The client merely asked for more storage and more light. The existing house had various additions over the years and they were poorly built and very run down. The interior spaces were poorly lit and the exterior spaces poorly utilized due to ill conceived planning.
House 20 presents a series of blades cantilevering over a bronze wall; pushing and pulling. A grassy knoll rises out of the earth below, being drawn up towards the jostling blades, and partially veiling the building’s elevation and under croft from the street’s vantage point. Below this point of arrival and shelter the offset rhythm and warmth of the bronze wall reveals itself.
The subject site is nestled on a corner in the back streets of Brunswick that enjoys a northern orientation which we chose to exploit. This house is a critique and a response to the suburban housing vernacular and the planning laws that influence them. An endeavour to provide an alternative affordable housing to conventional European influenced copies of copies that proliferate throughout our sub-urban landscape. An area much discussed and debated in the last decade within our profession.
The subject site fronts a main street (Union Street) to the south and a private car park that abuts and wraps around the northern and eastern interfaces of the site. The car park service’s RMIT University and is wedged between the subject site and a railway corridor. And although the car park is a private space it is utilized as a public thoroughfare from the Jewell train station opposite the University and from Dawson Street to the North. As a result, these site conditions provided for a building that is highly visible without any obstruction. This was a site condition that we capitalised on and exploited!
The height and scale of the proposed building is a direct response to the scale and massing of the existing context and fits comfortably with the adjoining buildings. The rectilinear volume sits atop a foliage-covered plinth, conceived as a reinterpretation of the surrounding fences overgrown with greenery and forms a direct visual relationship with the neighbouring Royal Botanic Gardens.
Crystal Gardens to set new world sustainability standards
Australian international architecture firm CK Designworks has designed a ground breaking 35-storey residential and commercial mixed use building for Melbourne’s CBD that will contain landscaped community gardens on every sixth floor equivalent to about double the area of the site with trees up to 10m tall.
The Vader House is an extension to a Victorian terrace in the dense inner-city. The high boundary walls, built in disregard of existing height regulations long before such rules were created, permitted a non-standard height along the northern boundary. The roofline then abruptly turns to follow the dictated set-back lines, resulting in a playful and telling interpretation of planning rules. All the new works surround an outdoor courtyard space which becomes the new centre of the house- accessed by a series of glass doors it is the opposite of the dark masonry-clad rooms of the old house. The refined palate of materials is subverted where volumes are removed to reveal the flesh inside – coloured bright red with glass tiles and joinery.
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