Continued...
Fig 3 : Battery Point 1996 1:2000
The pattern of development of Battery Point can be characterised as a sequence of land divisions that saw the farm sites divided and redivided, initially for wharf warehouses, but also residential use, as in Kelly Street. (Fig 2)
The established context of the study area therefore consists of a layering of histories. Between the first interventions some 200 years ago, notably at Salamanca Place and the "preservation of historic townscape and architectural elements"(City of Hobart, 1979, Pg 10), central to current controls that have been in place since 1979, there has been periods of neglect and Modernist controls/zoning.
Four notable overlapping levels of history can be read into the site's fabric:
1. Base Reality: nature in harmony (passive history preceding European intervention).
2. 1st Intervention: nature desecrated (carving and reshaping of base reality: a quarry, a port, a cemetery, trees and streams destroyed). Fig 1.
3. Modernist: the machine aesthetic and 'investment', over nature and loss of context; anonymous internationalism). Fig 4.
4. End reality today: nature dying (cultural entropy [ie. kitsch], calculation over invention).
Fig 4 : Battery Point 1996 
The area prompts the memory of places and events, urban venues that elicit rediscovery of myths, open acceptance of change and uncertainty. The written history (Rowntree, 1968) goes only so far in doing this. For the present authors, there is a strong perception that the fabric needs reconstructing as settings. As an example of an urban design conceptualisation, it seeks to challenge conventional historicist development control, current in the precinct. Experimentation and imagination are the keys to the experiment. The focus for this project is stage 4, the current situation and the imminent future.
The study area has a mix of 19th and 20th century fabric, under cadastrally driven planning. It includes each of the four levels of history. In stage four, savage, grey blocks of crude 'investment' buildings, and an emphasis on facilitating car use, has lead to the creation of islands of rectangular superblocks, largely impenetrable to the general public and bound on all sides by traffic / roads. (Fig 4) Salamanca Place can in part be seen as an exception to this rule; man and machine, unusually, take equal emphasis there.
Although chiefly a theoretical experiment, the intervention is also designed with a functionalist agenda, a slight contradiction in a deconstructive procedure. The main functionalist agenda behind the 'slice', Fig 3, is therefore:
- to conjugate the four levels of history;
- to subvert the cadastral /car pattern, through the realisation of public venues /pedestrian linkage;
- to pry apart the current block structure, opening new areas to activity, whilst questioning the traditional idea of block frontage;
- pedestrian interstices taking emphasis over vehicular street.
The core pedestrian venue (Fig 5, a to W, and Fig 6), therefore becomes a catalyst for movement, both via it's own axial determinism and via pedestrian crossings which create linkages to the broader parts of the precinct, engaging the city as a whole. This is clearly a 'deconstructive procedure': histories but not historicism, a pulling apart of morphology, lines superimposed and disjuncture, a degree of uncertainty, and so on. As Tschumi would have it, people not only move in, but generate spaces procuced by and through their movements.
