Back again

Where have I been? Doing a Creedence Clearwater Revival and goin' up the country. Moved to regional Victoria midway between Melbourne and Bendigo. Fresh air, trees, vineyard, frogs, wedge tailed eagles. Very disruptive but getting settled now. Lots of physical work to balance the time spent at the computer 'architecting'.

smaller house

small house

saving heritage buildings

Two issues in Melbourne this week - the Myer Emporium project and the Windsor Hotel project - are relevant to a discussion of adaptive re-use of existing, heritage listed (or not) buildings. The Windsor Hotel proposal looks to be a well thought out project that will inject new life into a tired but cherished building. The Windsor is first and foremost a hotel and this proposal will ensure that it will remain so, albeit in a contemporary form. Necessarily the scale of the new component will be larger than the existing building but then, when the Windsor was built, it no doubt overpowered its neighbours. And the city has grown in scale across the board also since then. The architectural detail and form of the new components are such that they will be readily discernible from the old. Remember the Burra Charter? A good outcome. On the other hand the demolition of the art-deco facaded Lonsdale street building next to Myer's to widen Caledonian Lane for service access seems crude and poorly considered. All the program requirements for the project could possibly have been met and this building incorporated in the project if the will was there. But the writing (literally) was on the wall as this building has been allowed to deteriorate over recent times. It was never to be part of Myer's 'grand plan' it seems.
So in the one week, we have two textbook cases of how to respect and re-use heritage buildings - one appropriate and one less so.

today's sketches

parabolas

I was looking at the pattern cast across the ceiling by some below ceiling mounted lights. Parabolas. Like a dolphin's snout, or water flowing around a rock in a stream. Natural shape. I then looked around the rectilinear room the lights were in. Shame the built environment can't be as elegant as the natural. Why did this come about? Why is everything square? What if the first brick maker made a parabolic brick? What a different world. The tyranny of the tee-square!

tarrawarra

Allan Powell was the architect for this gallery complex. Great work.