Plastic Extrusions

View from the west. The lozenge-shaped building evokes a futurist fantasy of lightness, plasticity and the ephemeral. Image: Dianna Snape

The Polymer Engineering Centre looks out to the west from the top of a long sloping site. Both familiar and strange, it is visible from some distance in the surrounding landscape. Image: Dianna Snape

The double-skin, translucent plastic cladding transforms the building into a lantern at night. Image: Dianna Snape

The large double height workshops benefit most from the rolled form. Image: Dianna Snape

Looking along the building from the north. Image: Dianna Snape

The Polymer Engineering Centre is a simulated plastics manufacturing plant, incorporating thermoplastic processing and recycling techniques, with supporting laboratory, meeting and multi-media/multi-use staff and teaching spaces. It is located at the periphery of an outer-suburban campus ringed by car parks and comprised of homogenous low concrete-block buildings with verandahed walkways framing several undistinguished courtyards. This is the kind of campus in which the buildings are numbered rather than named. Cox Sanderson Ness’s addition to the campus steps outside this anonymity with a building referred to by locals as the “worm”. From the campus context it takes only the extruded lozenge-shape of the verandah columns. The building’s other reference is to its use – the technique of extrusion through a single section used in some plastics manufacture is magnified to the scale of the building’s section. The lozenge reappears not only in the details of windows and decorative panels but as the building’s structural section repeated along its 80-metre length.

Clad in a double skin of translucent plastic, the building transforms into a lantern at night. The white tube-like form dominates the sloping site, visible from far below the campus, with a presence that is simultaneously familiar and strange. At the scale of a two-storey building, and in the context of surfaces comprised largely of plastics, this lozenge shape evokes a futurist fantasy of lightness, plasticity and the ephemeral.

Diverging from the inward focus of the campus this building looks confidently out over the west and is visible well before one enters the Broadmeadows commercial area and the campus. Its more public presence is consistent with the industry-focused nature of the client and indicates a shift in how tertiary education is conceived. The building is not only an advocate for the formal beauty and adaptability of plastic, but also for its environmental qualities – to counter the heat load that comes with its north-west orientation the double-sided vented skin permits thermal stacking, reduces thermal bridging, direct heat transmittance and provides controlled natural lighting to the workshop.

The large double-height workshop benefits most from the rolled form and it is disappointing that the presence of the aerofoil wall is barely felt from the internal classrooms, laboratories and meeting rooms. Not that these lack their own formal pleasures. Internally a greater variety of plastics have been exploited for differences in degree of transparency and for their texture, rib and hue with some very subtle shifts in adjacent surfaces. Opportunities for views between workshop and classroom spaces, between upper and lower levels and from internal to external spaces are maximised. To the north a large deck off the administration offices has become the key social space in the building. At just $1000 per square metre the Polymer Engineering Centre harnesses the flexibility and subtle variations within commercially available building plastics with the delicacy of Japanese paper shoji and the curious vitality of a silkworm’s cocoon. This project approaches the act of building as something akin to the economy and eloquence of a drink-bottle or a toothpaste tube. It pursues a disquieting object-like intimacy.