Field Rooms, Open Field Agency. Photo by Joshua Morris.
MAPA is a multidisciplinary practice working across architecture, public art, urban design and place strategy. We create inclusive and responsive projects grounded in deep listening, careful observation of place and creative community participation.
Through participatory and creative processes, we work with multiple communities, ecologies and key stakeholders of place. This includes Indigenous knowledge-keepers, everyday users of a place, community organisations, not-for-profits, cultural institutions, universities, local and state government.
We develop site-specific outcomes across scales — from design briefs to buildings to public art, temporary installations and long term strategy for public places.
NEWS ︎︎︎
From a nine-year planning process and a start as a public art concept for the City of Sydney, this project morphed into a place for experimentation. The Open Field Agency is mobile, flexible, changeable. These are attributes often sought for architecture but rarely delivered in built outcomes.
It comprises two lightweight, skillion-roofed boxes – one with solid cladding, the other translucent; one a refuge, the other an openable, extraverted workshop. Both can be wheeled around and spatially rearranged to suit different programs.
This is simple, raw and playful, inviting creative use and occupation. It can be anything for anybody and shows that architecture and quality design thinking have as much to offer little scales and tight budgets as it does the big end of town.
This project seeks to push discussions of sustainability beyond individual buildings or sites to consider the broader systems and processes of urban development. The project proposes and enacts a regenerative and reciprocal model of urbanism in a rapidly developing part of Sydney.
