After a lengthy, eight-day hearing, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) has sided with a Melbourne council’s decision to deny planning permission for a 20-storey apartment tower that would have been built partially over a metropolitan railway line.
The proposal for 24 Chapel Street, in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor, is designed by JCB Architects, Aspect Studios and SJB Planning. The proposal included 45 apartments with commercial spaces and car parking on the lower five floors, with a diagrid exoskeleton structure that the architects said was a response to the unique engineering requirements for suspending the tower over an 17-metre-wide void.
The developer lodged the application with the City of Stonnington, in May 2017. The council rejected the proposal in October 2017, with the developer, SMA Projects, referring the case to VCAT.
The tribunal determined that while the plan did meet many of the proposed site’s planning conditions, it failed to meet two “fundamental criteria” in that the height and scale of the proposed building was too great for the site and that it would not integrate well with low-rise heritage scale of the area.
The tribunal broadly agreed with the council’s assertion that the tower would be too tall.
While council representatives “felt the quality of the architecture was responsive to the context, through its use of an expressed structure and integrated greenery,” they also also argued that the tower would negatively impact several heritage shopfronts along Chapel Street. One representative of the council described the tower as an “unhappy afterthought” in relation to the heritage buildings.
The council also argued that the form of the tower, which features no distinct podium or setback, was too distinct from the buildings around it at street level.
The tribunal said that it did not find “any justification for a landmark structure at this point in the street, and instead think any development here needs to be more tempered than a 20-storey tower located so close to the front boundary.”
The tribunal also disputed the proposed benefits to the community the projects would have. Developer SMA Projects’ proposal would have involved a payment of $4.5 million to VicTrack, the Victoria Government-owned enterprise that owns and manages Victoria’s rail and tram lines and accompanying infrastructure, for use of the air rights over the railway.
“We acknowledge that developing over the railway cutting is technically difficult and a successful outcome could be seen as a community benefit,” it said.
“However we agree with the council in that the site constraints should not in themselves override the problems we have identified with the proposal.
“Not every site will be developable.”
