2015 Summer Architecture Commission

“People normally look at a building the way it appears at first glance or from a distance. What kind of form does it have? What kind of silhouette does it create? 
In the mid range, there’s the question of how a building sits abutting a certain aspect of landscape, the ground surface or a neighbouring building. Finally, at a detailed level, there’s a textural fascination with being up close and drawing in all of the senses, such as the acoustic qualities within buildings, the tactile aspects and the strong visual aspects of being right up close.Most buildings require these three levels of appreciation. Very often it’s the third level – the detail – that provides disappointment. We want to get in close and interrogate the detail. That’s often something that will draw a person back to a place for a second or third reading because of the level of richness of the experience.With the Summer Architecture Commission we are looking at these three levels while also paying homage to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. An iconic Melbourne building that is an amazing, graceful, exuberant and incredibly innovative piece of civic design of that era. We thought maybe we could draw from the forms and expression of the enclosure, put it in a different landscape and build it out of a new structural system, that was more related to our time.We’ve never had to design a building where the process of dismantling and possible reuse has come into play. We asked ourselves could it be disassembled and reassembled? Can it provide for other uses? Can it be manipulated to take on a whole new range of performative possibilities? Similar to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, a high level of engineering sophistication and material specificity is integral to the design in order to delicately balance the duality of span and strength. These properties come from both its form and materiality in equal balance.The structure started its life as a lightweight timber structure and has evolved into something different. Through this process of resolving the design and following the project’s innate ‘invented logic’, it has lead to innovations in its own right.”