Melbourne Design Week 2023

The Silo Project feat. The Siphon

Featured in The Silo Project as part of Melbourne Design Week 2023, The Siphon was a temporary architectural intervention that was designed to gather visitors together and safely conduct them through a derelict former brewery. 

The Siphon defined the journey from the street through the industrial site. The prosaic material selection was intentional, a coloured shade cloth that is ubiquitous on most building sites and hoardings around the city. Making use of the strengths of the material and capitalising on its huge potential for play with scale, uniformity and colour resulted in drama and design sophistication. It forced us to view this commonplace material in a new way. Specialist lighting and perspective-shifting angles assisted The Siphon to operate as wayfinder and playfully channel visitors into the exhibition proper. 

Pragmatically, this intervention performed as a device of containment to restrict exhibition visitors from wandering through active artist studio workspaces. Poetically, it was an opportunity to build anticipation for visitors as the volumes and scale of the spaces they traverse were played with, as they were siphoned towards the silos.