Evelyn Reynolds

A new cultural hub celebrating Jewish life and culture will be built in Elsternwick, under ambitious plans revealed by a number of Melbourne’s key Jewish institutions.
The Jewish Arts Quarter will be centred around a new eight-storey building at 7 Selwyn Street designed by Melbourne’s Mclldowie Partners that will bring together the Jewish Museum of Australia and the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre and National Library, along with performing arts and co-working spaces.

The building will be woven into an existing precinct that includes the Jewish Holocaust Centre, Sholem Aleichem College and Classic Cinemas, and will “shine as a beacon” to the Australian Jewish experience and to social connection and cohesion in Melbourne.
“The ability to rejoice in the widest range of arts and culture will encourage everyone that visits the quarter to appreciate and gain a better understanding of what we can offer – especially as we emerge from these challenging times,” said Barry Fradkin, president of the Jewish Museum of Australia: Gandel Centre of Judaica.

Mclldowie Partners’ design for the eight-storey Jewish Arts Quarter building is defined by a deliberate division between podium and tower, with the podium housing the museum and co-working spaces occupying the tower.

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Jewish Arts Quarter by Mclldowie Partners.

“The podium aims to respond to the existing rhythm of Selwyn Street by sitting in direct alignment with its neighbours, particularly the Jewish Holocaust Centre to the north,” the architects state in a design report.
“The design draws on horizontal references from both the Holocaust Museum and Classic Cinema which breaks down the facade so that it responds intimately with the human scale of the street.”
“The highly textured concrete of the podium has a material richness and patina that reflect the passing of time. A series of curved panels peel away from the facade, a playful invitation to the museum beyond, akin to opening the pages of a book or the calligraphic quality of Jewish written language.”

Along with permanent and temporary exhibition spaces for the museum, the podium will house learning spaces for school groups, adult education classes and public programs, a museum shop and a café serving contemporary Jewish cuisine at ground level.
In the basement, a multipurpose performing arts venue will accommodate up to 300 for theatre, dance, music and comedy performances along with lectures and other community uses.
The tower, setback from the street and the neighbouring apartment building, has its top corners lifted, “as if peeled to match the sculptural quality of the podium below.”

It is fully glazed to the east to provide natural light to the office spaces, and clad in a veiled metal screen on its other facades. “The design expresses, in its facade, the building’s civic and cultural value, whilst considering its immediate and broader context,” state the architects.
Though the project is yet to go before council, it is supported in principle by the Victorian government and the Glen Eira City Council.
“The Jewish Arts Quarter offers a wonderful opportunity for the wider community to come together – regardless of race or religion – to celebrate the rich Jewish culture that is so much a part of Elsternwick and Glen Eira,” said mayor Margaret Esakoff. “It will provide a welcoming space for everyone to celebrate Jewish life, culture, food, arts and music.” More

Construction is underway at the Meadowbank Education Precinct in north-west Sydney, a major project which will replace the existing Meadowbank Public School and Marsden High School.
Designed by Woods Bagot, the precinct will cater to 1,000 primary students, 1,500 secondary students and 120 intensive English language students.
The school facilities are being built on a spacious corner block that is home to around 275 existing trees, and the design is based around a concept of “learning in the landscape.”

“The specific site context and analysis developed an instinctual connection with the mature landscape and tree canopies that occupy large portions of the proposed site,” Woods Bagot’s design report states. “This has resulted in proposing [buildings] that enhance connections with nature and maximize outdoor learning and play opportunities.”

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The high school entrance at Meadowbank Education Precinct by Woods Bagot.

Classrooms will be divided across two five-storey buildings, with the primary school taking up the three lower levels of the northern building facing Rhodes Street and the high school occupying the remaining two levels, plus all five levels within the southern building.

