Unrealised Project 2005
Homeswest (DHW), Campbell Street, West Perth

Artists: Pam Gaunt and Marco Marcon
Architects: Donaldson & Warn (now With_Architecture Studio)
Clients: Homeswest (Housing WA)
Location: Campbell Street, West Perth
Project: Social housing apartments.

The project was withdrawn due a change in State Government.

The Homeswest housing project in Campbell Street, west Perth was intended to provide affordable inner-city residential accommodation to families and individuals on low to moderate incomes and people with other special needs. In keeping with the aims of this development, the artists sought to create a design concept that focuses on the way in which individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds experience the city of Perth as a place of residence, work or recreation.
The design is based on a series of mud-maps drawn, by invitation, by Homeswest clients and a cross section of other city users/dwellers of Perth’s community. The maps trace the participants’ habitual routes through the city of Perth, reconstructing their everyday journeys and their distinctive experiences of the city’s urban and social space. As a way to help interpret the maps, participants were asked to add explanatory texts including thoughts, feelings, descriptions and comments about their journeys. Taken collectively these maps depict the city as a site of individualised experiences and of subjective needs, desires, memories and aspirations. In this sense they offer a view of Perth that is alternative and complimentary to the objective neutrality that characterizes conventional topographic maps.

The material was then collated and translated into linear elements that form the fundamental lexicon of the design concept. Each mud-map is both an abstract formal motif and a trace of living human experience. At one level the resulting work could be interpreted as pure formal play of abstract patterns, on another level however it references the unpredictable, infinitely varied interactions between individuals and urban spaces. In this regard the work references the interplay of semantic and non-semantic components that often characterizes traditional forms of decorative intervention in architecture in both Western and non-Western cultures.

The North wall, sliding screens, gates and balustrades were selected as sites of interest to apply the imagery developed. The pdf shows the process of how participants mud maps were developed into relevant integrated designs.

Photographer: The artist.
Pam Gaunt Catle Studio Renovation
Meeting with architects and clients
– early stage development.
Pam Gaunt – gallery-homeswest
Design development in studio
Pam Gaunt – gallery-homeswest
Composite drawing of all participants mud map linear elements.
Pam Gaunt – gallery-homeswest
Design development process in studio.
Pam Gaunt – gallery-homeswest
Design development process in studio.
Pam Gaunt – gallery-homeswest
Design development process in studio.

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