Past Events
Designing with Country (Open House Melbourne 2025
The notion of Country is fundamental to Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and designing. Yet, as architects and landscape architects increasingly seek to engage with this concept, the question remains: what is Country? How do diverse Indigenous communities across Australia define and relate to it? And how might a deeper understanding transform contemporary design practices?
This year’s Designing with Country discussion explores these questions with leading Indigenous thinkers Owen Cafe and Leila Gurruwiwi, in conversation with Jock Gilbert and Christine Phillips from the Yulendj Weelam Lab (RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design).
Together, they unpacked the complexity and richness of Country, offering insights into its meaning, relevance, and potential to shape a more culturally responsive built environment.
Designing with Country was presented by Melbourne Conversations in partnership with program curators Open House Melbourne and event partner Fed Square.
This recording contains political themes.
Designing with Country (Open House Melbourne 2024)
Yulendj Weelam—the home of deep knowledge in the Boon Wurrung language. Home—the place where a person feels they belong.
So much of the design of our urban and civic environments ignores the sovereignty of our First Peoples. It ignores the fact that this has been home to those peoples, to their knowledges, practices and culture for in excess of 65,000 years.
How can our built environments better become home to the knowledge and culture of our First Peoples, and one which reflects the deep knowledge of Country? How do we understand our place, and what practices will bring us closer to a home in which we can truly belong?
Hear the Yulendj Weelam Lab in conversation about identity and placemaking within our built environments.
This Is Public: Built / Unbuilt (Open House Melbourne 2022)
For this special opening event at The Capitol, OHM in partnership with RMIT University’s School of Architecture & Urban Design, invited architects, designers and creative practitioners to respond to the 2022 theme Built/Unbuilt with a series of short presentations and conversations.
Speakers reflected on projects that amplify and register cultural memories, pre-histories and knowledges of place that are deeply present in the buildings, spaces and landscapes of our city.
This Is Public: (Open House Melbourne Opening Night 2021)
The 2021 Open House Melbourne July Weekend program kicks off with This Is Public, a speaker series co-presented by RMIT Architecture & Urban Design and The Capitol — RMIT University on Friday 23 July, 2021.
The event focuses on the need to find new ways to reconnect and transform the ways in which we live and work together. This Is Public will host speakers with different backgrounds and perspectives and seeks to answer big questions about the role of policy, climate change and architecture in the future of cities, amongst other thought-provoking topics.
This Is Public will be broadcast on the Open House Melbourne and The Capitol websites, and later produced as a podcast. Focusing on the central theme, Reconnect, this year OHM asks us to reconsider the way we will occupy our city and to envisage new ways of designing and adapting our buildings and infrastructure as we emerge from the impact of COVID-19.
Guests can expect a series of thought provoking and insightful presentations beginning with a Welcome to Country by N’arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs AM and an address from Lord Mayor Sally Capp, followed by an introduction to the OHM 2021 theme, Reconnect.