The northern building accommodates general learning spaces for the high school, while the southern building features specialized hubs and the gymnasium.
A tiered landscape-covered building will connect the two schools, housing the Primary School Library and High School Library. “Consisting of mezzanine levels, voids and direct access to the central landscape this space forms the heart of the building, the educational glue where students from various years come together interact and collaborate,” Woods Bagot states.
This central building forms a hill of sorts, with the landscape extending upwards and reaching every level of the adjacent buildings, so that “where possible every available surface can be used as space for learning and play.”
Internally, a “tartan” grid structure allows for flexible learning spaces, with the grid expanding and contracting as the program changes throughout the building.
The school project is expected to be completed by 2022.
TAFE NSW Meadowbank

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Multi-Trades and Digital Technology Hub by Gray Puksand.

Next to the school precinct is the Meadowbank TAFE campus, which will also undergo a major revitalization to designs by Gray Puksand, currently under consideration.
The major part of the project is a new Multi-Trades and Digital Technology Hub that will house a combined Construction and Building Trades facility with an Information and Communications Technology/Cyber Security facility.
Gray Puksand describes its design for the hub as a “true building in the round,” in which each of the four facades actively respond to their context.
“The design presents unashamedly as a public building adding to the streetscape in an harmonious juxtaposition to the residential neighbours,” the design report states. More

After 3,000 people in nine public housing towers in Melbourne were placed under the harshest coronavirus lockdown in Australia so far, acting Australian Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly referred to the towers on 5 July as “vertical cruise ships.” The statement was a reference to the danger of contagion in these overcrowded buildings. However, such terms play into a long, international history of vilifying public housing estates.
Legions of social housing towers, such as Pruitt Igoe in St Louis and the Gorbals Public Housing Estate in Glasgow, have been demolished since the early 1970s after being blamed for a wide range of social issues. But high density is not the problem. It is the way such buildings are designed, maintained and funded.

Blaming specific built forms distracts attention from decades of under-investment in social housing. The result has been tightly rationed, poorly insulated, deteriorating and overcrowded housing. Much of it is due for retrofitting or renewal.

In this article we discuss successful, safe and sustainable models of retrofitting social housing blocks.
Are public housing towers obsolete?
Most high-rise public housing estates across Melbourne (and indeed internationally) were built during the “golden age” of public housing. This era began after the second world war and lasted until the 1970s. More than 60% of Victoria’s housing stock is over 35 years old. Much of it is in need of retrofit or renewal – it is impossible to ignore this looming requirement.
However, government responses thus far have been to allow the towers to quietly decay or to demolish towers while transferring public land to private ownership with nominal increases in social housing. One in five public housing tenants live in dwellings that do not meet acceptable standards in Australia.
An alternative to demolition
The Architects Journal of the United Kingdom is advocating retrofitting of ageing housing stock because of its many social, economic and environmental benefits. We agree with this in many cases.
The substantial embodied energy in a salvageable building makes its destruction environmentally wasteful. Re-use also reduces the social displacement that occurs with demolition. And when the full cost of demolition is calculated, Anne Power and others have shown retrofits are cost-effective.
The Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017 put a spotlight on retrofit strategies. It exposed some of the broader tensions regarding repair and maintenance versus merely over-cladding to meet environmental targets or remove “eyesores” and aid neighbourhood gentrification.
Three shining examples of retrofits
Grand Parc Bordeaux
Grand Parc Bordeaux received the 2019 Mies van der Rohe Award, an annual European Union architecture prize. This transformation of three 1960s social housing blocks included the restoration and retrofitting of 530 apartments.
The project added deep winter gardens and open air balconies to the façade of each dwelling. Expansive glass sliding doors open from the apartments to the balconies.
Prefabrication of balcony modules enabled residents to stay in their apartments throughout construction. This approach avoided the large-scale displacement often associated with social housing renewal. The modules were crane-lifted into place, forming a free-standing structure in front of the housing block.
The retrofit also replaced lifts and renovated access halls.
DeFlat Kleiburg, Amsterdam
DeFlat Kleiburg by NL Architects and XVW Architectuur won the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2017. This project is a retrofit of one of the largest housing blocks in the Netherlands, which was at risk of demolition.
The architects oversaw the refurbishment of the structure and communal areas. The project left an empty affordable shell for buyers to customise as they wished.
Park Hill Estate, Sheffield
In the United Kingdom, Sheffield City Council is undertaking a part-privatisation scheme with developer Urban Splash of the contentious Park Hill Estate. The late-1950s social housing blocks are being gutted to their concrete shells and new apartments developed within.
Architects Hawkins/Brown and urban designers Studio Egret West designed phase one. Mikhail Riches designed phase two, which is under way.
The project involves a significant change in tenure to a mix of one-third social to two-thirds private.
Public housing estates are part of a system
The above examples reflect architectural approaches to preserving brutalist architecture. However, architecture is just one part of any social housing response. In Australia, any retrofit or redevelopment should aim to retain or increase the amount of social housing, given the huge shortfall.
Vienna, Austria, has one of the most successful social housing systems in the world. Over 60% of the city’s population live in social housing and have strong tenancy rights. Robust funding mechanisms supply and maintain access to affordable and high-quality housing.

