The northern suburbs of Melbourne are wonderfully grounding for a designer, they are a clear palimpsest of Australia, the empty ideological vision overlaid with decades of quiet cultural and ethnic tension that has blossomed into something very distant and far richer than its original intent. There is something exciting about being allowed to contribute to a suburb that is 2 or 3 generations old. Like many Australians who grew up in the suburbs I have a love/hate relationship with them. I often have had trouble seeing the suburbs clearly. When you grow up in the suburbs it is difficult to be objective as the suburbs are an aspirational and ideological landscape. We are constantly forced to look at the promise of the place rather than the reality. The Barrow house was one of those rare moments of clarity where one steps back and sees this vast field of strangely organised growth and accumulation of objects. Barrow is a direct contribution to this pattern, not a reinvention, criticism or critique.
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-joel