The UIA Work Program, Architecture for All created, for the occasion of the UIA 25th Congress in Durban, an international award to recognise constructions uniting architectural quality and accessibility and whose designers have provided all users, without discrimination, quality of life and function. The attractive, inclusive and sustainable buildings should have been completed on 1 January 2009. Part of the prize also recognizes architects whose research has contributed to promote and advance the theory and practice of universal design.

Congratulations to Conrad Gargett Riddel Ancher Mortlock Woolley Architects and Allen Kong Architect, both practices received Honorable Mentions for their projects Old Government House, Brisbane and Potter Street Redevelopment, Dandenong respectively.

AWARDED REALISATIONS

• Nikiforidis-Cuomo Architects for the New Waterfront at Thessaloniki, Greece
• Ingarden and Ewy Architects for the Malopolska Garden of Arts, Krakow, Poland
• Alberto Ferrer and Teresa Hermida from SCF Architects for the Salvation Army Community Center in Puerto Rico

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

• Jim Clemes Architects for the Belval Train Station, Luxembourg
• Force4 Architects with Cubo Architects for the Vandhalla Water Training & Rehabilitation Center, Denmark
• Carrascal-Fernandez de la Puente Architects for the Palace of Justice, Burgos, Spain
• Daflos & Panagouli Architects for the Melissia Social Centre, Athens, Greece
• Allen Kong Architect for the Potter Street Redevelopment, Dandenong, Australia
• Conrad Gargett Riddel Ancher Mortlock Woolley Architects for the Old Government House, Brisbane, Australia
• Ronald Lu & Partners Architects for the Revitalization of Pak Tsz Lane Park, Hong Kong
• Samoo Architects & Engineers for the Buk Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
• Naniopoulos, Kalliagra, Papanikolaou Architect for the Prospelasis Project, Thessaloniki, Greece

AWARDED RESEARCH

• Magda Mostafa, for her research ‘Autism ASPECTSS Design Index’

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

• Andreas Lauesen from Force 4 Architects for his project Accessible Everyday for Everybody
• Francisco Javier García-Mila Lloveras,Verônica Camisão and Eduardo Álvarez for their project Operational Guidelines on Accessibility in Urban Development Projects

SuperStudio Victoria is looking for interested practicing architects and recent graduates to donate their time to tutor students. It will be held at Deakin University, Waterfront Campus in Geelong, kicking off from 7pm Friday the 1st of August, and finishing at 7pm Saturday the 2nd of August. There would be roughly three different shifts to choose from, Friday evening, Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon, with each running for 2-3 hours. During your shift you will be engaging with students and helping them form ideas, as well as being provided with food. There will also be drinks during the presentation and awards on the Saturday evening.

If you would like more information, please visit click here, or if you would like to express your interest, please send an email to deakin@sona.com.au.

Approx. shift times: 

Shift 1 | Friday evening | from about 8pm to 10pm, this shift will help students with the early stages of the project. I will encourage however if you want this shift, why not come for the “Reading of the Brief” at 7pm?

Shift 2 | Saturday mid-morning | Helping the students from around 10am to 12 or 1pm, and this shift can also stick around for lunch.

Shift 3 | Saturday afternoon | From around 3pm to 5pm, this shift will be involved with more final designs/ideas, with encouragement to perhaps stick around for the presentations and awards.
If you are unable to tutor but still wish to see what SuperStudio is about, we invite you to the presentations of the projects and the awards on Saturday, 2nd of August, starting at 7pm, at Deakin University, Waterfront Campus in Geelong. There will be food and drinks available to guests, a great opportunity to see what students are producing and where the future of architecture is heading. If you would like to come along the Saturday evening, please email us at deakin@sona.com.au so we can get an idea of numbers for catering and drinks.

The Institute has embarked on a program of significant change in the way our staffing and resources are organised. These changes are designed to create a more efficient organisation through greater strategic alignment and a more direct focus on members and other stakeholders. As a result, we are pleased to announce the appointment of three new General Managers:

Jamie Penrose has been appointed to the new position of General Manager Member Engagement. Jamie has recently come from a similar role as the Director, Member Services for the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, was previously the General Manager Marketing at Engineers Australia, and has also held leadership roles with Animal Health Australia and the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. Jamie commenced his new position on 26 May 2014. Jamie is based at National Office, Canberra.

