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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | PLASTIC EXTRUSIONS Cox Sanderson Ness explore the potential of plastic in the Polymer Engineering Centre. Review by Sandra Kaji-O’Grady.
Photography by Dianna Snape.
| Review |
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View from the
west. The lozenge-shaped building evokes a
futurist fantasy of lightness, plasticity and the
ephemeral.
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The Polymer Engineering
Centre looks out to the west from the top of a
long sloping site. Both familiar and strange, it is
visible from some distance in the surrounding
landscape.
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The double-skin, translucent
plastic cladding transforms the building into a
lantern at night.
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The large double height workshops benefit
most from the rolled form.
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Looking along the building
from the north.
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The Polymer Engineering Centre is a simulated plastics manufacturing plant,
incorporating thermoplastic processing and recycling techniques, with supporting
laboratory, meeting and multi-media/multi-use staff and teaching spaces. It is located
at the periphery of an outer-suburban campus ringed by car parks and comprised of
homogenous low concrete-block buildings with verandahed walkways framing several
undistinguished courtyards. This is the kind of campus in which the buildings are
numbered rather than named. Cox Sanderson Ness’s addition to the campus steps
outside this anonymity with a building referred to by locals as the “worm”. From the
campus context it takes only the extruded lozenge-shape of the verandah columns. The
building’s other reference is to its use – the technique of extrusion through a single
section used in some plastics manufacture is magnified to the scale of the building’s
section. The lozenge reappears not only in the details of windows and decorative panels
but as the building’s structural section repeated along its 80-metre length.
Clad in a double skin of translucent plastic, the building transforms into a lantern at
night. The white tube-like form dominates the sloping site, visible from far below the
campus, with a presence that is simultaneously familiar and strange. At the scale of a
two-storey building, and in the context of surfaces comprised largely of plastics, this
lozenge shape evokes a futurist fantasy of lightness, plasticity and the ephemeral.
Diverging from the inward focus of the campus this building looks confidently out
over the west and is visible well before one enters the Broadmeadows commercial area
and the campus. Its more public presence is consistent with the industry-focused nature of the client and indicates a shift in how tertiary education is conceived. The
building is not only an advocate for the formal beauty and adaptability of plastic, but
also for its environmental qualities – to counter the heat load that comes with its
north-west orientation the double-sided vented skin permits thermal stacking, reduces
thermal bridging, direct heat transmittance and provides controlled natural lighting to
the workshop.
The large double-height workshop benefits most from the rolled form and it is
disappointing that the presence of the aerofoil wall is barely felt from the internal
classrooms, laboratories and meeting rooms. Not that these lack their own formal
pleasures. Internally a greater variety of plastics have been exploited for differences in
degree of transparency and for their texture, rib and hue with some very subtle shifts
in adjacent surfaces. Opportunities for views between workshop and classroom
spaces, between upper and lower levels and from internal to external spaces are
maximised. To the north a large deck off the administration offices has become the key
social space in the building. At just $1000 per square metre the Polymer Engineering
Centre harnesses the flexibility and subtle variations within commercially available
building plastics with the delicacy of Japanese paper shoji and the curious vitality of a
silkworm’s cocoon. This project approaches the act of building as something akin to
the economy and eloquence of a drink-bottle or a toothpaste tube. It pursues a
disquieting object-like intimacy.
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady is a lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne.
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| Project Credits |
Polymer Engineering Centre,Kangan Batman TAFE, Victoria
Architect Cox Sanderson Ness—project team
Philip Rowe, Fred Chaney, Patrick Ness, Martin
Coates, Emma Tullock, Ben Warner, Y. C. Kan.
Environmental Analysis Arup. Structural/Civil
Engineer Warren and Rowe. Services Engineer
SWIJ. Project Manager Peter Davies. Cladding
Manufacturer Ampelite. Cladding Contractor
Axcess Roofing. Builder Cockram Builders.
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Copyright © 2010 Architecture Media Pty Ltd
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