ArchitectureAU – Projects

Kew House

Toby Horrocks — Thu, 23 May 2013 23:05:00 +0000

On a steep hill in leafy Kew, an inner suburb of Melbourne, views to the north overlook a valley filled with large houses and lush gardens. The importance of prospect on this site was obvious to Bent Architecture from the beginning. “I think the magic of architecture is in defining that balance between protection and prospect,” explains director Paul Porjazoski. “The balance between the home as a shelter and cocoon, and allowing its inhabitants to look out … that’s what we’ve tried to do here, create that balance.”

The architects have attempted to create better engagement between what was a “very static object plonked in the middle of the site” and the surrounding landscape. Kew House was designed for a couple with two young children. Bent Architecture grouped the functional areas into zones and then fragmented the plan, making the living areas “revolve around the courtyard,” as Paul puts it. This strategy of fragmentation is illustrated in the front entry experience.

RMIT Design Hub

Juliana Engberg — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:07:00 +0000

The layperson on the jury is the most important judge,” Sean Godsell tells me over dinner after we have walked through, around and under his RMIT Design Hub building. He was referring to my recent involvement with the Australian Institute of Architects national awards. I had a slightly different understanding, having been on the road with my well-informed co-jurors for a fortnight, travelling thousands of miles and having some often heated discussion. At times I wished I had brought along Architecture for Dummies … or a loudhailer. But in essence I think Sean was suggesting that the “lay” person has an honest and intuitive understanding of a building, unmediated by the rhetoric of the discipline and unhampered by allegiances.

One thing I am certain of, after our architectural sojourn and my work inside buildings of culture. You need to be around and inside a building, feel a building, sense a building through your body and, in the best possible scenario, use a building to test its functional premise. Photos will not do, glamorous though they are for the portfolio.

King Residence

Jill Pope — Mon, 20 May 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Perched on a rocky outcrop towering above the picturesque beachfront of Phegan’s Bay on the New South Wales central coast, David Boyle’s King Residence rose phoenix-like from the ashes of a house destroyed by bushfire on New Year’s Day, 2006.

Little remained of the previous house, save some remnant block work and a kidney-shaped swimming pool that was to be kept as part of the new home. Both architect and client have a deep sympathy for this rugged piece of land and the brief to David Boyle was that the new house should maintain the integrity of the rock formations found throughout the area.

Glebe Town Hall

Jean Rice — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:00:00 +0000

The Glebe Town Hall is an item of state significance, situated on a prominent site on the corner of St. Johns Road and Vernon and Lodge Streets, Glebe. It forms an important landmark in the area for the local community. This building has aesthetic significance at a state level as a fine example of a largely intact building in the Victorian Free Classical style of architecture. Many of the building’s features are characteristic of this style and civic buildings of this period. Designed as one of the grand town halls of Sydney, with richly decorated interiors, and all of the modern facilities, the building is significant as a major component of the Glebe Conservation Area. The Glebe Town Hall has continued to provide a strong sense of place within the local community and to provide a centre for the social and cultural life of the area, and to function as a popular venue for entertainment, social events and fundraising functions. The building has social significance for its original association with the Glebe Municipal Council, and involvement with the government functions and development of the suburb of Glebe since the late nineteenth century. —From the NSW Environment & Heritage Statement of Significance.

Conservatory, Melbourne

Freya Lombardo — Thu, 16 May 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Where would you take Marie Antoinette for lunch? It’s a question not often asked, but it springs to mind when visiting Melbourne’s Conservatory. With its grand proportions, opulent finishes and bespoke detailing, there is something distinctly regal about this space.

Sydney-based architecture and interior design firm Blainey North and Associates’ work for Conservatory comes on the back of its extensive engagement with Crown on other projects, including the Crown Towers Villas luxury suites, the Crystal Club members’ lounge, and accommodation and restaurants at the Crown Metropol in Perth.

Taringa House

Margie Fraser — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:00:00 +0000

While backpacking in Germany many years ago, Con and Mary Zahos spent their last pennies on a Walter Gropius-designed Rosenthal tea set. It is a sleek composition of black and white porcelain; its minimalist lines set to survive any fashion ephemera of coming centuries. The couple’s acquisitive act of love (and sacrifice of pragmatism) set the pace for a lifetime of collecting, and celebrating, their twentieth-century heroes.

