Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2015 i Architecture Australia

The importance of housing as a proving ground for ideas in architecture has been demonstrated by this year’s Houses Awards entries. The number of awards given to younger architects reinforces how important the single dwelling is as the first vehicle for a practice to investigate and show its design intent. That aside, all of the winners show ability in one way or another to thoroughly prosecute an idea from inception to realization and it is this trait that allowed them to create projects worthy of awards. Across a breadth of climates and locales, ten awards and thirty-one commendations were given. These were chosen from a shortlist of 135 projects, gleaned from a record 329 entries. A home designed for a simpler life, Jesse Bennett Architect’s wonderful Planchonella House in Far…

KEY 1 Carriageway toSwanston Street2 Lobby/lounge3 Mail room4 Tenancy5 RMIT forecourt below6 Winter garden (futurestage)7 Lobby8 Shared dining9 Cinema10 Outdoor spas11 Outdoor dining KEY 1 Highest occupiedfloor – 99 metres2 Top of facade –106 metres3 Top of building –112 metres4 Adjoining heritageMaltstore5 Swanston Street The southern facade of Swanston Square bearing the image of William Barak and titled “Portrait” (as if it were a work of art in its own right) has been the subject of heated debate since it was first proposed by ARM Architecture in 2006. Portrait’s ambitions, consequences, authorship and legitimacy have been vociferously argued across informal and formal media channels, including some in which architecture is a novelty. So thoroughly has Portrait been dissected that reviewers have turned to weighing up the various arguments made, a…

We are currently experiencing a collision between digital technology and human nature. It brings opportunities and challenges to balance. We need places – particularly for working – that make the most of both our new digital networks and our unique human capacities. In a virtual age, physical places (and their designers) should remind us to be people. Technology creates an inherent paradox throughout society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the workplaces of organizations. We have shifted “from a world structured by boundaries and enclosures to a world increasingly dominated, at every scale, by connections, networks, and flows. This is a world of less rigid, more fluid and flexible relationships.”1 This advancement brings exponential new capabilities, but digital networks are not an achievement in themselves. As John Naisbitt is…

KEY 1 Main road2 Driveway3 Carport4 Deck5 Living6 Utility7 Pool8 Bedrooms9 Seasonal creek10 Beach11 Coral Sea KEY 1 Boardwalk to road2 Boardwalk to beach3 Canopy deck4 Breezeway deck5 Sun deck6 Living7 Utility8 Pool9 Bedroom There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.” Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams. Herzog’s fraught South American rainforest shoot for his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo (the director apparently had local tribespeople helpfully offering to kill his lead actor) nurtured his vision…

KEY 1 Learning space2 Teacher preparation3 Learning lane4 Drama / PE Studio5 Dress up6 Store7 Subfloor car park8 Admin9 IT Service10 Study hub11 Resource hub12 Student services13 Print14 Honours wall15 Morse code wall16 The Plaza17 Existing heritage building18 Science lab19 Void As a boy growing up in Adelaide, I always admired the handsome tan brick volumes of Adelaide High School. With the languid sweep of its long, low wing facing the main road, and the blocky communion of blank cube and half-cylinder asymmetrically balanced around the main entrance, the building projected an urbane self-confidence that made it feel both out of place and completely at ease. Perched in the midst of a diffuse park landscape on the scrappy western edge of the city, overlooking the scenes of Adelaide’s automobile desert…

In a departure from the traditional Architecture Australia project review, Stuart Vokes pens a letter to Angelo Candalepas, Pelican Street’s design architect, to share his praise and criticism of the project. Dear Angelo, you suggested I write you a letter of sorts, as an intimate critique of your building, in lieu of taking a measured and distant position about it. The latter, you said, would offer little to the reader or the critic that couldn’t otherwise be extracted from the glamour photography accompanying the review; you also wished to learn something through this process. So at your request, following are my enjoyments and criticisms of the Pelican Street apartments in Surry Hills, Sydney. I admit, the thought of reviewing Pelican Street was intimidating – what would I have to contribute…

In the developed world, we feel the effects of “digital disruption” in our experiences of the spaces of retail, hospitality, entertainment, finance, arts and culture, and even healthcare. This disruption can take many forms: augmentation of physical experience with a digital complement such as the use of a bespoke mobile application to navigate an art museum, ordering food on digital tablets in a restaurant, recording our health data to share with a doctor. We also rate and review our experiences of a wide range of services and share these opinions with diverse others via the social web. So how is the ubiquity of digital technologies reshaping the physical spaces of education and learning? Whether institutions of learning have planned for it or not, digital technology is refashioning how learning takes…

KEY 1 Entry2 Garden3 Raised deck4 Kitchen5 Mezzanine over6 Shower KEY 1 Seasonal flood2 Mown grass3 Seasonal pond4 Rush, grasses and tea-treelinking across properties5 Heath expanding6 House, tea-treeemerging inside7 Establish ephemeral creek Baracco and Wright Architects’ pursuit of the loosest and lightest of forms is exemplified in the practice’s new house on Victoria’s Western Port – a joyfully direct manifestation of experiments into pared-back infrastructural architectures. In this project, the architects begin to undertake a removal of some of the very components that make a building a building – the displacement of a floor, the elimination of solid walls and roof, and the dismissing of conventions such as the garden stopping at the front door. These editorial gestures seem a gradual undressing of sorts. The building invokes, the architects confess,…