The government funds about a quarter to a third of all housing in Vienna each year – up to 15,000 apartments a year. Most subsidies are in the form of repayable, long-term, low-interest loans to build new housing. The decade-long operation of the system means repaid loans can be used to finance new construction, decreasing the budgetary burden.

A developer competition process was introduced in the 1990s to judge social housing bids. This means developers vie with each other to offer high-quality, energy-efficient homes.

For social housing to work, it must provide enough stock to meet housing needs. It must also receive enough funding to manage and maintain the housing.
Recent events have highlighted what multiple reports, commentaries and protest movements have been saying for years: Australia’s ageing social housing stock requires immediate attention. Australians need much more new social housing.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. More

The Australian Institute of Architects has told an Australian parliamentary inquiry that the Australian War Memorial’s controversial redevelopment plans should be reconsidered.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works invited the Institute to give evidence on the $498 million project to redevelop the war memorial, which would include the demolition of Anzac Hall, designed by Denton Corker Marshall.
On 14 July, Institute CEO Julia Cambage told the committee in her opening statement, “What we oppose is the wasteful and unnecessary destruction of Anzac Hall.” She also stressed the Institute is not alone in its view. The committee heard that the project has received a record number of submissions, around 80 percent of which oppose the project, among them historians, distinguished Australians and veterans.

The Institute has long campaigned to stop the proposed demolition of Anzac Hall, the winner of the 2005 Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture, but its efforts have been met with disdain from the Australian War Memorial.

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The existing Anzac Hall by Denton Corker Marshall.
Image: Denton Corker Marshall
“Disappointingly, representatives of the memorial have sought to belittle the Institute’s concerns,” Cambage told the committee.
She said the Australian War Memorial has portrayed the issue as a binary debate between the award winning status of Anzac Hall and the need for more gallery space to reflect Australia’s involvement in modern conflicts and peace keeping efforts.
The Institute told the committee the project has had “clear and numerous failures of due process.” Namely, that the moral rights holders (Denton Corker Marshall) and the Institute were not initially consulted before the decision to demolish Anzac Hall; that the redevelopment plans contravene the Heritage Management Plan for the memorial; and that the referral of the redevelopment plans to the department did not sufficiently address the heritage impacts of the proposal.

“When other significant public institutions have embarked on journeys of expansion and redevelopment, such as the National Gallery, they have engaged openly and constructively with our organisation and many others to achieve the best outcomes for the Australian community,” Cambage said.”
“Had we been consulted, the Institute could have provided expert assistance in the conduct of best practice design competition to creatively explore further options identified in the Preliminary Design stage, which would have supported the retention of Anzac Hall.”
The Institute commissioned an independent heritage report from Ashley Built Heritage, whose principal Geoff Ashley also gave evidence to the committee.
The report found the proposal would have “significant heritage impacts arising from the bulk, scale and location of the new work such that further detail and minor modification would not remove that significant impact.”

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A proposed glazed link between the existing building a new Anzac Hall designed by Cox Architecture.

