We are passionate about the 'offcuts', the leftovers, the discarded, degraded and undervalued. The bits people say are useless. We love working with difficult sites, tight deadlines, shoestring budgets, unusual clients, clashes of culture, weeds, contamination, drought, floods and storms. We believe this is where landscape architecture's greatest work is found.

We're intellectually and aesthetically restless. Silly but sincere.

Offcuts are first and foremost landscape architects. We embrace the discipline's mongrel heritage, porous demeanor and we seek collaborations with others equally inspired by their craft.

We design terrariums, back yards, public parks, plazas, green infrastructure, large urban redevelopments, cities and anything else we can get our hands on.

Address: Brunswick, VIC 3056, Australia
All inquiries via email: theoffcutsau@gmail.com

Offcuts are an award winning landscape architecture studio managed by Alex Breedon and based in Melbourne, Australia.

We personally have not faced the trauma of those that we were designing for and felt deeply uncomfortable with the possibility that the designer's hand or an artistic statement would overshadow the intention of the space; as a place for people to come together and reflect on terrible events and moments in our shared history.

As non-survivors we felt that it was disingenuous to attempt to fully comprehend what these people have been through. There will always be an element of unknowability, a gap between the experiences of survivors and everyone else around them. But, at the same time, we must attempt to listen, so as to create something that resonates with survivors, even if that resonation is something that we do not fully understand.

So when designing the memorial we asked ourselves: ‘How do we create a space that welcomes people in, and at least attempts to translate, not the trauma itself, but the ongoing resilience and strength of survivors?'

We also asked: ‘What sort of space would we hope to bring our own young children to visit and help explain the terrible abuse inflicted upon children?’

The result is something open, inviting, with moments of pause and reflection along the way. It became a garden, with rolling hills and flowers. A place, along the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, where adults, parents and children could come together and question what came before and eventually what will come to be.

Location: Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, Australia
Municipality: Acton
Indigenous Country: Ngunawal and Ngambri
Client: National Capital Authority (NCA) & Department of Social Services Australia
Year: 2021

But there’s no point being a bloody whinger.

Everyone is doing it tough.

In their own way.

Well...maybe except for Dick Smith.

I’m dreaming of being somewhere else,

Like walking around a heart shaped lake.

A weird pink landscape at the foot of the city.

So deliriously happy it makes you want to puke.

I came to this idea many years ago but have finally gotten to it as Melbourne goes through COVID lockdown 6.0. Now, in an almost post pandemic world, it looks even more naive. Turn a pink lake into a Harring-esque love heart. It’s a simple idea, even a dumb one.

Pink Lakes occur when a particular salt loving bacteria named Dunaliella salina starts to thrive in the warmer months where there is little rainfall and lots of sun. As they photosynthesise they produce beta carotene that eventually makes the lake milkshake pink.

Melbourne is very fortunate that just south of the city one of its lakes turns pink every year or so. This phenomenon, usually occurs in far flung places; in the desert, the bush, or along desolate coast lines. But we have one that blooms in Westgate Park, south of Docklands. When this happens, Instagram goes bananas, with people flocking to the lake and cramming the carpark.

I imagine this as a completely bizarre landscape, full of photo happy tourists, dog-walkers and pit stopping truckdrivers, all meandering around the molten pink lake on one of those summer evenings that seem to last forever.

Location: Westgate Park, Port Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Municipality: City of Melbourne
Indigenous Country: Boonwurrung
Year: 2021

Round, green, generous, the good kind of fat. What a role model!

Imagine. Its a late summer’s afternoon. You’re picnicking with the last bite of your very late 9pm lunch, and you and you’re friends are nestled within the calming embrace of a voluptuous avocado. Sounds bliss!

But why design an avocado? Doesn’t it contradict all the hard work, the aesthetic war on the foreign so fiercely fought by the previous generation?

So we ask can a park be a walking contradiction? Possibly. Even probably because parks can’t walk.

And Avocado Park is just that; surprisingly obvious, obtrusively under-designed, exotic but strangely Australian.

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Location: Foletta Park, Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia
Municipality: Moreland City Council
Indigenous Country: Woi-wurrung
Year: 2020

The classic ‘back yard’ is a quintessential element of the Australian suburbs and is a microcosm of national cultural change. The Offcuts are fascinated by them, grew up in them and mourn their loss as we shift into a new Australia yet still hold onto the quarter acre dream.

