Projects

SYDNEY: VOLVO GALLERY

In an admired example of prestige brand marketing, Volvo Australia has opened in central Sydney a rentable exhibition/function room—the Volvo Gallery—to promote its Swedish cars in subliminal conjunction with art and design exhibitions, and receptions to launch fashionable products and services. The fitout was designed by Landini Associates (led by London-trained retail/restaurant specialist Mark Landini), with a palette of maple, limestone, white paint and colour-backed glass.

MURWILLUMBAH: TWEED FEDERATION GALLERY

After a competition involving four firms, Bud Brannigan of Brisbane is designing the $3.5 million Tweed Federation Gallery to house the Doug Moran portrait collection, the Tweed Regional Art Gallery’s permanent collection and touring exhibitions; also to provide function/performance and office spaces. The scheme places a single-storey sequence of four slightly fanned pods along the ridge of a small hill overlooking the Tweed Valley and Mt Warning. The palette combines local timbers, stone, rock recycled from the site and concrete walls and paving designed by local artists. The site will be landscaped with sculpture courts.

CANBERRA: THE ATLANTIC

The Atlantic is a café at Manuka, ACT, designed by Kevin Carmody (then in his third year of architecture at UCanberra and now at RMIT), with Huw Evans. It has a central kitchen partly visible from two dining rooms. The main space is theatrically decorated with an acoustic ceiling of perforated timber, gold silk panels mounted on white walls and black stained timber floors continuing to a terrace. The bar/secondary dining area has cooler furnishings, with a raised floor and seraphic glass doors.

RIO DE JANIERO: PRINTING HALL

Archigrafica, the practice of globetrotting Australian architect Ken Sowerby, has designed the world’s longest (338 metres) newspaper production centre, now nearing completion on a hill overlooking Rio de Janiero’s bay. With Eurografica, specialist engineers in Munich, Sowerby planned a split-level, steel-framed, energy-efficient facility shaded from the tropical sun by a massive ‘sombrero’ roof. The plan lines up a paper store, a four-storey-high, 300 metre-long press hall and a publishing and despatch hall. Bicycles will be used to travel along the building, which can be adapted and extended in future.

BRISBANE: FRESHWATER

On the Brisbane River at Teneriffe, developers are building a serpentine white apartment complex to a design by Bligh Voller Nield. Freshwater is a long, six-storey development which steps back and down to four storeys at the south-east end to avoid intruding on a heritage villa called Amity, which has just been sold off from this site. The design provides 104 airconditioned apartments and penthouses of one to three bedrooms, with deep balconies of 3.6 metres facing the river and three metres along the city-oriented, Gray Street, frontage. The main entrance has a two storey atrium with a water cascade.

SYDNEY: KINDERSLEY HOUSE

Rice Daubney has redesigned Kindersley House, in Sydney’s financial district, as a 35 storey office building with basement car parking and a 20 metre-high, naturally lit foyer and walkway connecting Richard Johnson Square (off Bligh Street) and O’Connell Street. Above a retail podium, the rectangular tower will be clad with energy-efficient, low-reflection, high transparency glass elaborated by vertical fins, horizontal sun louvres on the north and west sides, and recessed grooves to mark floor levels.

MT HOTHAM SKIFIELDS: HOTHAM HEIGHTS CHALETS

Melbourne architects Fooks Martin & Sandow have completed a cluster of 24 ski lodges—most three storeys—huddled at 1750 metres on Victoria’s Mount Hotham. The Hotham Heights Chalets are built with steel and timber frames, stringybark, cedar and compressed cement claddings and steel roofs. They are designed “light, tall and narrow, with some buildings separated”. This strategy encourages the structures to flex in high winds, establishes downhill glimpses and intriguing snowdrifts between the lodges and generally promotes “a bristly look and intense village feeling”.