In its submission to the committee, the Institute also stated, “The AWM heritage listings already acknowledge the contribution of Anzac Hall to the precinct. Given time, it is extremely likely that Anzac Hall would obtain a direct heritage listing in its own right.”
“The current and pending AWM Heritage Management Plan’s (2011 and 2019) also recognize the importance of Anzac Hall to the AWM Campbell precinct and require that Anzac Hall be retained and conserved.”
The Institute also expressed concerns that the procurement of a design for the redevelopment did not consider the retention of Anzac Hall.

“The Institute is extremely disappointed that not only did the Reference Design significantly constrain the usual creative competition design processes, it lost the opportunity to creatively explore further options identified in the Preliminary Design stage, which would have supported the retention of Anzac Hall,” it said in its submission.
“We have been told by some Institute members that they did not submit an EOI on the basis that they were restrained by the EOI requirements.”

Institute representatives also told the committee, “This is a project worthy of a genuine design competition that strives to find the best solution that supports the future of [the Australian War Memorial].”
“Our key concern is that due process hadn’t been followed,” said immediate past national president Clare Cousins, warning that if the redevelopment plans were allowed to proceed, it would set “very dangerous precedent” for Australia’s most import public institutions. More

The NSW government has approved the proposed Victoria Cross integrated station development, paving the way for North Sydney’s tallest tower.
Bates Smart is the design architect for the above-station office tower, which will rise to 42-storeys, along with the three-storey retail precinct.
Cox Architecture is designing the station and Aspect Studios is designing the public domain.
Planning minister Rob Stokes announced the development’s approval on 8 July, noting that the excavation of the metro and service tunnels was complete.

Along with the 42-storey office tower, the development includes a community hub, a pedestrian link from the station plaza to Denison Street and “almost 1,300 square metres” of new public open space.

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The Victoria Cross integrated station development.
Image: Bates Smart
“The integrated station development at the new Victoria Cross Metro Station will double the available public open space near the tower and create a continuous ‘civic green spine’ along Miller Street, with landscaped terraces, outdoor dining, casual seating areas and pedestrian paths,” Stokes said.

“North Sydney is already a strong commercial hub for Greater Sydney and this project will provide a much-needed boost, injecting $315 million into the economy and creating between 400-600 construction jobs to deliver the over station development.”
Station fit-out works on the Victoria Cross Metro Station are scheduled to commence in early 2021 and the the tower is expected to be finished by mid-2024.
The development had its assessment fast-tracked as part of the government’s Planning System Acceleration Program. It was part of the third tranche of fast-tracked projects, which included 19 major developments totalling $4.7 billion in value.

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A 14-storey apartment tower will be built behind the preserved façade of the Old Burleigh Theatre Arcade on the Gold Coast, under plans by Conrad Gargett now before the local council.
The historic red brick building dates back to 1930, when it was built as the De Luxe Theatre, a picture theatre and dance hall. It was remodelled in 1954 after it was substantially destroyed by a cyclone and again in the mid 1970s, when it was converted into an arcade with shops, restaurants and offices.

It was placed on the local heritage register in 2019 following public outcry after developer Weiya Holdings purchased the site for $18.5 million and revealed plans to redevelop it. However, it was rejected for state heritage listing, with the Queensland Heritage Council pointing to the substantial changes made to the building over the years.
Conrad Gargett’s design calls for the conservation and adaptive reuse of the front “book end” of the Old Burleigh Theatre Arcade but will see the demolition of some 1950s and 1970s sections of the building, along with relatively recent ground floor shop fronts and some internal partition walls.

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The colonnade and new public entry viewed from Gold Coast Highway to the west.

“We’re trying to find that happy medium between the conservation of what’s important fabric and creating a building that is of its place in Burleigh,” Conrad Gargett director John Flynn told the ABC.
The new development will include 36 residential units – broken down into 10 four-bedroom, 17 three-bedroom, and eight two-bedroom units, in addition to a single one-bedroom unit – along with 472 square metres of retail space on the ground floor, and three basement levels for carparking.

The former landmark theatre sign on the front Goodwin Terrace façade will be recreated, and new brick engaged piers along the western elevation will reference the rhythm of the piers proposed for demolition.

