Little Business

BY Nicola Dovey, Arianna Wilson, Ross Brewin and Cara Wiseman

A few years ago there was a shop/studio called kioskA. The space it occupied had previously housed a switchboard underneath a staircase in the foyer/arcade of the Manchester Unity building (corner Collins and Swanston Streets). The space is just large enough for a person to sit in and now houses half of Switchboard café.

Melbourne has many small spaces, and in them people have set up businesses, studios and gallery spaces. Smaller spaces are cheap and so they enable alternate practices to exist in crowded places. Even conventional businesses in small spaces are able to offer a charged experience: creating moments of awkward intimacy with strangers in the way we fill these spaces and in the way we share them.

Writing about small buildings in Tokyo (Pet Architecture Guidebook, 2001), Yoshiharu Tsukamoto suggests that their shapes and forms do not conform to conventional styles or pretensions. As such we find them stimulating; we are somehow ‘relieved’.

But back to kioskA. How many people would set up shop in a space you could only ever sit in, alone? Operating as storeroom, changing room, workroom and showroom at once, the space was a testament to a type of functionalism that can exist if we look at the space around us differently.