observations on the floor of the workshop

from cockatoo to balmain – section 1 to 200

the water has a stronger quality than the land

plans and sections in 1 to 200 – all the groups overlaped and connected

mid term review with proposal presenting to the guests professors

models in 1 to 1000 and drawings in 1 to 200 help to the discussion

first testing of the drawings in the drawing office of cockatoo island

arriving to the ferry moving the studio to cockatoo

models and drawing moving to the island on the ferry

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Urban Islands Workshop
July 2013

We invited students to put attention in the fringe of land which limits the inland from the water. To place themselves at the edge of Cockatoo Island and reflect upon the promise that a urban island can contain, and the sequence or way in which it can be revealed. If a urban island can be recognized by its limits, its future will depend on the definition of its edges, in its border, and how it connects or not with both sides of the edge… The workshop proposes to work with this edge, to read in it the possibilities for future transformations that will affect this fragment of land. We believe that any transformation on Cockatoo Island starts in its border. Or said in another way: any future plan for the island should consider its edge, as the departure line for new ideas. At the end of the process, any idea should be tested again by its effects in the edge of the island.

For the final presentation, the former drawing office, a space where many ships were actually designed in real one to one scale, was for a day re-inhabited by the students from, as a way to re-energise the Island with the (almost) lost art of drawing. Big hand pencil drawings and working models, containing reflections about different aspects of Cockatoo Island, were displayed as they used to be extended and drawn, in big horizontal surfaces. The former character of this office was then momentarily recovered: this beautifully lighted space, with enormous continuous windows and views to its four sides, again served as a studio place, a workshop where to draw and debate around big tables with models and drawings.