Every decade backyards seem to change. From early settler gardens focusing on sustenance and sanitation, the 60s bush school movement and now the sprawl of low maintenance, treeless suburbs; the woodheap has made way for the barbeque, the chicken coop for swimming pool and the outdoor dunny for the entertainment patio.* Today, the back yard is less pragmatic and more symbolic. Now more than ever it may reflect who we are, where we’ve travelled and how we like to spend our spare time.

Similarly, the outback holds a particular place within the Australian psyche. Most city dwellers have never set foot on red sand but still claim it as theirs; their very own ‘back yard’. As a country of coast hugging city dwellers, we can’t help but project our urban lifestyle out into the desert. The outback is a suburban dream. A country contained within a nation of fences.

So put to the challenge we design a literally figurative (yes, literally also means figuratively) outback yard. Monoliths, Red Cabbage Palms (Livistona mariae), spinifex ‘fairy circles’, hills hoist and dipping pool. It’s a dog’s breakfast really. But it reflects an old colonial itch, the search for the ‘real’ Australia, the quintessential Australian garden reflecting the travels of well heeled citizens.

*Patrick Nicol Troy (2000). "The Big Backyard". A history of European housing in Australia. Cambridge University Press. pp. 127–128.

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Location: East Melbourne, Australia
Indigenous Country: Woi-wurrung
Year: 2020

So The Offcuts ask; how do you reconstruct, restore, give back something that is already lost? How can we see this loss as a way forward to something just as valuable?

As The Scenic Railway dips and bounces around Luna Park and families skip over the searing asphalt to the beach; The Blue Wiggle celebrates the great St Kilda summer afternoon stroll. Full of weirdos, dog walkers, backpackers, teenagers, roller bladers and dropkicks all running, riding, weaving and promenading against the hot setting sun.

Not straight enough to be a pier, nor steep enough to be called a roller coaster, the Blue Wiggle is a bit of a mongrel, dysfunctional but endearing, not fitting in but at home along the foreshore.

And much like St Kilda itself, a little bent, crooked and queer, but loved deeply non the less. The Blue Wiggle totters out into Port Phillip Bay, towards the setting sun, a little unsteady from a few too many afternoon whites.

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Location: Former Brookes Jetty, St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia
Municipality: City of Port Phillip
Indigenous Country: Boonwurrung
Year: 2020
Special thanks: Awesome sketches by Stacy Gougoulis

The NBN (National Biodiversity Network) is a vision for an ecological project of continental reach and significance. Outrageously bold at over 60,000km it brings forward the question “Why is biodiversity not a national aspiration?”, while everything else seems to be…Roads, telecommunications, politics, broadband, freight, trains, security, sport, education all have significant national planning, policy and implementation. So why not add plants and animals to the list?

The NBN starts big. By focusing on less desirable linear infrastructure, such as transmission line corridors and pipelines, that stretches tens of thousands of kilometres around the continent there are almost countless opportunities to implement significant ecological corridor projects.

The project satirises the Australian political climate during the largest infrastructure bungle/rollout of a generation, the National Broadband Network (NBN), and uncovers the potential political hurdles to large scale ecological planning projects the country so desperately needs.

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In late 2019 we were honoured to be awarded 2nd Prize for the AILA Future Parks Competition. It was a great event that brought so much positive dialogue around landscape architecture in Australia. We were humbled that our silly but sincere proposal was so warmly received. Jill Garner, the Victorian Government architect called the NBN a ‘cheeky proposal’, we got a chuckle from the news anchors on the ABC national night-time news and many other positive and loving comments along the way.

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Location: All of ‘Straya, Australia
Year: 2019
Client: University of Melbourne, Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA)
Awards: 2nd Prize, AILA Future Parks Competition

It’s the same old story in Australia. Dig it up, process it, use it, dump the residue in the outback where there ain’t too many people. The issue is, there’s always someone.

But for a moment, we dream of the opposite. Instead of a utilitarian response, where the site is chosen where the least people are affected, why can’t it be managed where there is the most?

We dream of a future where nuclear waste was managed within the city, where it was originally created, and what it would take to process it securely over multiple generations.

So we dumped it. Right on the doorstep of the Melbourne CBD. We try valiantly to write a business case. More jobs, greater connectivity and safety. And we build a monolith, not dissimilar to its outback cousins. A totemic reminder to future generations that cities also house monsters.

