JURY COMMENT

Among the selection of winning projects this year is a proposal for a new public park at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market that uses pattern to encourage new understandings of novel ecologies; a scheme for the reimagining of the economy of the Hunter Valley in a post-coal future that merges resilient viticulture, tourism and the adaptive reuse of the remnant infrastructures of the existing coal-mining industry; and an educational landscape on a tertiary campus that embraces Aboriginal agriculture as a way to tackle soil salinity issues and promote Aboriginal agency.

While the varied design approaches and expansive and multi-layered nature of the 2018 projects are impressive, the jury unanimously selected the national winner – Tasting Territory by Xingyuan Chen of RMIT University. The jury was impressed with the sheer scope and ambition of the project which grapples with intertwining issues of particular relevance in the current global situation.

The project distils rigorous research into a compelling proposal that connects the human experience of food and its processes of production and consumption at the individual and domestic scales with larger territorial-scale strategies. Noteworthy for its ambitiousness, complexity and attention to detail, Tasting Territory reminds us that food and the design of our food systems can be an aesthetic, emotional and intellectual experience, as well as something purely of necessity.