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FIRST PLACE
Kieran Wong, CODA Studio—team members Emma Williamson, Renae Tapley, Stephen Hicks, Brett Mitchell.
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SECOND PLACE
Simon Anderson, University of Western Australia -team members Jennie Officer, Trent Woods.
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THIRD PLACE
Jon Johannsen, Architects Johannsen + Associates -team members Gabrielle Gering, Yvette Olsen, Amelia Capella.
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HIGHLY COMMENDED
Graham Crist, Antarctica Group—team members Diego Ramirez, Simon Whibley, John Doyle, Daniel Yusko.
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HIGHLY COMMENDED
Gresley Abas Architects—team members Ahmad Abas, Jackson Liew, Sabrina Cheong, Philip Gresley.
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Philip Goldswain reviews the outcome of a recent ideas competition for new models of socially diverse housing.
The ideas competition offers a rare
opportunity to publicly articulate the
speculative potential of architecture. As
part of the Building for Diversity National
Housing Conference, the Department of
Housing and Works and the East Perth
Redevelopment Authority proposed such a
competition, which sought to investigate,
within the process of urban renewal, new
models of socially diverse housing.
A frayed piece of urban fabric, denuded
as a result of the Northbridge Tunnel
project, was chosen as the site for
conjecture. This site is in an area of urban
transition, between a monocultural
“entertainment precinct” and disappearing
light-industrial and emerging residential
fabric. It is bound by Newcastle Street to the
north and a proposed twelve-metre-high car
park to the south. The demanding brief
specified hostel accommodation for single
men, and community housing to be
determined by the entrant. An existing
single-storey heritage building was to be
integrated into the retail and commercial
mix at ground. A response to demographic
and urban shifts, as both architectural and
habitational phenomena, was fundamental
to the competition.
The winning scheme, by CODA Studio,
proposes ambiguous occupation in a hybrid
form. Accommodation is housed in two
familiar forms – the perimeter and slab
block – reconfigured around an elevated,
stepped garden. The combination of these
types allows the simultaneous interrogation
of two modes of urban engagement. The
perimeter block conforms to the brief’s
latent aspiration for a familiar nineteenthcentury
street edge, while the slab block
allows a formal investigation of one of
Modernism’s failed utopian programmes –
the relationship between a building and its
artificial ground. The resulting scheme
happily conforms to the antipodean
tradition of reinterpreting European models,
where such models lose their singularity
and reappear in a unique pidgin
architectural dialect. CODA’s new urban
ground, shared by both blocks, can be read
as an expanded English terrace garden
and/or as the liberated ground plain of the
Unite model. This garden connects the
disparate forms together in a new state of
hybridity. In the shifting landscape of urban
renewal and demographic change this lack
of fixity is perhaps architecture’s most
appropriate response. Further, CODA
proposes a diversity that is manifested in
“dwelling” rather than articulated through
built form. For example, a series of
diagrams explains the potential
reconfiguration of a single communityhousing
apartment type for a photographer,
a copywriter, a yoga instructor or a fashion
designer. The innate transience in this
occupation seems to suggest a domestic
correlation to the scheme’s urban
multiplicity.
Simon Anderson’s second-placed scheme
poses a moment of rational clarity, with a
more defined and resolute form that draws
stylistic cues from his own small-scale
residential projects. The Newcastle Street
elevation bears an uncanny resemblance to
Anderson’s Killarney Street House (2005) or
Broome Street House (2004). In inflating
these domestic references, with their
asymmetrical elevations and slipped
balustrading, to an institutional scale
Anderson plays with their formal
resolution. The double-height voids are
enlarged, maintaining the scale of the
domestic project, while the articulated
depth of the houses is flattened. In its new
form the elevation begins to evoke the
apartments of Geoffrey Summerhayes or
Hobbs Winning from the late 1960s and
early 1970s – crisp, cubic forms whose
openings seem carved out of a white,
sun-drenched block and whose solid
balconies read as slipped planes of the same
form. Anderson’s Newcastle Street elevation
denies a homogeneous facade in preference
for a direct translation of the diversity of
units contained in the block. As well as the
variations on the hotel-room model seen in
many schemes, Anderson offers split-level
apartments, three versions of the hostel
units, and one- and two-bedroom
apartments. Kitchens and wet areas are
treated as linear or block elements pushed
against a wall or inserted into a single space
to divide it into spatial zones. The scheme
has a clever stepped section that lets
sunlight penetrate deep into the building
in winter, while shading the glazed facades
in summer.
The third-placed scheme by Johannsen +
Associates is the most pragmatic and
buildable of the awarded projects. Its form
would sit comfortably with the other
speculative apartments that have begun to
appear in Northbridge. It also has the most
convincing integration of the historic shell
of Scruth’s Furniture Showroom, albeit
predominately as the backdrop to a cafe.
Typologically, it shares with other schemes
the strategy of separate perimeter and
walk-up apartment blocks.
In their commended scheme, Antarctica
Group propose a more radical interpretation
of these typologies and prioritize the
building’s role as an urban-scale object.
A projecting canopy and a void in the built
structure create a public space, a vertical
and horizontal chamfer to their version of
the perimeter apartment block. This
two-storey void is the location for weekend
markets or the over-spill of the adjacent
cafe. In the building, this “public corner” is
manifest as the communal lounges that link
the wings of the hostel accommodation. The
building proposes a nicely ambiguous
relationship with the urban condition – the
block’s articulated canopy engages with the
setback and form of the remaining built
fabric, while the perimeter block veers away
from a direct connection with the street.
The four-storey walk-up apartment building
is understated in the entry’s presentation.
Its modularity allows a variety of planning
arrangements, while the highly rational
planning promises future adaptability and
flexibility. The proposed limiting of on-site
parking means that Antarctica was liberated
from dealing with the spatially hungry
concerns of the car. However, the resulting
courtyard between the buildings is rendered
unconvincingly and the walk-up’s sunken
private gardens seem unappealing.
A humanist narrative organizes the
other commended scheme by Gresley Abas.
Vignettes of occupants’ lives reveal the
architects’ consideration of the scheme’s
eventual and hopefully multifarious
inhabitation. Hostel units can be adapted to
have shared or private facilities. Small
variations in bathroom, kitchen and balcony
arrangements provide individualized
hostel rooms, while the transition from
supported to independent living has an
architectural manifestation.
The thoughtful response of both the
profession and the academy to the
challenges of the brief gives a small glimpse
into the possibilities for the terrain vague of
our cities. In addition to these architectural
and urban propositions, the careful
consideration of the spaces created for
people on the margins of society reveals an
interest beyond the merely formal.
Hopefully the success of this exercise will
prompt the organizer and sponsors to
propose future experiments that offer young
and emerging practices, such as the ones
acknowledged in this competition, the
opportunity to implement their ideas in
built form.
PHILIP GOLDSWAIN IS A LECTURER IN
ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
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