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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | MATTER REVIEW Paul Walker
PHOTOGRAPHY Dianna Snape
| Cox Architects and Planners’ new building at Chisholm Institute’s Dandenong Campus juxtaposes a taut, abstract external skin with the insistent materiality of a remarkably robust interior. |
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Wall detail of the
massive concrete atrium
within the Access and
Language Building at
Chisholm Institute’s
Dandenong campus.
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The taut, translucent
southern and eastern
facades, as seen from
Stud Road at twilight.
The building functions
as a new “gateway” for
the campus.
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Looking
east along the cranked,
folded southern facade.
The main entrance in
the foreground, with an
artwork by Geoff Nees
with Studio 505.
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Eastern elevation,
facing Stud Road. The
effect of the facade
changes in response to
light conditions.
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The north-eastern
corner, with Building A
seen to the right. New
concrete walkways
connect to Building A’s
solid existing stair and
prefigure the texture
and weightiness of the
atrium inside.
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Looking along the
length of the atrium,
with its startling
concrete interior.
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The atrium at
ground level, with a
red ancillary space to
the left.
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The stair
extends the striking use
of concrete.
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One of
the general purpose
classrooms.
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Looking
down the stair.
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The new Access and Language building at the
Chisholm Institute of TAFE’s Dandenong campus in
Melbourne’s outer east has been devised to give the
institution a higher profile – an aspect it shares with
many keynote buildings constructed for suburban
TAFE and university campuses in the past decade.
The building sits lightly at Chisholm’s south-eastern
entry point on Stud Road, one of the endless arterial
roads in suburban Melbourne that problematize any
attempt to make “address”. Rising to this challenge
is a volume of glass and polycarbonate; transparent
and translucent walls projecting forward from the
rest of the eastern facade at the corner of the
building. When lit from the interior at night, it acts
as a lantern indicating the campus’s entry point.
Further signalling that the building is a special one,
the southern wall tilts back slightly at seven degrees.
Its surface is mostly translucent, glass at ground
floor, polycarbonate above, with windows spread
regularly across it. A diagonal fold across this
surface – straight across some of the windows, and a
diagonal shift in the plan – pulls the wall back to
vertical at the western end. Entry to the building is
protected by a recess at the south-western corner
and a projecting galvanized steel canopy fixed
matter-of-factly to the concrete above. This recess is
in some part a counter to the projecting lantern at the
other end of the building; a smaller lantern adjacent
to the entry is made by folding the translucent glass
of the adjacent wall around and down. On the
northern facade of the building, profiled galvanized
steel is the predominant material.
These first impressions of the building’s exterior
suggest that games are being played with shapes and
material conditions: a volume added here is
counterposed by a subtraction there; windows are
turned into a pattern across a wall that plays with
degrees of visual determinacy and indeterminacy;
the dominant translucency on one side of the
building is matched by opacity on the other;
qualities of the site topography and patterns of
access inflect the building form in plan and
elevation. The architecture here is made from
exploiting opportunities for formal invention,
rationalized as responses to the site and the client’s
expectations – explicit or tacit – for something
special. The material palette, however, does not
respond to anything in the site or the institution’s
existing buildings. Its range of translucent,
transparent and reflective effects is made possible
through a repertoire familiar from widely admired
contemporary mid-European architecture.
These impressions suggest that the building
invites us to consider it primarily in rather abstract
terms. But entering the building, things become
more complex and more concrete. Literally.
Concrete. Contrasting with the prevailing thin, taut
and precise materials of the exterior, the effect on
coming into the building is immediately one of
volume, weight, texture. An architecture that
engages touch rather than vision. The main entry
leads directly to an atrium rising through the
building’s three levels that, programmatically,
organizes all the building’s internal circulation.
But for the glass roof at the top, all its surfaces are
concrete. Doors, areas of carpet on the floor, ceilings
are detailed as circumstantial, delimited necessities,
not fundamental conditions. The concrete is
assertive in its weight and weightiness. Cast in situ,
walls and balcony corridor upstands are
calculatedly rough; formwork was apparently
manipulated to leave overt traces in the finished
wall as parts recede and project; worn ply was
sought out to give the walls an almost mannered
degree of incidental marking and wood grain. All
imperfections at junctions have been left. Both soft
and vaguely menacing, in some places the concrete
bulges out slightly. This was done by bowing some
of the formwork before the pour. More alarming still,
one of the atrium’s longitudinal walls pitches
inward at seven degrees, and sections of wall are
tilted further, permanently open hoppers for louvred
windows to the classrooms behind. The fiddling all
this required has, in a few details, disrupted the
insistently alien quality of things: the concrete
reception counter is a bit “Flintstones” and the
continuous recess at the base of the concrete walls
compromises the weightiness of the whole.
