THIS PLACE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Lasse Mouritzen
and Frida Robles



Love Canal
Elsa Bres


The Permanently Temporary
Cathy Smith and Natarsha Tezcan


A post-landscape handbook
Ed Wall


Tuning Space
Campbell Drake


Dear Testing Grounds / Fortuna Redux
Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster


Evoke
Nic Quantock-Holmes
and Oli Brown


Mini Maddern
Public Realm Lab


Home as Hometown
DENARA - architecture studio


Glow: Monarch Lane
Christine Phillips and Tania Davidge


The Overlooked Chinese Terrain Vague: On Culture, Urbanisation, and Resilience
Jiatong Shi, Jillian Walliss


More trains, more often – soon, they promise
Yuchen Gao, Loren Adams, and Eugene Perepletchikov


DO YOU CARE?
Let’s reflect on the sea
Maria Pina Usai and Stefania Toro


Black Box Festival of Living and Dying Art
Kyle Bush


Belfry
Jinjoo Yang


Togethering
Lena Heubusch, Susana Moliner, and David Pérez


Drawing Fields
Outpost Office, Ashley Bigham, and Erik Herrmann


Kristall, The Domestication of Water
Daryan Knoblauch


The Field
Robert Snelling, Brittany Devlin, and Kate Donaldson


Windflower
Urban Radicals


The Waste Archive
Jesus Meseguer, Javier Arias, Mireia Ferri, and Connie Meseguer


Modul #3070
DELACAVE Architectes | Architectural Think Tank


New York has a High Line, Berlin has a Low Line
Studio ON/OFF


Dear Document Fukushima Paribartana Mohanty


Mapping Future Memory
Eleanor Peres and mone studio


Sydney Biennale:
Cockatoo Island
Philip crowther


Aqueous Landscapes
Ainslie Murray and Helen Lochhead


Other Spaces: Others' Spaces
Demet Dincer


Born to Die
Laura Syzman


Peripheral housing on the urban wasteland of Chinese cities
Weijie Hu


Terrain Vague; Neighboring Damascus
Sara Adam


Not yet another web
Ioanna Sotiriou


Weeds’ Analogy: From Industrial Debris to Data Urbanism
Kwan Q Li and Joel Austin Cunningham


Incompiuto (Unfinished) Alterazioni Video

More trains, more often –
soon, they promise


by Yuchen Gao, Loren Adams, and Eugene Perepletchikov



LOCATION: MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA


City Square – a public plaza in Melbourne’s city centre – has been closed to the public since April 3, 2017. In its place, a multi-storey concrete and steel enclosure currently sits atop a 35 metre deep hole; its perimeter teeming with saturated cotton work-shirts and plastic bollards in matching safety-orange, while flurries of hand gestures (stop, wait, proceed, cross) conduct a cacophony of machinery en route to the deep underground. City Square is now a construction hub for the Metro Tunnel project, an ambitious reconfiguration of Melbourne’s passenger rail system. There will be “more trains, more often” – soon, they promise. And in the meantime, we wait. Indeed, it will take nearly nine years from the date of its closure for City Square to gestate into Town Hall Station: by “the end of 2025” the site will be transformed into a fully operational architectural manifestation of political promise. That’s 3,195 calendar days of waiting; more than 75,000 hours; close to five million seconds – or eight years, eight months, and 29 days. It takes a long time to reduce transit time. The Metroshed, meanwhile, is the thing that exists while we wait for the thing we have been promised. It is a contradictory spatiotemporal terrain vague: the architecture is simultaneously liminal and permanent; the waiting is seemingly never-ending, but with a definitive end. So, could better infrastructure help us wait better? This project offers four alternatives to the impenetrable under-construction-infrastructure of the Metroshed: an expanded public realm, gifting us more places to be while we wait; a hybrid program of site office and makeshift hotel, reducing transit time while we wait for transit time to be reduced; a workspace for civic oversight, allowing us to see what we are waiting for; and an event space – Metroshed at Night x Melbourne Fashion Week.


