 | HOUSING STUDENTS Tight budgets, constrained sites and minimal spaces. Student apartment buildings by Hayball Leonard Stent eke architectural potential out of difficult briefs and prosaic construction methods.
REVIEW Clare Newton, David Pryor
PHOTOGRAPHY Peter Clarke, Dianna Snape
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Highly articulated
facades squeeze every
possible opportunity out
of budget construction
techniques.
Barry
Street’s lightweight
rooftop extension gives
a sense of depth to the
building skin.
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The
Leicester Street facade
is a chequerboard of
wall and window void.
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The Earl Street
apartments’ hit-and-miss
mosaic of wall and
void.
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Corner
balconies at Global
House.
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The gaps in
the concrete cladding
become fissures in the
Vale Street facade.
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Bauatelier Gropius
photographed in
1927–28 by Edmund
Collein. Walter
Gropius’s students tease
him about his advocacy
of minimal living.
Courtesy Gallery
Kicken, Berlin.
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Interior of a standard
student apartment.
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The communal court
between the Barry Street
and Leicester Street
buildings.
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The foyer
at Barry Street provides
a space for chance
social encounters.
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Detail of the
balconies of the Vale
Street facade.
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Detail
of the ground-level
facade of Earl Street,
showing variation in
colour and textures.
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Load-bearing
apartments rise above a
raked glass wall at
Leicester Street.
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The
entry to Global House.
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Between the campuses of RMIT and the University
of Melbourne, student housing has been sprouting
like polyps. Exploiting the new market for
international student accommodation, the low-cost
apartment blocks which now line Swanston Street
give little support for that street’s role as Melbourne’s
civic spine. But a suite of smaller buildings nestle
politely among the laneways of south Carlton,
rubbing shoulders with a mix of brick warehouses,
vacant lots and terrace houses. Six of the best
examples are by Hayball Leonard Stent (HLS).
Student housing is distinct from the typical
apartment market in demanding very low cost and
remarkably little space. The students who buy or
rent these apartments don’t drive cars and many
don’t bring their own linen or appliances, let alone
furniture. Dispensation to reduce normal town
planning requirements has been awarded on the
basis of sole use by students, the provision of
communal space and a management programme.
The students are not eligible for on-street car
parking permits.
Each apartment is minute and contains a tiny
bathroom, a kitchenette, a cupboard, a single bed
and a desk in a footprint of between sixteen and
eighteen square metres. To help compensate for the
lack of living space, a communal area is provided.
Built for around $2,600 per square metre, these are
low-cost buildings given the ratio of wet to dry
areas. The market-driven minimal brief is functional
rather than inspirational and is not conducive to
producing architectural masterpieces. But Hayball
Leonard Stent has developed a series of sound
design strategies to mould their initial yield studies
into worthy architecture. These strategies can be
characterized as construction, facade composition,
materiality and the design process.
Tom Jordan from HLS explained how the firm
uses construction constraints to generate design
ideas. At schematic design stage, HLS works with a
quantity surveyor and sometimes a builder to
complete a cost-benefit study, determining the most
efficient construction methods for the specific site.
On a vacant site with good access, cost constraints
would typically indicate precast concrete walls
supporting concrete floors. To avoid the cost of band
beams and minimize slab depth, every second
internal wall is concrete. Avoiding the cost of
scaffolding, external walls are pre-finished. The
floor-to-floor height is just 2,700 mm. Plenums bring
the ceiling height in the corridors down to 2,300 mm
but otherwise these buildings are serviced through
multiple risers. Precast panels need to be small to be
manoeuvred by mobile cranes, and the scale of these
elements has proven conducive to a range of facade
compositions. This is illustrated in the Earl Street,
Vale Street and Leicester Street projects. Other site
and time constraints dictate different construction
methods. For example, Barry Street involves a
rooftop extension to an existing building and so here
the architects explored lightweight construction,
fabricated off-site into large panels. The landlocked
site where Global Apartments has been built could
not accommodate even a mobile crane and so
scaffolding was used in this instance along with
lightweight cladding.
An efficient documentation process supports the
construction strategy. Working drawings are ordered
to suit the needs of trades, with the fitout documents
kept separate from the shell construction.
Designs have been driven by construction
methodology within a modernist sensibility. The
architects have panelized the facade into a
chequerboard of wall and window void hovering
over an articulated ground-storey plinth. Windows
are treated as gaps rather than holes punched into
the already small panels, while airconditioning
vents are thoughtfully formalized into each facade
design. Cladding materials have been left raw rather
than re-finished with paints.