Cameron Frazer, previously the Institute’s General Manager of Archicentre, has accepted the new position of General Manager Commercial and Community, and commenced his role in early May. Cameron will continue to be based in Melbourne.

Vanessa Goss has been appointed General Manager Shared Services. Over the past decade or more, Vanessa has been employed in a range of change-focused and corporate services roles as General Manager, Chief Executive Officer and Company Secretary. She has worked for a number of non-profit and commercial organisations spanning rural research and development, advertising, communications and legal services. Vanessa commences her new role today and is based at National Office, Canberra.

These new appointments have created important changes for the previous senior management team:

Greg Hughes will remain with the Institute in a new, senior role within the Shared Services division.  Greg will take up the newly created role of National Manager, People Places and Culture.

Carmel McCormack has left the Institute, as her role of General Manager Membership and Programs became redundant as part of the re-organisation process.

Cameron Frazer, previous General Manager Archicentre, has been successful in securing the new role of General Manager Commercial and Community, as detailed above.

Peter Macie, currently General Manager Finance, has decided to take the opportunity presented by the re-organisation and will leave the Institute at the end of July.

During this period of change, the Institute is very effectively continuing to deliver its full range of programs, services and events at the very high standards to which members are accustomed.

By Josh McAlister

41X, the new home of the Australian Institute of Architects’ Melbourne-based teams, is a thin 21 level commercial office tower. The site is the Institute’s former residence on the corner of Flinders Lane and Exhibition Street. The journey to realisation for this project began in 2008 when the Institute conducted an Expression of Interest for a national design competition, which shortlisted four architectural practices, Ashton Raggatt McDougall, Design Inc., John Wardle Architects and Lyons Architects. The following commentary is gathered from an interview with the successful architects, Lyons, and discussions with co-directors of the project, Adrian Stanic and Carey Lyon.

The winning competition scheme was awarded in February 2009 with the Lyons entry judged as successful on overall design, sustainability, response to the city, commercial viability and the proposed image of the Institute capturing its past, present and future.  Stanic and Lyon suggest that the design intent of the competition design was maintained in the final building form.  As part of the competition entry, the four shortlisted entrants were commissioned to produce concept design drawings. Although the design was subject to significant detail resolution, the competition scheme bears considerable resemblance to what has been built.

The expression of the civic imagery for the Institute is key to the design concept of a public building within a commercial office tower. Lyons explored the idea of a hybrid public and commercial building by contrasting the permanence and weight of heavy stone like materials with corporate transparency. The form of the tower was developed as if sculpted from a stone block, avoiding atypical commercial disposition.

Revealing the Institute’s home to the city as a public space was a key feature of the Lyons competition entry. The Institute is located on the lower levels of the tower and has been designed to maximise public engagement.  Lyons’ conceptual idea of drawing the city street up into the building was achieved by locating a publically accessible stair at the perimeter of the building. The form of this monumental stair space was literally carved into the Flinders lane frontage visually connecting the Institute to the public realm, this then continues as additional internal circulation for the organisation.

The concept created a bespoke design for the Institute; they occupy the first five levels with access to the roof level on level 21. From the outset the Melbourne City Council (MCC) was supportive of having the Institute re-established in such a prominent city location. Although the site is located within a MCC height restriction zone where setbacks are required, Lyons argued no set back, instead proposing a reverse podium, cutting back the lower levels to widen the street. The effect of this strategy is the creation of a series of unique micro public spaces. The Institute (as developer) and the MCC saw this as an opportunity to give public space back to the streetscape, generally, something a commercial developer would not be inclined to do.

The original competition entry was for a 16 level building, being increased to 21 as the project evolved. The increase of five levels helped to make the project commercially viable. The site area is only 328m2 with the net sellable area being 275m2 per floor. To achieve efficiency on such a small floor plate the building core was continuously reworked to remove wasted space. Lyons examined the core in forensic detail with every 50 mm saving having a direct dollar value. One of the concessions made by the Melbourne City Council, that provided relief to the NLA, was a series of the bay windows that extend over the title boundary to the south facade. The bay windows allow views up and down Flinders Lane on all of the commercial levels, becoming the only building in the city to do so.