In the early hours of the morning on October 23, 2017, Summer Block, a writer from Los Angeles, posted an idea for an escape room to the popular microblogging and social networking platform, Twitter, under the user handle @teamblock: “You walk into a waiting room and sit down, nothing ever happens, and the way you escape is by deciding to leave.”1 Within a few hours, Aubrey Clayton – a mathematical researcher posting under the eponymous user handle @aubreyclayton – had expanded on Summer’s escape room idea in a public reply: “You are born into the room that contains the whole world. The only way to leave is death.”2 At the time of this brief online dialogue about waiting rooms between two Californians, City Square – a public plaza in Melbourne’s city centre – had already been closed to the public for more than 200 calendar days. Since then, blue and white branded signs with “METROTUNNEL” logos have appeared (and proliferated) to reassure us – the public – that there will be “more trains, more often.” Soon, they promise. And in the meantime, we wait.


1. “We have more trains, more often – as promised.” It will take nearly nine years from the date of its closure for City Square to gestate into Town Hall Station: by the end of 2025 the site will be transformed into a fully operational architectural manifestation of political promise. Digital render and project design by Yuchen Gao, text and subtitles by Loren Adams.


Indeed, from the date of its closure to the public on April 3, 2017, it will take nearly nine years for City Square to gestate into Town Hall Station – one of five new stations to be constructed in an ambitious, $13 billion3 reconfiguration of Melbourne’s metropolitan passenger rail system, called the “Metro Tunnel” project. According to the office of our current Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews, this unremarkable rectangular site – flanked by Collins Street, Swanston Street, Flinders Lane, and the Westin Hotel – will reopen to the public by “the end of 2025,”4 having completed its transformation into a tangible and fully operational architectural manifestation of political promise. In the official media releases, a matter-of-fact third person voice compares current progress onsite to the initial timeline that was offered in the project’s Environment Effects Statement (EES) and approved by the Minister for Planning:5 there will be “new High Capacity Metro Trains running through the Metro Tunnel a year ahead of schedule.”6 We will have more trains, more often – “a year earlier than expected,”7 they promise.





Yet, that still means 3,195 calendar days of waiting; more than 75,000 hours; close to five million seconds – or eight years, eight months, and 29 days. And, of these 3,195 days waiting for “more trains, more often,” 2,233 are working weekdays.8 For a fulltime city worker on a conventional Monday-to-Friday schedule, this means 2,233 missed opportunities for lunch in the public plaza; as many as 4,466 to-and-fro commute encounters with the disruptive metabolism of construction; countless minutes accumulating into hours waiting for flashing lights, safety tape stanchions, and hand gestures to signal permission for us to walk, cross, or proceed with caution – because even as we wait, we must continue.
It takes a long time to reduce transit time. And so, our city – now perpetually under construction – has become a kind of waiting room. (“You walk into a waiting room and sit down, nothing ever happens, and the way you escape is by deciding to leave.”9)
The Metroshed, meanwhile, is the thing that exists while we wait for the thing we have been promised. First appearing on the former City Square site “towards the end of 2018,”10 the Metroshed is multi-storey precast concrete and steel acoustic enclosure that currently sits atop a 35 metre deep hole, through which “tunnelling equipment (can) be dropped in.”11 It is a curious and contradictory spatiotemporal object: the architecture is simultaneously liminal and permanent; the waiting it signifies is seemingly never-ending, but with a definitive end – December 31, 2025. Indeed, nearly three decades since Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió’s chapter, “Terrain Vague” appeared in the fourth book of Cynthia Davidson’s edited 11-volume Any- series,12 the Metroshed can be read as a kind of spatiotemporal terrain vague. As an exemplar of both the spatial in-betweenness and the (decades-long) temporal stretch of large-scale infrastructure project delivery, the Metroshed is at once “internal to the city yet external to its everyday use.”13
Unlike the urban photographs offered in de Solà-Morales Rubió’s essay, though, the terrain vague of Metroshed is not “empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place.”14 Rather, it is a definitively active space in which a series of (nontrivial) occurrences do continue – and will continue – to take place until the site takes its intended new form as Town Hall Station. These occurrences are both spatiotemporal and economic: on a nondescript weekday in the early months of 2022, the perimeter of our former City Square teems with the hyper-saturated orange of cotton work-shirts and matching plastic bollards, while flurries of hand gestures (stop, wait, proceed, cross) conduct a cacophony of machinic beeps, clanks, and whirrs as construction equipment slips through multi-storey roller doors, en route to the deep underground.
The Metroshed defies de Solà-Morales Rubió’s neat categorisation of terrain vague as necessarily “vacant” space that is characterised by an “absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy.”15 While it is a “strange place,” and is indeed characterised by “the sense of freedom, of expectancy,”16 the Metroshed does not truly “exist outside the city's effective circuits and productive structures.”17 As an economic apparatus, Metroshed is indisputably “productive” even as it makes us wait. (7,000 jobs for Victorians!18 791 apprentices!19 30 million hours worked!20) Nevertheless, while it may be a “hive of activity”21 in some ways, Metroshed is still “foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much critique as a possible alternative.”22 We – the (non-tradie) public23 – are not permitted inside; we must wait outside. And on the still-public streets and sidewalks, Metroshed offers us strange adjacencies between business suit and wheelbarrow, between cement mixer and Dior.


