Episodic Urbanism: The RMIT Urban Spaces Project 1996–2015 by Peter Elliott Architecture + Urban design

The notion of the ‘campus’ is fundamental to landscape architecture, one of the few places where it can unashamedly do its work by tying disparate collections of buildings together to make a whole. Thinking of the campus immediately conjures the idea of ‘green’, both as a physical backdrop as well as a brand. Firmly kicking this idea out of one’s mind is necessary to understand the work of Peter Elliott Architecture + Urban Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) in Melbourne, Australia, a campus that is indivisible from its city, nested within, or seamlessly a part of the foundational and iconic grid of Melbourne. The ‘Hoddle’ grid is perfect, except that it kinks out with a series of triangles on the edges, produced at the intersections of the city grid with the suburban grids that meet it, each triangle holding a civic function outside the regular capitalist lots housed within the rectangular grid segments.