A disused warehouse in Sydney’s Chippendale could soon be home to an architecture gallery, under plans for its transformation designed by Smart Design Studio.
The warehouse will be topped with a distinctive new roof to be made from an innovative, self-supporting Gaussian vault structure, that will hover over a column-free space below.
The project to adaptively reuse existing building 16-18 Meagher Street is instigated by investment trader Rob Keldoulis. Two floors of the proposed development will be used as a studio and workspace for his wife Tobi Wilkinson, an artist and photographer.
The roof of the proposed building will be an innovative Gaussian vault structure.
“This left us with the entire ground floor and the question of how best to use it. William [Smart, founder of Smart Design Studio] suggested the idea of an architectural gallery as very few, if any, presently exist,” Keldoulis and Wilkinson wrote, in a letter to the City of Sydney.
Smart Design Studio’s proposal will physically and visually open up the existing warehouse to the street. The surviving timber beams of the ground floor space, which have been aggressively sandblasted and irreversibly damaged, will be painted to increase the level of light reflectivity in new gallery space.
The proposed Gaussian vault roof structure will be supported on tapered columns to all four sides of the existing building.
Landscape architects Secret Garden will also create gardens on each of the building’s four corner terraces.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
