Commodity House

Join a talk and walkthrough of the interior of the ruined Commodity House hosted by RMIT fellow alumnus. The Commodity House is filled with ‘Expected Adjacencies’ and ‘Common Ghosts’.  Alone, each Commodity House mimics other architectural styles and lacks interest. However, when the components come together to form a suburb, a network becomes clear, and we realize that the ruins form the finger bones of a still-living structure. They wait dormant for some imagined future and are more than the empty containers of an unrealized dream.

Melbourne’s growing peripheral suburbs are in a ruin-upon-arrival state. The Commodity House is the fossilized matter of its own dream, a domestic style similar to Victorian, Georgian, and Tudor dwellings before it. However, it lacks the Morris-esque romance of tumbling crenellations and knights on hilltops. We read the traces of the city through two different lenses: a palimpsest of fossils from the romantic city of the past on one hand, and on the other, the living ruin of the Commodity House held in limbo by the speculative anxieties of the housing market.

Fossils and ruins are both dead things, but while fossils can be read as the contemplative end of a natural process, ruins can be read as artificial containers for a romantic story that is untrue of the ruin itself, but true of its specific-non-specific type, the fairytale: “Once upon a time in a little house…”