Lyons noted that the Institute was closely involved in the design process through project resulting in a significant partnership between the client, the architect and the contractor. The project was procured through a design and construct process with Lyons being novated to the successful bid team, Hickory Group.  Concerns regarding the loss of design intent were alleviated by achieving significant resolution of the design prior to novation. Lyons worked with the Institute to develop a tender package that was complete to Design Development level. As the developer, the Institute was able to insist that Lyons, as the designers, complete the documentation and construction phases  of the project.

The design and construct methodology enabled the Institute to de-risk the development process, as the delivery risk was passed directly to the contractor. Under this arrangement the Lyons and the design team worked directly with the contractor and sub-contractors to develop the various systems and related details, focusing on build-ability and quality to provide a positive outcome consistent with the design intent. On some occasions this process yielded results that exceeded the design intent, such as the original proposed concrete patterning on the north elevation, which was replaced with a high quality form liner solution for no additional cost.

The challenging feature ‘chiselled’ areas of the façade, were resolved through multiple workshops with the contractor and sub-contractors to ensure build-ability and quality. The contractor’s influence through the design and construct process was most evident in the alterations made to the design of concrete elements of the tower. Hickory Group initiated specific changes to the extent of precast to the exterior sun-shading fins and also the substitution of traditional concrete slab and band beam structure for an integrated BubbleDeck concrete floor system. This reduced the overall weight of the structure, reducing its material usage and increasing the structural efficiency of the building.

Now completed the occupancy of 41X is varied and diverse. These strata titled ownership arrangements are unique in the market offering single tenancy floors with three sided views of the city, making it one of Melbourne’s newest iconic boutique buildings. Overall this has proven to be a highly successful strategy for the Australian Institute of Architects.

David Adjaye OBE, Principal Architect of Adjaye Associates, is one of the leading architects of his generation. Described as an architect with an artist’s sensibility, his ingenious use of materials and showcasing of light have defined his work since establishing his practice in 2000. He was born in Tanzania in 1966 and lived in a number of different cities across the continent of Africa until settling in London at the age of thirteen. After gaining a B Arch from London South Bank University, he graduated with a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Royal College of Art in 1993, where he won the RIBA Bronze Medal.

Projects have been diverse in scale, audience, and geography. They include numerous private houses, exhibitions and pavilions as well as major arts centres and important public buildings across Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. These demonstrate his considered approach to understanding the needs of the constituency served by each building and a respect for their integration – culturally and architecturally – within the existing locale. Completed civic works include two neighbourhood libraries in Washington DC, Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO, The Bernie Grant Arts Centre in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and Rivington Place – a visual arts centre in London. His largest commission is the project to design the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington DC, which is under construction.

David Adjaye’s belief in working together with artists and other cultural thinkers has led to a number of notable collaborations on both building projects as well as exhibitions, which include the Richard Avedon exhibition at New York’s Gagosian Gallery in 2012, Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Your Black Horizon’ light installation at the 51 st Venice Biennale in 2005 and Chris Offili’s ‘The Upper Room’, which is now in the permanent collection of Tate Britain. In addition, his practice invests considerably in critical research projects, including most recently, ‘Urban Africa: David Adjaye’s Photographic Survey’ – a unique geo-cultural catalogue profiling the African city in a global context.

His commitment to education extends to lecturing internationally; he was the first Louis Khan visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and was the Kenzo Tange Professor in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Previously a unit tutor at the Architectural Association, David was also a lecturer at the Royal College of Art and he held a Visiting Professor post at Princeton University School of Architecture.

David was awarded the OBE for services to architecture in 2007 and received the Design Miami/ Year of the Artist title in 2011. In 2012 he reached number one on the Guardian’s ‘Powerlist’ of Britain’s most influential black people.

David is just one of the many impressive speakers taking part in Making 2014. For detailed program information, visit the conference website.