 | EDO Individual expression within the communal
– Stanisic Associates’ latest allows one
of the pleasures of suburban living within
a compact urban environment.
PHOTOGRAPHY Patrick Bingham-Hall, Brett Boardman
REVIEW Tom Heneghan
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The individually
controllable louvre
screens animate the
facade and give a sense
of space within the
overall structure.
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Looking along
the grid-facade, which
hovers above the
ground plane.
Photographs Patrick
Bingham-Hall.
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Looking down
the narrow space
of the apartment.
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The apartment
plan is opened up
through the use of
sliding screen walls.
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The neatly
planned living area
of an apartment.
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The inner-city
apartment balcony.
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The bedroom
area is tucked behind
a sliding screen wall
that can be opened
up to the living space.
Photographs
Brett Boardman.
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Looking along
the upper interior
corridor that is lined
with marble.
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An oblique view
of the eastern facade.
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The communal
gallery on the eastern
side of the building
has the quality of a
wintergarden with the
glass louvres opening
onto the small garden
outside.
Photographs
Patrick Bingham-Hall.
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An important shift is taking place in contemporary
architectural practice, one which the RAIA awards
programmes at both state and national levels are
beginning to recognize. Over the last few years a number
of medium-density projects have won major awards for
residential architecture in categories that had previously
acknowledged only the design of individual houses.
In 2003 the NSW jury, recognizing the immense
and growing importance of collective housing and its
influence on the quality of the urban environment,
awarded “twin” Wilkinson Awards – one to the rural,
isolated, Toumbaal Plains House by Fergus Scott, and
one to Mondrian by Frank Stanisic, a city-centre housing
development of mid-price-level apartments of an
elegance and invention that profoundly raised the bar.
In Sydney – a city of burgeoning population and
high land values – and in the environmental situation
in which we now find ourselves, the apartment building,
rather than the single house on the quarter-acre block,
must increasingly become the appropriate residential
type – even outside those areas that pass for the city’s
urban centres. In order to maintain relevance, architects
must increasingly address the issue of collective living –
a concern that has been neglected in recent decades, but
which transfixed the architects of early and mid-period
Modernism, although their successes in that area, it must
be said, were few.
Housing of international quality has arisen in recent
years, designed by some of the city’s finest architects and
visitors – for example, Horizon, Moore Park Gardens,
Altair, Walsh Bay, Victoria Park, META, Aurora Place, and
Stanisic’s many lauded and awarded projects throughout
the city. Of these, Mondrian was a landmark, showing
how, through the architect’s ambition and ingenuity,
quality can be achieved within the restrictions of a
mid-range commercial budget. It offered cross-ventilated
units with balconies of exceptional size, shaded by
sliding louvres – in tune with the particular conditions
and styles of life in sunny Sydney. It helped establish
the “look” of contemporary Sydney apartment living,
and its many derivatives, by other hands, no matter how
weak, attest to its positive influence. But perhaps its most
significant contribution to debate was its site-specificity.
It incorporated an existing pedestrian public route into
its variety of linked, shared garden spaces, binding the
building to its context – making it part of the fabric
of its city, not merely a collection of objects on a plot.
As Sydney expands and densifies, such an urbanistic
approach to individual architectural projects is
increasingly important.
The parallel issue of the manner in which housing
may define the contemporary urban streetscape is
addressed by Stanisic in his recent project, EDO, where
he investigates a prototypical response to constricted
city-centre sites. Here, his intention is less the creation
of a site-specific work than the creation of an exemplar.
We now so esteem the individualist icons of the
international “starchitects” that it is easy to forget that
many of the world’s most significant architects – from John
Nash to Le Corbusier to Team X to Christopher Alexander
– focused on the creation of exemplars that informed the
collective, and that it is through the application of a refined,
consensual orthodoxy – a typology – that cities obtain
their coherence and quality. Stanisic’s contribution at EDO
is an essential and timely experiment in contemporary
living and urban decorum. One wonders what the impact
on the city would be were EDO to become – as it should
– the reference point for all new medium-density housing
developments across Sydney.
On a long, narrow, north–south plot, addressing
a busy street scene of no distinction – that is, a typical
Sydney city-centre context – Stanisic composes 31
apartments of five different types and sizes over four
floors, behind a unifying grid-facade, which floats above
a recessed base. The grid gives order to the facade, but
also gives an intentional ambiguity – the considerable cantilever implies the lightness of steel construction,
and the crisp metallic framing around the balconies
contributes to this misreading of the in-situ concrete.