More followed, with pieces by Cassina and Bauhaus favourite Marcel Breuer sitting alongside an abiding passion for the functionalist works of the Internationalists, and Santiago Calatrava and Renzo Piano. What, then, can become of such passions, and such a collection, bristling with importance in its own streamlined way, in the confines of a pretty Queenslander home? How does one house these minimalist treasures within the decidedly textured, decaying layers of old painted timber and decorative embellishments?

Czech-Seidel House

Katelin Butler — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:08:00 +0000

Upon entering this family home in the leafy Melbourne suburb of Kew, you mightn’t notice that a renovation has taken place at all – and that’s where the charm lies. The clients, Peter Seidel and Karen Czech, bought the house five years ago and were “taken by the initial feel of it.” The original house was designed by Godfrey and Spowers (now Spowers) in 1984. Responding to the client’s brief that the original aspects of the home shouldn’t become a “second cousin” to the new elements, architect Richard Stampton focused on making the most of the existing opportunities.

The project is made up of a series of subtle modifications that together create a warm and functional home that makes reference to late 1970s/early 1980s architecture, but which is suited to contemporary family life. Richard uses the example of Asplund’s law court extension in Stockholm to explain his approach to this project – the built heritage is preserved, while making way for new use. This is an alternative to the more common approach to a backyard extension, which involves clear articulation between old and new, or a “new box out the back.”

One One One Eagle Street

Antony Moulis — Mon, 13 May 2013 05:00:00 +0000

A high-rise tower presents a paradox of sorts: while it might look like the building has been designed vertically, it is essentially the stacking of horizontal planes that creates this vertical presence. If a strong vertical expression is desired, the columns can be designed to extend beyond the outer floor edge, puncturing the facade. Alternatively, the building’s horizontal stacking can be hidden behind a more solid or camouflaging skin. The first thing visitors are likely to notice about the new high-rise tower at One One One Eagle Street in Brisbane, designed by Cox Rayner Architects, is the way in which it plays with these traditions in its decidedly non-orthogonal expression.

The tower sits adjacent to a magnificent Moreton Bay fig tree, and between two buildings designed by Harry Seidler and Associates: The Riverside Centre (completed 1986) and Riparian Plaza (completed 2005). The precinct was envisaged in Seidler’s 1996 masterplan, which included One One One Eagle Street as its final piece, the building situated on a site placed slightly back from the river’s edge between the two existing towers.

Howard Place

Jill Pope — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:00:00 +0000

At a time when many public commissions are identified or identify as “iconic,” Williams Boag Architects has shown that a project can share the limelight and still make a big impact. While this Bendigo project aspires to be as visually unobtrusive as possible, it has still provided widespread benefits to the local community.

Driven primarily by a long-term need for a safe, accessible space for the weekend crowds who emerge from Bendigo’s bars and clubs in the early hours of the morning (facing long waits for taxis due to a limited supply), the new public infrastructure project contains a toilet block, a shelter with seating and queuing systems.

House for Art Collectors (2000) first house

Mark Cashman — Thu, 09 May 2013 05:00:00 +0000

It seems so long ago now, really. In 1996, Rowena Marsh and I were living in, and working from, our Elizabeth Bay Seidler apartment, absorbing Harry, and trying to survive as young, naive but enthusiastic architects. We were, respectively, thirty-four and thirty-one years old, expecting our first child and getting deep into debt.

Unbeknown to us, though, the stars were aligning. A “young architects” issue of an architecture magazine, which featured our practice, had landed on the breakfast table of a couple who were passionate about art and architecture. They wished to build a house on a newly subdivided piece of land – a rare commodity in Sydney’s Woollahra – and invited us to take part in a limited design competition, which we were fortunate enough to win. This was our first “big” commission, and gave us the break we so desperately needed. We are still indebted to the clients – known as the Art Collectors – for believing in us and persevering through the trials and tribulations of building a new home, of which there were plenty.

Woods Bagot studio, Sydney

Freya Lombardo — Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

How much time do you spend in the office? Chances are that the hours you put in at work far exceed the eight hours of work, eight hours of rest and eight hours of play recommended for a balanced life. For Woods Bagot design director and principal Domenic Alvaro, the opportunity to define the next-generation studio surfaced when the practice negotiated a move to the GE Capital Real Estate building at 60 Carrington Street, Sydney, in return for improving the foyers and entrance experience of the building.