Our Metroshed

Our willingness to tolerate the inconvenience of the Metroshed – to wait for nearly a decade – is predicated on two things: the promise of something proportionally worthwhile at the end of the waiting (more and better, soon!) and our incremental desensitisation to disruption, as the temporary condition of under-construction becomes permanent. Still, what shall we do while we wait for City Square to become Town Hall Station? What shall we do in this spatiotemporal terrain vague for 3,195 calendar days; for 75,000 hours; for eight years, eight months, and 29 days? Could better infrastructure help us wait better?


2. It takes a long time to reduce transit time.” Metroshed City Square at the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets in the Melbourne Hoddle Grid, January 2022. Film still by Eugene Perepletchikov, text and subtitles by Loren Adams, project design by Yuchen Gao.

3. “It was our Metroshed.” As an exemplar of spatial in-betweenness and the (decades-long) temporal stretch of large-scale infrastructure project delivery, the Metroshed is a kind of spatiotemporal terrain vague. Could better infrastructure help us wait better? Digital render and project design by Yuchen Gao, text and subtitles by Loren Adams.


Here, designer Yuchen Gao offers four alternatives to the impenetrable under-construction-infrastructure of the Metroshed. In the first design option, the public realm is gently – but decisively – expanded, gifting us more places to be while we wait. In the second, the existing site office program becomes hybridised with a makeshift hotel in a wry effort to reduce transit time while we wait for transit time to be reduced. In the third, a conventional workspace program hosts unconventional aspirations for civic oversight: a rectilinear volume escapes the Hoddle Grid to pivot and punch through precast concrete, allowing us to see inside the Metroshed – to see what we are waiting for. (There are traces, here, of the pair of ten metre long viewing platforms that appeared on Swanston Street between the time of City Square’s closure and the erection of the Metroshed structure24 – about which, the City of Melbourne's then-Lord Mayor, Robert Doyle, said: “I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the hydraulic hammer with pulveriser attachment, which I have affectionately dubbed ‘the crusher,’ in action.”25)
And finally, in the fourth design – a monstrous amalgam of its predecessors – Metroshed transforms into an event space to host “Metroshed at Night x Melbourne Fashion Week.” Yuchen’s reinterpretation of infrastructure-as-fashion-catwalk is witty and transcendent: they marry the strategic ambitions of the City of Melbourne’s newly formed “Night-time Economy Advisory Committee”26 with the around-the-clock functionality of the Metroshed in its current form – as an acoustic shed “to minimise noise, light and dust spill on the local community during 24-hour tunnelling activities.”27
By putting the “event” into “eventually,” Yuchen conjures an alternate urban reality in which the spatiotemporal terrain vague of waiting for infrastructural projects to be delivered – and for political promises to be fulfilled – is both plausible and chic. While we wait for “more trains, more often,” we are invited to take ownership of the Metroshed – our Metroshed.
Until one day, Metroshed is gone. Then, we will have “more trains, more often” – as promised. We will talk fondly of Our Metroshed, as we do for other beloved but now-defunct Melbourne institutions. (Late nights thrashing at Pony; that infamous Prince concert at Bennett’s Lane Jazz Club; the kitsch spectacle of Dracula’s; and soon, spirited debates over beer at the John Curtin Hotel.) We will refer to those precious eight years, eight months, and 29 days as “The Metroshed Years.” Because Our Metroshed was here for a good time, not a long time.