“Interpretive displays are also proposed to convey the history, stories, key themes and phases in the life of the place as a key part of Burleigh’s and the Gold Coast’s culture and heritage,” development application states. “These proposed displays would use a combination of photos, film, physical models and display of 1950s artefacts from the rear ‘bookend’ apartment.”
The former 1950s-style shopfronts will be referenced in the design of the new shopfronts, with the arcade entrance to be fitted with concertina timber-framed doors.
The development will sit next to a planned light rail station connecting Broadbeach to Burleigh Heads due to be constructed by 2023. More

The historic North Sydney MLC Building, originally designed by Bates, Smart and McCutcheon, is set to be demolished under a development application for a new commercial office building submitted to North Sydney Council.
The building, completed in 1956, was the first high-rise office block in North Sydney and the largest building of its type in Australia at the time of its construction. It is listed as an item of local heritage.

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The existing North Sydney MLC building by Bates Smart and McCutcheon, completed in 1956.

Bates Smart is also the architect of the building’s replacement – a sculpted, tapered commercial tower with a naturally ventilated atrium along its height.

In documents submitted to the council, Bates Smart stated that it had worked with the building’s owners for more than a decade to find a way to refurbish it, but the plan was eventually deemed unviable because of an “unsympathetic relationship to the heritage of MLC [and] overshadowing of [the adjacent] Brett Whiteley Place.”

Bates Smart’s long history with MLC dates back to 1937, when it won a competition to design the company’s Sydney headquarters. Since then, the firm has designed nine buildings for MLC across Australia. Former Bates Smart chairman Roger Poole wrote that the North Sydney MLC Building “retains its importance as a significant intact example of the 1950s International Style in post-war architecture.”

However, the design of the building was flawed from the beginning due to its east–west orientation. This led Sir Osborn McCutcheon to issue an edict that, from then on, no Bates, Smart and McCutcheon building was to be oriented east–west. Nonetheless, the building is significant for its early use of a glass curtain wall and for having the largest floorplate in Australia at the time of completion.
In a letter supporting the development application for the proposed building, Bates Smart said it accepted the commission to demolish the MLC Building and design a replacement on grounds that “the replacement be of greater significance in the development of innovative office typologies.”

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The proposed development designed by Bates Smart will create the largest publicly accessible space in North Sydney.

“Bates Smart are highly aware of the importance and legacy of this pioneering piece of architecture,” it said in a design statement. “Our aim is to design a building in the spirit of MLC that is as pioneering for the 21st century as MLC was for the late 20th century, creating a new legacy for North Sydney in the 21st century.”
The proposed 27-storey building will have a tapered form with a curved crown shaped by the sun’s angles to protect solar access to the adjacent Brett Whiteley Place to the south and the nearby Greenwood Plaza.
The tower will be raised to create a naturally ventilated space connecting Brett Whiteley Place with the Miller Street Special Area via an “urban room,” which will constitute the largest publicly accessible space in North Sydney.
A 7.5-metre-wide atrium will extend the full height of the tower, bisecting two plates. The atrium will be naturally ventilated and will include landscaped breakout social spaces.

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The atrium will have landscaped breakout social spaces.

“The design is based on a campus workplace typology, where two or more floorplates are vertically connected by an atrium, usually over 6-8 floors; however in this case extend the typology vertically into a tower form to create Australia’s first vertical campus workplace, creating an innovative new typology,” said Bates Smart in a design statement.
“We believe 105 Miller Street is the first genuine vertical campus tower [and that] this project represents a breakthrough typology that humanizes the high-rise for the 21st century workplace.”

The building will have a distinctive triangulated facade pattern, designed to enable views to the Sydney Harbour Bridge while simultaneously providing solar shading. It will be the first net zero carbon ready building in North Sydney and will also be self-sufficient in its water use.
An underpass beneath the building will connect it to the future Victoria Cross metro station, designed by Cox Architecture and Aspect Studios. Bates Smart also designed the proposed Victoria Cross over-station development, which was approved for construction on 6 July. More