Good vs Evil

Topaudio-visual unit and office;aboveMeeting room with curtain open, looking towards the audio-visual unit, with steps up to managment at left.

above and belowTwo overall views of the office, with the circular curtain of the meeting area open and closed, and the reception desk and waiting area at left.

Project Description
Melbourne architects Zahava Elenberg and Callum Fraser have adopted a dramatic black and white theme for the open plan studio of Leonard’s Brandhouse, an advertising agency occupying the first floor of a warehouse in Richmond.

Architects’ Note by Zahava Elenberg and Callum Fraser
The architecture of the advertising studio works through counter-attack to the program; composed through territory and politic, articulated by line and dot. The line divides, to raise a platform between ‘management’ and ‘creative’. The dot is subtractive; it exhumes and defines the territory of a meeting room from an expansive, watery floor. At Leonardi, the figures in the political landscape suggest themselves. Organised around eight square-format, two-man arm wrestling tables—this is suits-off and bare-knuckled action.

Aged in their mid-20s, Elenberg Fraser are the youngest architects selected for the coming exhibition 40 Up: Australian Architecture’s Next Generation.

Comment by Anna Nervegna and Toby Reed
The brief for the Leonardi Brandhouse was to create a novel scenario for advertising production: to have an office with no hierarchy, a place where everyone is equal. Elenberg Fraser have applied this utopian ideal by taking its equivalent architectural manoeuvres and giving them the style of cool, minimal art.

Elenberg Fraser have emptied those chosen architectural signs of their meaning, to reduce everything back to style. The result both fulfils the initial brief while at the same time pointing to the impossibility of architecture truly eradicating hierarchy: there is always a trace left from what has been deleted.

One enters the office through an anonymous yet marked entry. The anonymity of the stainless steel pivot door and blacked-out stairwell contrasts against the enormous banner spelling Leonardi Brandhouse. Inside, the plan is a diagrammatic dispersion of elements. Walls have been obliterated in favour of colour-coded floors (black ply = creative, raised white ply = management, red vinyl = production), a datum of identical desks, a few specially designed joinery objects (reception, a storage wall and an audio-visual library wall/object) and a large, circular curtain of black velvet (defining the meeting area).

The curtain evokes a negative of Roy Grounds’ circular courtyard (Toorak house), so the form is solid black rather than a light-filled void. The plush draping (reminiscent of Mies) enables the meeting room to be both present and absent. The circle is reinscribed on the floor with black carpet, which traces over the two steps leading up to the white management area. Elenberg Fraser provide the metaphor of the boxing ring for this place where all the office can come together and ‘fight it out’. However, the extreme blackness and the choice of circle suggest more of a clandestine ritual.

The black and white environment appears generally to be architecture in negative. The display unit and conference table are made of a silver birdseye laminate which gives the impression of woodgrain in a photographic negative. The tracings of the program, the backlit pegboard surfaces, the soft velvet curtain and the management’s desire to have no hierarchy, all add to this impression. Sure, the hierarchy is still there, but that doesn’t matter as long as there is an image of non-hierarchyas a style. Here, the idea is the image and the image is the idea.

Anna Nervegna is an architect and artist; Toby Reed is an architect and filmmaker. Both are based in Melbourne.

Leonardi Brandhouse, Richmond, Victoria
Architects Elenberg Fraser—project team Zahava Elenberg, Callum Fraser. Lighting Consultants Richmond Lighting. Builders Jonsson Construction Management.