Dezeen School Shows: an arts centre highlighting the culture of its local Indigenous community is among the projects from the University of Melbourne.

Also featured is a water-cremation facility and memorial park in Melbourne, Australia, and a museum that includes a skatepark.

University of Melbourne

Institution: University of Melbourne
School: Melbourne School of Design
Courses: Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture
Tutors: Paul Walker, Alessandro Zambelli, Benjamin Lau, Emilio Fuscaldo, David O'Brien and George Stavrias, Rory Hyde, Jillian Walliss, Delia Teschendorff, Alan Pert and Virginia Mannering

School statement:

"This work is from Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Architecture studios, which embed the exploration of representational techniques and materiality into their design studio teaching."

Artlab: Box Hill (Amorphous Amplification Prosthetic for Vestiges of the Suburban Arts) by Kevin Wang

"Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood's 1961 Fun Palace envisaged an urban laboratory that placed the arts at the civic altar with housing and commercialisation of the developing urban space.

"Since then, suburbs around the world, like Melbourne's Box Hill, have seen unprecedented development in their residential, service and transport networks since the 2010s.

"Their artistic networks, however, are not only fragmented but at threat of disenfranchisement from biased development schemes and the 'CBD-arts illusion'.

"This thesis project inquires how a multidisciplinary arts laboratory in the testing zone of Box Hill can provide sociocultural, economic and practitioner value to local, diverse, underfunded creatives.

"A modular building experiment, Artlab contends that the multidisciplinary arts are more important than ever in the upcoming epoch of suburbia."

Student: Kevin Wang
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutor: Paul Walker
Email: kevinkevnkvn[at]gmail.com

Memoria by Agnes Leonardi

"Memoria is a water-cremation facility and memorial park situated along the wetlands at the edge of Geelong, Melbourne. The project reimagines funerary ritual through water, offering an alternative to burial and fire-based cremation.

"Sited beneath the historic aqueduct, the architecture transforms one invisible infrastructure into a civic vessel for grief, memory and ecological renewal.

"The building sequence guides mourners through enclosed chambers toward open platforms that meet the river, where ashes are released into water as part of a continuous cycle.

"Using timber, steel grating and filtered light, the project creates a calm and atmospheric environment that holds emotional weight without spectacle.

"Memoria aims to bring death back into public life, turning water, landscape and architecture into shared rituals that dead while caring for the living."

Student: Agnes Leonardi
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutor: Alessandro Zambelli
Email: nesleonardi[at]gmail.com

Between Silence and Witness by Terence Sammeldy

"On 14 May 1998, violence surged through Glodok's commercial corridors in Jakarta. Rioters broke into shops, looted goods and set buildings alight.

"This thesis reactivates Glodok's abandoned shophouses to serve as living witnesses to the Kerusuhan Mei 1998 (May 1998 Indonesia riots), confronting political denial and cultural erasure.

"It contends that ruins can serve as phenomenological vessels of memory, rather than being demolished or converted into museums.

"Through narrative-driven spatial journeys, scenographies and material atmospheres, the project stages absence as lived experience.

"It situates architecture within broader discourses on memory, trauma and spatial justice by reactivating wounded structures as community testimonies, positioning them as instruments of resistance and resilience."

Student: Terence Sammeldy
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutor: Benjamin Lau
Email: terence.sammeldy[at]student.unimelb.edu.au

Buildings as Pyrophyte: Halls Gap Community Landscape by Jared Baum

"Seeking to extend and reinvent existing practices of bushfire resilience, this thesis looks to counter the escalating threat of bushfires.

"Proposing a form of civic infrastructure that not only mitigates risk but also galvanises collective resilience, the proposal offers local community a reinvigorated sense of security and belonging.

"Deploying placemaking to cultivate social capital, the design aims to strengthen the bonds between people, culture and country, ensuring that rural communities can continue inhabiting and caring for their threatened landscapes.

"Championing circular building practices and an ethos of evolutionary cyclic overhaul, an infrastructure that diverges from conventional approaches is prescribed, driven by care and renewal.

"The design is conceived not as a static and impervious artefact, but as a living, adaptive system that embraces cycles of loss, repair and regeneration.

"Challenging conventional perceptions of bushfires as solely catastrophic events, rather, this thesis looks to reframing fire as a natural and inevitable process that can be anticipated, absorbed and transformative."

Student: Jared Baum
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutor: Emilio Fuscaldo
Email: jaredfbaum[at]gmail.com

The Museum as Blur by Evelyn Gunawan

"The Museum as Blur repositions the museum from an exclusive institution to an open, everyday and participatory cultural space.

"Rather than isolating art within the 'white cube', the project erodes the separation between archive above and skatepark below: the museum descends toward the skatepark while the skate ramp rises into the galleries, creating a reciprocal overlap between formal exhibition and street culture.

