South - Tasmania

RESEARCH BACKGROUND
This project formed part of 32,000 Beaches, the Australian entry curated by Leon van Schaik for the Mare Nostrum project at the 2nd Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale. Under the Biennale aegis of The Flood, Mare Nostrum examined the rise of mass tourism that relies on the presence of water, part of a striking aspect of globalisation.

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION
Richard Blythe (Terroir) was one of five leading emerging practices who addressed five problem areas of mass tourism in Australia: the strip-densification of the east coast from Sydney to Brisbane, holiday developments south of Sydney, the linear city of west-coast Perth, the invasion of Tasmania by seekers of solitude, and the mouth of the Murray Darling Basin, in grave danger from increasing salinity.
Blythe's submission explored questions of place in relation to tourist expectations and experiences. Despite sharing a strong interest in poetics expressed by other Australian architects, such as Glenn Murcutt and Rick Le Plastrier, Terroir positions itself alternately to this instrumental approach. Instead it uses three different frames, psychoanalytic, political and phenomenological, to create work that relies on provocative indeterminacy. The work builds on architectural investigations of the surface, inner and outer realms, and the key relations between the environmental and socio-political worlds.

RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE
One of five leading practices in Australia, this work represented the best of emerging Australian architectural thinking to an international audience at the 2nd Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale, 2007.