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Location: Melbourne, Australia
Municipality: Melbourne City Council
Client: National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
Indigenous Country: Woi-wurrung
Year: 2019

Schrödinger’s Garden borrows from the infamous quantum mechanics thought experiment Schrödinger’s Cat to re-present the classic form of the walled garden.

Schrödinger’s Garden draws upon the ‘observer’s paradox’, that is, there is no outcome which is certain unless it has been observed. By creating a condition whereby a garden cannot be physically experienced, we pose the question: can the existence of nature, and/or the thought of nature be simultaneously existent and non-existent?

We propose a walled garden taking the form of a 10m x10m square, the contents of which change each year. Inaccessible for the entire installation period, its interior is only ever viewed through a video feed broadcast electronically. Oscillating between footage of the garden in both its present and past states – the video feed becomes a repository of ‘gardens’ both alive and dead – however, remaining ambiguous to what are the actual contents of the garden at present.

Thus, the existence of Schrödinger’s Garden is observed only as a probability. Never surveyed physically, the garden is tentatively poised between the real and the virtual, fully inhabiting neither one state nor the other.

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Location: Anywhere
Year: 2015
Special thanks: This was a collaboration with our good friend Lam Le Nguyen

From Alex Breedon. Clearly flipping out over the birth of his first child.

My daughter was born in the summer of 2018. For me, her coming into the world was a mix of pure happiness and horror. As a child born into the Anthropocene she has inherited a system that she didn’t design. She was born into an environment created by her father’s generation, but also one that has been in creation since the start of the Holocene.

Over 11,650 years ago ancient Mesopotamians started changing their environment by planting the first cereal crops and laid the foundation of our modern agricultural lifestyle.

When Ellery was born the U.N. assumed that she would use 18.62 tons of carbon that year. As an Australian this is the 7th highest per-capita consumption after oil-rich countries such as Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. If that tonnage of carbon was were converted to its equivalent in coal she used 5.5 cubic metres of it coal in a year.

When arranged in an art gallery these 15 columns of coal look harmless but the striking thing is that this - her first year of carbon - will take centuries if not millennia to be removed from the atmosphere. She will be wedded to these little piles for her whole life, and they will extend beyond the lives of meaningful relatives.

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Location: Melbourne, Australia
Year: 2018

Today, arguably Australia’s most famous landscape, the Great Barrier Reef is facing the largest threat in its existence. Due to climate change and increased shipping; irreversible bleaching (permanent discolouration) of the reef is fast advancing. As of 2016, approximately 90% of the reef has been affected by bleaching.

Part exploration, part therapy, we come to terms with the relentless destruction of the human super organism through data turned tapestry. Using GIS data, we create a map showing the extent of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Bleached areas, shipping routes, coal repositories and climate data is shown. We then translate that to the medium of tapestry that imbues permanence to the data collected - a reminder of the permanence of damage.

We propose parallel tapestries to be made in intervals every 20 years, serving as a means of documenting the irreversible damage to the reef. The first of which, in 2036, will coincide with the point the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies estimates 100% of the reef will have been affected by bleaching.

Tapestries are then continually rewoven woven until either the entire reef is dead or a brighter future is found.

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Location: Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia
Responsible Authority: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
Indigenous Country: Gureng Gureng, Bayali, Darumbal, Guwinmal, Yuwi, Giya, Yuru, Bindal, Nyawaygi, Wargamaygan, Djirbalngan, Yindinjdiji, Djabuganjdji, Kuku-yalanji, Guugu-yimidhirr
Year: 2016
Special thanks: This was a collaboration with our good friend Lam Le Nguyen

Quoted former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, October 2014 and looking at today's political climate not much has changed. Coal reigns supreme in Australia

In response to this we ask; as coal mining landscapes are essential to our city's urban life, shouldn't they be made visible? So that we can really see the consequences of our energy consumption?

So we propose an obelisk, a deep section of Hazelwood mine and placed in Federation Square, our home town's most significant public space and a regular site for organised protests. We hope to collapse the distance between the city and it's coal mining landscapes and lay bare the dendritic and extraneous organs of urbanity.

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Location: Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia
Municipality: Melbourne City Council
Indigenous Country: Woi-wurrung
Year: 2015