 | SWEET WHITENESS RICHARD KIRK ARCHITECT’S SOPHISTICATED NEW PREMISES FOR THE CUTTING EDGE POST-PRODUCTION COMPANY IS AN ELEGANT AND THOROUGH SOLUTION TO A COMPLEX BRIEF, SITE AND EXPERIENCE.
REVIEW JOHN MACARTHUR PHOTOGRAPHY JON LINKINS
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The Jane Street elevation. The simplicity of the
rest of the building breaks down at the entry corner
into complex formal play, which sees the boardroom
hover over the glazed foyer.
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View along the Jane Street elevation, towards the
entry, with the river beyond.
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The simplicity of the
Riverside Drive facade with its lapped layers of
aluminium screens.
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Oblique view along the long
Riverside Drive facade.
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Overview from the south.
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The foyer stair, which affords long views down the
river.
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The rooftop restaurant with uninterrupted
views along the Toowong Reach of the river.
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Looking along the restaurant terrace.
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The
rooftop also has a surreal pocket garden of bamboo
and air handling units.
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The
rooftop also has a surreal pocket garden of bamboo
and air handling units.
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RICHARD KIRK ARCHITECT’S recent Queensland RAIA award for Cutting Edge
was a popular choice. Many admire the formal dexterity of the building, its urbane
management of its site and its material qualities. But this is a building where, more
than most, one needs to understand the brief and the circumstances of the clients in
order to appreciate the extent to which the building has been produced out of a
complex set of functional and urban planning constraints.
Cutting Edge is a film and TV post-production house that, unusually, conducts the
different aspects of post-production – editing, sound, special effects – under the one
roof. The equipment required to do all this, and then store terabytes of high definition
stuff, is astounding. To give one sense of scale: the site, building and building services
represent only about a quarter of the monetary value of the facility. What is more, both
the business and its technology develop rapidly, requiring a high degree of spatial and
organizational flexibility, much of it as black box spaces. When the company first
approached Kirk he sensibly recommended a greenfield site with low land costs and
scope for flexibility, but instead the clients purchased a warehouse on a riverfront block
in the booming inner city suburb of West End. This is perhaps the first general lesson to
take away from Cutting Edge: the “smart” culture industries of the emerging future are
based around economies of agglomeration. They gather in the inner cities, where a
spectrum of specialized services support rapidly developing businesses, and where
lifestyle amenities attract and keep a work force.
Kirk is regularly asked how many apartments are in Cutting Edge. This is a
natural enough supposition if one hasn’t looked at the building closely, but the answer
is none. We have come to think of the city as all about the consumption of space –
in the immediate vicinity the game is how to turn over former industrial sites into
generic apartment complexes that maximize the river view – but there is another
urban logic. Cutting Edge is a productive space, and is as specialized and functionally
specific as a hospital.
Kirk’s strategy is simple. He takes advantage of the black box spaces to develop
a deep plan with a thin wall of offices that take the river views. The car parking is on
grade and the roof is an entertainment area. There was a major planning constraint in
that what you see in the photographs as a road on the river side is likely to revert to
parkland. Thus access was required to be on the cross street. Here Kirk assembles a
four-level stair and lift foyer, above which floats the boardroom. Given that there is little
scope for spatial expression in the ballast of the spaces, Kirk is squeezing more than a
little drama out of this space. On entering the building the immediate view of the river
is withheld, but on the upper levels and while descending the apparently precipitous
stair with its glass balustrade, one has a long view down the length of the river. Three
floors of largely similar offices have the more immediate cross-river view. The offices
are relatively small and intimate, with a deep layer of motorized blinds, exterior louvres
and scrubby gums giving a large range of enclosure and illumination. In moving around
the building this contrast of direction and scale is very successful. On the rooftop a
smart but restrained restaurant is set back from a deck which has an uninterrupted
sweep across and along the Toowong Reach of the river, but also a surreal little pocket
garden of bamboo and air handling units.
The biggest gesture of the building is to place the boardroom over the foyer. This
appears to balance on the glazed entry wall. As an object poised in space it adds a
little spatial empathy to the foyer – one can imagine balancing the forces to maintain
it in position. Inside the boardroom the exterior zinc cladding folds into the interior as
an exception to the rules set elsewhere in the building, and one feels oneself projected
out into the view.
Kirk’s aim was to give the building an appearance of permanence and sobriety
arising from the site and the fabric of the building. This is intended to complement,
rather than represent, the flux of the pixels within it. The greater length of the facade is
a simple repetitive frame with lapped layers of aluminium blinds making a variable skin.
At the entry corner, this simplicity breaks – as if the building itself were leathery clay
that bends and then tears on the corner and short facade, which are spatially complex.
This formal play is held together with a simple palette of materials. The shell of the
building and the part of the skin which wraps into the interior of the foyer is off-form
concrete, made white with oxides. The white is not harsh and crisp, but soft, slightly
bluish and with the formwork visible. Close up it is plain that this is not liming or some
other finish; the whiteness is the substance of the concrete and seems almost sweet –
as if the building were made of cake icing. Against this mass material are set areas of
dark zinc panel cladding, which in its direction as well as colour make an effective
contrast. At this point the roof is expressed as the section of a plane that rises from the
rear elevation and makes a shallow fall to a crisp gutter. Cut sharply on the property
line, the roof jetties out a considerable distance to protect and shade the boardroom
and the glass wall to the foyer.
Much architecture in Queensland is still marked by a studied casualness that
betrays a basic insecurity about what buildings should look like. In order not to betray
the marketing image of informality, the logic which most buildings have by virtue of
their site and function is generally disguised as much as possible with jaunty battened
screens and a few extra roofs. Cutting Edge is a sophisticated design resolved to a
level that is rare in commercial building, let alone one with this level of planning
constraint. It shows that a new level of assurance is emerging in the younger Brisbane
practices. There is a faith here in a kind of regional modernism that can accept the
context of climate and local architectural idiom as a base for thinking rather than an
ideology to be propagated. What appears as modelling of the exterior form of the
building is in fact driven by a holistic logic of organization, structure, spatial experience
and lighting conditions. In the end, what is interesting about Cutting Edge is its
appearance, but like the whiteness that goes through the concrete, this is an
appearance that the building owns.
DR JOHN MACARTHUR IS A READER IN ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND.
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| Project Credits |
CUTTING EDGE
Architect Richard Kirk Architect—design architect Richard
Kirk; project team Brendan Pointon, Fedor Medek, Andrew
Drummond. Client Constant Resources. Structural
engineer Alexander Browne Cambridge. Hydraulic
engineer McKendry Rein Petersen. Landscape Terrain.
Lighting DAS International. Acoustics Hyder Consulting.
Quantity Surveyor Rider Hunt. Mechanical and electrical
engineer DMA. Contractor Hutchinson Builders.
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