Wall panels are distributed to camouflage the
regularity of the apartment plan behind. Within this
simple premise, the series of buildings demonstrates
a variety of facade compositions. Earl Street and
Leicester Street both use a hit-and-miss mosaic of
wall and void, whereas at Vale Street the gaps
become fissures through the facade.
Each design layout and construction premise is
robust and able to be argued in terms of cost. The
architects have managed to subvert the appearance
of a bottom-line-driven design through the
development of highly articulated facades and
generous entries. Sunshades and balustrades
provide a secondary layering system. Windows are
recessed and panels folded or splayed to give the
appearance of wall depth. Ironically, it is Barry
Street, with the thinnest facade system, that
achieves the greatest sense of depth. Like a
Halloween pumpkin, the balconies appear to be
carved through a solid object. Two-tone Alucobond
panelling alludes to the pumpkin’s skin and
overcomes the normally monotonous finish of this
cladding material. Facade geometries are carried
into the public areas of the building. In Barry Street,
the entry area makes use of the brickwork and
chamfered geometry that distinguish the existing
building, while brick red is abstracted into bright
red elements that punctuate the interior. At Global
House the splayed facade is seen again in the
reception desk.
The repetitive apartment plan diminishes
expressive opportunities. The architects grab at the
small opportunity offered at each corner, pulling the
units into the corridor space to create a corner
balcony. They celebrate the ground floor. In Earl
Street, the ground level, with its reception and
common area, is a robust plinth composed of
rusticated concrete, steel beams and coloured
pressed cement tiles. In Leicester Street, the
load-bearing apartments float above a raked glass
wall, which cleverly camouflages fire boosters and a
garage door alongside the entry and a shopfront.
Such subtleties can easily get compromised as the
building goes through the perils of tendering and
construction. HLS takes steps to safeguard the
design, making allowances in the initial yield study
and ensuring that crucial design elements are locked
in to the planning permit.
The rigorous deployment of these strategies has
resulted in a family of projects which collectively
start to influence urban character between the
universities. This coherence is reinforced by the
consistent scale of the buildings. Typically about six
stories high by six units wide and slightly taller than
its width, the scale of each elevation lends itself to a
well-proportioned composition.
The apartments are smaller and meaner than
Australian residents are accustomed to. Minimal
dwellings have been popular in other places and
times – in 1929, the second CIAM congress
advocated “Existenzminimum”, or the minimal
dwelling, as a societal good. And in today’s context,
student housing uses commendably minimal
resources as well as supporting sustainable modes
of transport. But what happens when the
international students go elsewhere? HLS has
ensured a level of adaptability by making every
second dividing wall non-load-bearing, so that two
units could be consolidated into one, but this is of
little benefit if the two units have different owners.
A concern is that this building type is intrinsically
unadaptable because its occupants are limited to
students. A further problem for all strata apartments,
but particularly for low-cost apartments, is the
negotiation of major upgrades as the building ages.
Each student room is nominally self-sufficient.
This means it can be strata-titled and sold. It also
means that, unlike in a college, students can easily
become isolated. Communal spaces are therefore
very important. In addition to lounges and roof
decks, most of these projects offer incidental spaces
where students might pause to chat. At Barry Street,
for example, the stair lobbies are among the most
attractive spaces in the building, while chance
encounters are encouraged at Earl Street by locating
the letterboxes in the communal lounge. With
around eighty to a hundred residents each, the
developments generate enough activity to animate
the common areas without overwhelming the
individual resident in a crowd of strangers.
These buildings are within viewing distance of
each other and HLS has enjoyed developing a
common language for the group while reflecting the
possibilities of each situation. They contribute to the
urban landscape by invigorating disused and
potentially threatening laneways. One wonders,
however, if the sensitivity and delight explored by
the architects within the facade design might also
have been carried into the apartments themselves.
Effectively, this dwelling type is caravan-sized but
without the ingenuity of collapsible furniture and
transformable spaces.
DAVID PRYOR IS A SENIOR ARCHITECT/URBAN DESIGNER AT
THE CITY OF MELBOURNE. CLARE NEWTON IS A SENIOR
LECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
MELBOURNE.
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STUDENT HOUSING,
MELBOURNE
Architect Hayball
Leonard Stent—project
teams Len Hayball, Rob
Stent, Tom Jordan,
Sarah Buckeridge, Luc
Baldi, John Hair, Daniel
Khong, David Jessup,
Nick Williams, Toby
Earle, Gosia Gabrys.
Photography credits
01, 04, 07, 08, 09, 13
Dianna Snape. 03, 05,
10, 11 Peter Clarke.
02, 12 Ian Rooney,
Hayball Leonard Stent.
06 Edmund Collein.
Silver gelatin print,
printed 1985. Copyright
Rudolf Kicken Galerie,
Cologne.
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