The HASSELL contribution to the biennial London Festival of Architecture (LFA) 2010 explores the importance of ‘place’ through design, focusing on the island of Rottnest (Wadjemup) off the coast of Western Australia.
The 16-day Festival, which opened on 20 June, includes more than 300 events expected to attract 250,000 visitors to a variety of installations, exhibitions, debates and dialogue,
Titled ‘Emoh Ruo’ which read backwards is ‘Our Home’, the HASSELL exhibit is about landscape, memory and experience represented through a series of experiential frames. It presents a place of constant transmutation and erosional geological processes – the cycle of making and collapse.
An island that is remote from an island continent, Rottnest (Wadjemup) is an artefact of change; an erosional landform. A ‘karst’. For over 500,000 visitors a year Rottnest is a place of treasured memories and experience. Home to Aboriginal people for thousands of years, Wadjemup was separated by a rising sea 6,500 years ago. Only the remnant deposits of limestone, dune substrate and ancient inland lakes connect it to mainland Australia. Colonial settlers made it a wall-less prison for the indigenous population and hundreds of lives were lost as a result of hard labour.
In the 20th century, it became a focus for recreation for a growing Perth population, fractured only by WWII and its strategic role in defending the mainland from an enemy that never arrived.