KEY 1 Existing chimney2 Existing boiler house3 Existing coal hopper4 New access walkway5 New access stair6 Attenuators beyond7 Cooling tower beyond8 Attenuators9 Condenser pipes andservice reticulation10 Horizontal structuralmembers11 Cooling towers12 Acoustic louvres13 Cooling towers above The Irving Street Brewery project by Tzannes is situated on the six-hectare site of the old Kent Brewery in Sydney’s Central Park neighbourhood. The brewery site was established by Tooth & Company in 1835, less than fifty years after Europeans first arrived in Australia. In Mary Ann Hamilton and Sue Andersen’s “An Oral History of Kent Brewery,” it was described as a factory complex so big it was like a “city within a city.” Over the past several years, Sydneysiders have watched as one of the city’s densest mixed-use sites has emerged from this old…

Advanced Manufacturing and Design Centre by Wilkinson Eyre Architects opens Swinburne University of Technology has launched a $100 million Advanced Manufacturing and Design Centre by Wilkinson Eyre Architects in partnership with Jacobs Australia. The eleven-storey building in Hawthorn, Melbourne, includes the Training Centre in Biodevices, a facility for exploring innovative medical technologies. The Factory of the Future space on the ground level was designed by H2o Architects and hosts specialist studios where designers will create prototypes and research manufacturing methods. READ MORE ABOUT THE ADVANCED MANUFACTURING AND DESIGN CENTRE architectureau.com/articles/swinburne-opens-100-m-centre Amanda Levete reveals MPavilion design Architect Amanda Levete has unveiled her design for the Naomi Milgrom Foundation’s next MPavilion, which is set to inhabit Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens from October 2015. Inspired by forest canopies, the structure reads as a…

KEY 1 Public entry plaza2 Reception3 Children’s clinic4 Adults’ clinic5 Plant area6 Loading7 Kitchen8 Cafe9 Bookshop10 Campus services foyer11 Academic entry foyer12 Virtual learning centre13 Lecture seminar14 Lecture15 Metro North Oral HealthServices clinic16 Library17 Staff workstation18 Undergraduate studentcommon room19 Undergraduate studentcommon room – terrace20 Breezeway foyer21 Breezeway22 Preclinical lab For many, and I count myself among them, there is an irrational fear associated with a trip to the dentist. I say “irrational” because my own dentist is a very nice person and good at his job and the procedures are not particularly painful. He is a sole practitioner whose clinic is located in a beautiful, heritage-listed building in the centre of the city. From a busy pedestrian mall, you enter an intimate, richly detailed lobby and take the timber-and-brass-lined lift…

We all know experience is bifurcating, but architecture is still working out what to do about it. The splitting of the digital and the physical, this splintering of habits of mind, is cascading through many areas of architectural speculation and many building types. In public libraries the decline of the printed book and the growth of online publications and information are radically redefining their public role, transforming them from lending libraries into new hybrids combining physical online portals with places to create social and community capital. Universities, faced with the growth of massive open online courses and their implicit paradigm of both free content and free geography, are having to reassert their campuses as distinct physical and consequential “experiences” for their students. Even workplaces, faced with new mobilities created out…

KEY 1 Porte-cochere2 Wind lobby3 Lobby4 Guest lift lobby5 Back of house6 Cafe7 Cafe terrace8 Otemachi forest KEY 1 Arrival lifts / concierge 2 Lobby lounge 3 Guest lift lobby 4 Cloaks 5 Wine cellar 6 Restaurant 7 Display kitchen 8 Main kitchen 9 Lounge 10 Bar 11 Cigar lounge 12 Library 13 Boardroom 14 Business centre 15 Back of house 16 Female spa 17 Female changing room 18 Male changing room 19 Male spa 20 Gymnasium 21 Swimming pool 22 Spa reception 23 Yoga 24 Pilates 25 Treatment rooms 26 Relaxation 27 Private dining 28 Void 29 Deluxe guestroom 30 Corner suite 31 Premier suite 32 Plant 33 Lobby It’s obvious that Kerry Hill Architects and Aman Resorts had a close conversation for more than eight years as the…

Mono No Aware is a marriage of two unlikely images of a home: the revered and mythologized Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto and a homeless person’s informal shelter located just forty metres from the edge of the Imperial grounds. The intimate images in the book, photographed by Sydney’s architectural photographer Brett Boardman on a sunny November morning in 2011, juxtapose the Imperial Villa with the homeless shelter, suggesting parallels between the two in composition, pattern, tectonic and relationship to nature. Through this “experiential” lens, the gulf between these two extremes of the housing spectrum is dissolved: we see that both dwellings offer shelter overhead, layered screens, stones and steps fringed in grass, places to eat, and views out into a sun-dappled landscape. And, we can infer, both have humans inside…

The piece I created as part of the 2015 Vivid Sydney light festival is titled It’s All Around You . It explores futuristic ideas of the progression of nature and visual growth patterns. The piece is an abstract and stylized statement about what nature could become. This was the first time I have had my work animated and projected onto a building facade; usually I am up a boom or scissor lift painting a mural, which obviously is a static image, not a moving one! For this project I prepared my artwork as vector drawings and then worked with Ample Projects, which animated my drawings. Ample Projects initially prepared a complete and precise digital template of the entire building surface, including all the windows, pipes and voids,…