This steelwork, in fact, provides the housing and
tracking for individually controllable louvre screens,
giving each balcony innumerable possible degrees of
differing enclosure or exposure – from being a clearly
separate external space to being the enclosed, most
naturally ventilated section of the living room, with
which, cleverly detailed, it shares its floor-level. The
differently tuned screens of each balcony, together
with the slightly altered structural grid and roll-out
canopies of the top floor terraces, give this apparently
very simply ordered building a rich, animated “flicker” as its character oscillates between the formal and
the jaunty.
The building has a linear central section which
elegantly provides for the essentials of habitation.
This has an attached cushioning layer of external space
on each side – individual balconies to the west, and
to the east, the rear, a tall, communal gallery from which
the lower two floors of apartments are accessed. This
gallery, which faces into a small but very well-landscaped
private garden, is only semi-enclosed by widely spaced
horizontal glass louvres, giving it the character of
a wintergarden. This is effectively an external space,
of a scale and width to invite casual use and children’s
play, which permits the apartments that open from
it to take natural ventilation from both sides. On the
top two floors, the apartments are accessed by a more
conventional corridor at third-floor level, opening
to double-fronted apartments to the west and to
double-storey apartments, entered from the east, which
wrap over the corridor to give the principal rooms and
their canopied terraces panoramic western views over
the Domain and the CBD. Within the unifying system
of the building envelope there is a flexibility that enables
the bringing together of very different, prototypical
apartment layouts, in which the central criterion is the
provision of natural ventilation.
The apartments are meticulously planned, with an
easy sophistication. Interior space in this inner-city site
is at a premium, and Stanisic, as he has done with some
previous works, enables the “tuning” of the smallest
interiors by the use of sliding translucent screen walls
that subdivide the space into bed and living spaces, or
allow it to be opened up and perceived as one.
A consistent language of additive detailing unites
all parts of the building, at all scales – from the approach,
where one “slides” into the entrance behind a glass screen
that is applied to the facade, to the way the drawers and
doors are designed to “float” within the carcasses of the
kitchen furniture. And in the general neutrality of the
whole, simple, often silent materials are invited to “speak” eloquently – the apparently dense, though not actual,
timber that lines the elevator lobbies, the marble sheets
that line one side of the upper, interior corridor, and
the surprisingly eloquent simple repetitive perforation
patterns of the sound-absorbing panels that are attached
slab soffits.
Despite the fineness of its aesthetic, the design of
EDO is driven by use, not by appearance. In electing for
– or being obliged to accept – apartment dwelling, the
sense of identity and territory, which Australians have
found so appealing in the quarter-acre block, is forfeited.
Mondrian, for all its qualities, presented no particular
solutions to this dilemma. But it is in this that EDO is
most innovative. Although the apartments are generally
narrower – and more “urban” – than those of Mondrian,
the very significant adjustments that each resident
can make to their interior layout and balcony, and to
the ways that both are perceived, provide a significant
sense of individual identity within the collective, and
a sense of self-determination and control of one’s own
residential environment.
Stanisic is arguably Sydney’s most notable current
exponent of collective housing design, despite this
representing only 18 percent of his office’s regular
workload. EDO is an eloquent exposition of his
understanding of this building type and its budgeting,
and of his ability to exploit the potential – not the
loopholes! – of its particular legislation. The filigree
motorized balcony screening, which can so very
dramatically transform the sense of space of each
apartment, merely modifies sunlight and privacy, and,
to a degree, wind, but the balcony is at all times external
space – never in conflict with the planning allowance
– and offers residents a usable living space far larger than
the interior area they have paid for. It’s the same with the
“wintergarden” access gallery, which, despite the qualities
it contributes to the residential experience, is in fact only
a modified external environment.
EDO demonstrates a rare cleverness, ingenuity and ambition in the provision of collective housing and a vision for its place in the contemporary urban streetscape.
Tom Heneghan is professor of architecture at the University of Sydney.
EDO, WOOLLOOMOOLOO
Architect
Stanisic Associates—
project director Frank Stanisic;
project architect Rob Harper, Damien Madell;
project team Peter Rush, Stefan Meissner.
Landscape architects
Aspect Sydney.
Public artist
Peter McGregor.
Structural engineer
SCP Consulting.
Electrical, mechanical and hydraulic consultants
IT+C Consulting.
BCA/certifier
DLM.
Builder
TQM Design + Construct.
Client
Buildcorp.
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