"These vertical crossings soften boundaries and produce shared thresholds of movement, gathering and informal spectatorship, dissolving distinctions between visitor, skater and passer-by.

"Everyday programmes drawn from Melbourne's urban rhythms, including cafe, co-working, maker studio and skatepark, are woven directly into the museum around the archive so that art is encountered within ordinary routines rather than apart from them.

"Through open archive shelves and choreographies shaped by bodily motion, participation becomes a spatial condition. The museum shifts from a static repository to a porous, evolving civic organism."

Student: Evelyn Gunawan
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutors: Rory Hyde
Email: evelyn.gunawan[at]outlook.com

Between Boort's Walk by Maisie Matthews

"Between Boort's Walk explores the tensions between cultural agency, cultural tourism and productive agricultural landscapes.

"Farming since colonisation has reshaped the water landscape of Boort, creating stark contrasts between gridded farmland, controlled water channels, and the ephemeral wetlands of Dja Dja Wurrung Country.

"This project proposes a three-day, four-night cultural walk that acts as a catalyst for Dja Dja Wurrung-led land management strategies. Three zones structure shared ecological, cultural and economic benefits for farmers and Traditional Owners.

"Along manipulated watercourses in the Cobram Estate olive groves, endemic plantings form biodiversity corridors that improve soil health, water quality and farm productivity.

"At Lake Boort and Lake Lyndger, Red Gums are re-established and cultural burning restores nutrients and manages invasive species.

"Decentralised keeping places, designed by Nethuni Sumanaweera, showcase living cultural artefacts and provide infrastructure for maintenance and rest, while Lake Lyndger accommodates overnight camping during seasonal inundation."

Student: Maisie Matthews
Course: Master of Landscape Architecture/Master of Architecture (MLA/MArch)
Tutor: Jillian Walliss
Email: maisieamatthews[at]gmail.com

Ground Architecture – Dwelling with Tension by Wuyu Liu

"At Redstone Hill, a greenfield site in Sunbury's growth corridor, the tension between suburban imagery and lived reality becomes a site of repair.

"Amid severed ecologies and fenced conservation 'islands,' the thesis proposes Ground Architecture, a mode of designing that listens to the land and restores its quiet sovereignty.

"Through green corridors, shared gardens and contour-following dwellings lifted on light timber frames, the design transforms misfit into regeneration, weaving ecological continuity with everyday life.

"Architecture becomes an in-between space, mediating human and land, cultivating reciprocity through verandas, thresholds and communal grounds.

"It asks: what if suburbia could grow not by expansion, but by learning to breathe with the ground again?

"By choreographing encounters across macro, community and dwelling scales, the project reveals a suburb that reconnects through care, a living framework where land, people and memory shape belonging together."

Student: Wuyu Liu
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutors: Delia Teschendorff and Alan Pert
Email: wuyuliuarch[at]gmail.com

Keeping Place by Nethuni A Sumanaweera

"Situated on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Boort holds a substantial repository of cultural artefacts, both catalogued and many still embedded in the landscape.

"Their significance lies not only in the objects themselves but also in the cultural and environmental systems that shape and are shaped by them.

"This thesis critiques the conventional museum typology that removes artefacts from their places of origin and places them in controlled environments.

"The project is grounded in the enduring importance of the Yung Balug Clan's knowledge system, preserved through living practice and oral tradition rather than confined to vitrines.

"The proposal unfolds through three interventions: an adaptive reuse project of a town shopfront as a communal hub and keeping place for already catalogued artefacts; accommodation on Lake Boort's edge supporting immersive engagement with place; and a network of movable, site-responsive keeping places highlighting uncatalogued artefacts in situ.

"Together these interventions propose an architectural approach that foregrounds artefacts by keeping them connected to country and community."

Student: Nethuni A Sumanaweera
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutor: Virginia Mannering
Email: nethuni.a.sum[at]gmail.com

Architecture for Gija Agency in Warmun by Lewis Bushell

"Founded as a refuge for Indigenous families displaced by violent pastoral expansion, Warmun has since existed in the shadow of a westernised order.

"The local arts centre and its artists form a unique sanctuary for a millennia-old, deliberate, environmentally attuned way of life that resists this hegemony.

"Today, globalisation adds pressures such as an accelerated way of life, alongside climate strains like extreme heat and flooding, which together pose a significant threat to the community.

"In response, this design thesis explores how architectural practice can act as both preservation and provocation. Can it protect 'slow living' while simultaneously exposing the global mechanisms that erode it?

"The design of a new arts centre aims to preserve by giving agency to the local community, allowing them to shape their own way of life. It also seeks to provoke by revealing to visitors the deep disconnect between modern life and Gija culture."

Student: Lewis Bushell
Course: Master of Architecture
Tutors: David O'Brien and George Stavrias
Email: ljbushell75[at]gmail.com

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and University of Melbourne. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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