Centrally located atop Wynyard railway station, the second-floor, open-plan expanse offers floor-to-ceiling glazing along the entire length of the fitout, affording it a superior view of Wynyard Park. The westerly aspect provides ample natural light, and the leafy treetops are a welcome green respite from the urban density of midtown Sydney.

City House

Marcus Baumgart — Mon, 06 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

The City House by O’Connor and Houle is a rare creature: a house used as a part-time residence in a location that many would dream of settling in full-time. Virtually nothing of the old house – located in the shell of a relatively narrow, fully attached Arts and Crafts dwelling – remains other than the facade and one idiosyncratically suspended, and now disused, chimney. From the front door back this is a totally new build, and the resultant internal spaces reflect the blankness of the canvas, and bear no resemblance to the historic planning of the original dwelling.

Annick Houle presented the dwelling to me in a matter-of-fact way, choosing not to focus on conceptual “baggage,” as some might. As a result I experienced the house very clearly as a place of things and presences, and not as a place of ideas or concepts. It is not that the ideas aren’t there – there is a clear conceptual diagram, evident in the spatial clarity of the architecture. It is more the case that the house is experienced as a series of concrete material experiences, which taken together frame a particular lifestyle.

Kings Park Education Centre

Jill Pope — Fri, 03 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

It is hardly surprising that architects Donaldson + Warn wanted to maximize the landscape experience in their design for the new Kings Park Education Centre, a new environmental teaching space for the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority situated adjacent to the Naturescape adventure playground in Perth’s celebrated parklands. With such a dramatic site, they saw an opportunity to bury the building into the earth, and in doing so, make a statement about what the practice refers to as the “aesthetics of sustainability.”

What that means is the building has joined a growing movement away from the type of sustainable design that is visually identified by the recognizable mechanical tropes, to an architecture that operates in a highly sustainable way, but communicates it less overtly. “Expressive and romantic,” is how Geoff Warn (Donaldson + Warn) describes its contoured glass form that reaches out to the site’s edges and refracts the landscape around it.

Austinmer Beach House

Freya Lombardo — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:34:49 +0000

Architect Alexander Symes is standing in a privileged position. From the construction site of his current project he is looking across the water to his recently completed Austinmer Beach House. These two projects bookend the beach at Austinmer and bring a new level of environmentally sensitive architecture to the area.

It’s easy to be seduced by the prospect of a sea change when visiting this coastal hamlet just south of Sydney’s Royal National Park. The clients, having returned to Sydney after stints in Amsterdam and London, sidestepped the metropolitan area to take advantage of everything this coastal hamlet can offer a couple starting a family. After purchasing a prime beachfront block topped with a classic fibro shack, they decided to create a family home that would maximize the aspect onto the water and headland while providing privacy. Environmental concerns were not initially at the forefront of the couple’s minds. However, the pairing of Alexander Symes and local master builder Matt Jolley meant their respective abilities with sustainable methodologies were unified, and they have used them to create an efficient, low-ecological-impact home that more than meets the clients’ lifestyle needs.

The Infinity Centre

Christine Phillips — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:00:00 +0000

McBride Charles Ryan’s (MCR) design for Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School (PEGS) Junior struck a chord with me, particularly its haunting Hogwarts-style silhouetted facade that references the local Edwardian houses. So I had high expectations for MCR’s latest addition to the school – the Infinity Centre at PEGS Senior – and it did not disappoint. MCR has extruded an infinity symbol to create this two-storey school building, looping together a village of learning centres around two courtyards. A library sits at its literal heart, positioned at the intersection within the figure eight. Externally, the biomorphic form is articulated as a singular gesture with a different inner and outer skin. These are hitched up at two points, creating northern and southern arched entries, richly clad in red like a fleshy underbelly. Internally, the learning centres have their own distinct characters and sit on the outer perimeter wall with a looping circulation spine that connects to the courtyards and is loaded with more incidental learning opportunities. Situated on a highly exposed area within the senior campus, the fluid form not only tackles the challenges of the site, but also creates complex spatial opportunities that provide a provocative learning environment for the Year 11 and 12 students.