‘Doubleground’ is the 2018 NGV Architecture Commission located in the sculpture garden of Roy Grounds’ National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. As an intervention, the project specifically seeks to challenge the role of the garden within the civic realm.

The series of commissions previously occupying the garden form an important precedent to reconsider the evolution of the pavilion as a typology and engage with what the garden is and can be through the lens of architecture. Rather than an object in the garden, it is the landscape that generates interiors and rooms that are to be explored and occupied.

1959. A rectangular building aligned to St Kilda Road. A triangular administration building following the edge of Southbank Boulevard. The garden, a geometry born from left-over-ness. The original building dedicated 50 percent of its floor area to contained external space. Three distinct courtyards defined by varying programs, signaling an attitude towards the value that curated external space could bring to the gallery.

The bamboo courtyard. Inaccessible, but a view into another world. Fountains projecting thin streams of water into the sky above and rounding down to meet the pebbled surface. The Great Hall of wonderment. Looking up. The golden carpet reclined on, not a floor but a viewing platform. A gallery of expansion and compression. Solidity. Openness. Light, shade, darkness.