Forms of Culture: A Survey of Cultural Buildings and Their Economies – Melbourne, Hong Kong, Vietnam

Forms of Culture is a research platform by Vicky Lam and Lauren Garner that examines how architecture sustains cultural economies across the Asia-Pacific, with a focus on Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Ho Chi Minh City. By comparing key cultural buildings across these three cities, the project highlights how similar spatial, financial, and social frameworks are adapted to local conditions.

This exhibition brings those differences, and resonances, into focus: tracing the often-invisible systems that underpin creative and collective life. The buildings at the centre of this inquiry are not just sites of culture, but active support structures: frameworks that uphold fragile economies, platforms that host public life, and architectures that quietly absorb the pressures of policy, practice, and precarity.

Operating between necessity and excess, these spaces are often overlooked yet indispensable, sustained through a mix of formal funding and informal networks of care. Rather than presenting these buildings as static or iconic, Forms of Culture positions them as living systems—held together by subsidies, leases, shared resources, and ongoing acts of maintenance. It asks: What makes a cultural building viable? Who sustains it, and what exactly are they sustaining? What role does architecture play in the survival—and vulnerability—of these spaces?

Through large-scale architectural and ethnographic drawings, alongside comparative data, Forms of Culture maps the operative logics of selected cultural buildings. It traces their dimensions, typologies, atmospheres, and financial models, reading them not simply as buildings but as material expressions of the economies, ethics, and aesthetics that sustain collective culture.

The installation occupies the stairwell of Curtin House, Levels 2–4, turning the building itself into a reflexive site of study and display. Produced in collaboration with students from RMIT Architecture, it incorporates insights from artists, architects, and developers working within these architectures of support.

Join us for the opening event on Sunday 18 May, 2–4pm at Metropolis Bookstore, Curtin House.

There will be a display of selected books and research materials, a short presentation and Q&A with invited speakers from the exhibited buildings, and guided tours through the stairwell installation.