But it’s still quite amazing. A strange space,
memorable for its material immediacy, it is
intriguing for its insistent presence – like a big,
warm, shaggy creature, a semidomesticated animal.
It’s also a shocking contrast with the exterior of the
building. But the effect here is not just of two quite
distinct aesthetic registers juxtaposed. In particular,
the heavy inner building and the lightweight outer
together address ESD issues. The working spaces of
the building – classrooms, administration, staff
work areas – occupy the spaces between the light
claddings of the building exterior and the weight
of the atrium walls. Manual and automatic systems
manipulate window openings to the exterior and to
the atrium; openings at the top of the atrium allow
air movement to be encouraged when appropriate
and discouraged when the heat-sink effect of the
masses of concrete can be advantageously used.
Openings to the north are relatively few (a service
zone occupies much of that side of the building),
and to the west they are kept to an absolute
minimum. And so on – there is a range of passive
and active systems for intervention. Where
appropriate, spaces can be air-conditioned should
exterior noise be distracting.
The classroom spaces have the typical
anonymity of their kind. However, their location
between the rather eccentric exterior and the even
more idiosyncratic interior architecture of the
building means that each has a degree of
individuality – shape and fenestration are not
repeated. Some are connected by wide double doors
or folding walls to offer opportunities for different
class configurations and sizes. Break-out spaces are
at knuckles in the cranked plan, lined with coloured
rubber laid over the concrete. One disappointment
of the rooms to the south is that the overall
transparency/translucency suggested from the
exterior is not maintained from the interior. The
exterior cladding turns out to be an outer skin. Its
corresponding inner is compromised by the need to
prevent fire spread from level to level. But this
double cladding system gives further opportunities
to orchestrate environmental performance.
To the north of the building is a lawn with a few
mature eucalypts in a courtyard created between the
new building and one of the campus’s original
buildings. This is Building A, in the banal but robust
public works manner of a generation ago. It contains
Chisholm’s auditorium. The new exterior space
suggests that the ground level spaces in A could be
advantageously reconfigured to exploit their new
southern outlook; this would enliven the space.
Apparently these possibilities are being investigated.
The new building is organized to make further
programmatic connections. At the western end of
the ground floor, two seminar rooms with wide
sliding doors to a terrace shaded by the projecting
first floor above can be used in conjunction with
activities in A’s auditorium. Concrete walkways
from each level of the new building – their precast
panels repeating the wilfulness of the building’s
interior concrete work – link to one of the exterior
staircases that project from A’s south. It’s
inexplicably massive, and the new bridges to it help
make visual sense of its scale.
Through these physical gestures and the
possibilities built into how it might be used, the
new building acknowledges conditions established
and implicit in the existing fabric of the Chisholm
campus. I admire this building very much for its
ability to be itself while accommodating the patterns
and opportunities embedded in its context. In its
material and formal language it is very different
from another notable building on the campus, a
design by Corrigan on the other side of A. But it is
similar in being both neighbourly and assertively
itself. A pity more buildings do not understand so
astutely that context and self-confidence are not
mutually exclusive.
DR PAUL WALKER IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE.
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ACCESS AND
LANGUAGE
BUILDING,
CHISHOLM
INSTITUTE OF TAFE
Architect Cox
Architects and Planners
—project team Philip
Rowe, Marc Raszewski,
Fred Chaney, Patrick
Ness, Brendan Le Var,
Josephine Evans,
Charity Edwards, Sadie
Looslie. Project
manager Burns Bridge
Australia. Builder
Adco Constructions.
Structural and civil
engineer Robert Bird
& Partners. Quantity
surveyor Wilde &
Woollard. Services and
ESD engineer Wood
& Grieve Engineers.
Acoustic engineer
Marshall Day Acoustics.
Building surveyor
Philip Chun &
Associates. Landscape
design Cox Architects
and Planners. Client
Chisholm Institute.
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Copyright © 2010 Architecture Media Pty Ltd
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