The NGV Architecture Commission Competition is a commission to design a temporary pavilion to be displayed throughout the summer at the NGV International’s Grollo Equiset Garden in Melbourne.

ANTARCTICA’S 2022 proposition, Understorey, is a nursery story: a story of ambiguous horizons, non-human biology and a distributed, extended object life.

This is a pavilion for propagation: a hovering nursery designed to be donated and dispersed into the community environment after its short NGV life. The engineered timber grid, carrying more than nine thousand biodegradable tube stock seedlings, creates a dappled shaded understorey: a cool and compressed architectural space from which to look up at the coir cones above. Slowly transforming itself through its exhibition life, the canopy grows a fringe to be later planted elsewhere for a far longer life. The ambiguous horizon of the wooden structure sets a new datum - at eye height visible across the roof plane of green shoots and experienced underneath from reflections in polished platforms: from a chair, or from a child’s eyes. Understorey’s complexity is biological and optical; its architectural form is deliberately simple.