And I guess you had to be there.



CONTRIBUTORS

Within the team of collaborators, Yuchen Gao↩ is sole author of the four new design interventions at Metroshed City Square. Loren Adams↩ authored the essay, project abstract, and film subtitles, while Eugene Perepletchikov was responsible for all cinematography.

*Yuchen originally authored this design while undertaking a Masters of Architecture design studio subject at RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design, titled “Regulatory Nonsense: Slutspurt” and taught by Loren Adams. For their project, Yuchen received an RMIT Award for Design Excellence in 2021. The essay and film were produced afterwards in collaboration with Loren Adams and Eugene Perepletchikov, to complement and expand upon Yuchen’s original design proposition.


REFERENCES
1. Summer Block, Twitter post, 23 October 2017, 8:35 AM PST,(link↩)
Note that this was the time in California (Pacific Standard Time, UTC/GMT -8 hours). It was already 2:35am the following morning – October 24 – in Melbourne (Australian Eastern Daylight Time, UTC/GMT +11 hours).

2. Aubrey Clayton, Twitter post, 23 October 2017, 10:21 AM PST,(link↩)

3. This figure includes the $2.7 billion in cost overruns announced in late 2020. See, for example: Timna Jacks, ‘Metro Tunnel’s $2.7 Billion Budget Blowout Revealed’, The Age, 11 December 2020, Online edition, (link↩)

4. Office of the Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews, ‘Metro Tunnel Construction Ahead of Schedule’, Media centre, 21 February 2018,(link↩)  

5. The EES (and its timeline) was approved by the Minister for Planning in December of 2016. See: Major Transport Infrastructure Authority, State Government of Victoria, Australia, ‘Environment Effects Statement’, Media centre, Victoria’s Big Build, n.d., (link↩)

6. Office of the Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews, ‘Metro Tunnel Construction Ahead of Schedule’.

7. Office of the Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews.

8. This calculation subtracts weekends (Saturdays and Sundays) and all public holidays that are officially recognized by the State Government of Victoria.

9. Block.

10 Office of the Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews, ‘Major Metro Tunnel Works on Display’, Media centre, 6 December 2017, (link↩) 

11. Benjamin Preiss, ‘City Square Shuts down as Work Begins on Metro Tunnel’, The Age, 3 April 2017, Online edition, (link↩)  

12. Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió, ‘Terrain Vague’, in Anyplace, ed. Cynthia Davidson (The MIT Press, 1994), 118–23, (link↩) 
13. de Solà-Morales Rubió, 120.

14 de Solà-Morales Rubió, 119.

15. de Solà-Morales Rubió, 119–20.

16. de Solà-Morales Rubió, 119–20.

17. de Solà-Morales Rubió, 120.

18. Office of the Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews, ‘Metro Tunnel Construction Ahead of Schedule’.

19. Office of the Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews.

20. Tara Hamid, ‘Melbourne Metro Tunnel Reaches 30 Million Hours Milestone’, Roads & Infrastructure (blog), 29 June 2021, (link↩) 

21. On the date of City Square’s closure, The Age quoted then-Major Projects Minister (now Minister for Transport Infrastructure), Jacinta Allan: “This is going to be a hive of activity.” See: Preiss, ‘City Square Shuts down as Work Begins on Metro Tunnel’.

22. de Solà-Morales Rubió, ‘Terrain Vague’, 120.

23. Tradespeople (“tradies”) are, of course, also members of the public – but they occupy a curious position in that they are simultaneously inside and outside of the spatiotemporal terrain vague of the Metroshed.

24. Craig Butt, ‘Train Now Standing at Town Hall Station Gives Passersby a Building Sight’, The Age, 6 December 2017, Online edition, (link↩) 

25. Office of the Premier of Victoria, The Hon. Daniel Andrews, ‘Major Metro Tunnel Works on Display’.

26. City of Melbourne, ‘Industry Experts to Guide Melbourne’s Night-Time Recovery’, Media centre, 23 April 2021, (link↩)  

27. Major Transport Infrastructure Authority, State Government of Victoria, Australia, ‘Acoustic Sheds’, Media centre, Victoria’s Big Build, n.d., (link↩)