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CORNER BOURKE AND WILLIAM FOYERS

BATES SMART AND SJB ARCHITECTS HAVE CREATED TWO DISTINCT THRESHOLDS: ONE A GRAND, STATEMENT-GRABBING ENTRANCE, THE . . OTHER AN EXTENSION OF THE STREET.

words CONRAD HAMANN photography JOHN GOLLINGS

THE FOYER MAKES A STATEMENT OF GRANO ENTRANCE WHILE USHERING YOU TOWARDS THE LIFTS IN A QUICK-SLOW-QUICK RHYTHM OF RECOGNITION.

CORNER BOURt<E ANO WILLIAM

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FOYERS ARE CONTRADICTORY IN NATURE AND THIS HAS OFTEN CREATED PROBLEMS IN ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISM, WHICH SO HEAVILY FAVOURED PURISM IN FINAL EXPRESSION.

x project Corner Bourke and William Streets Melbourne Victoria 3000

x design practice Bates Smart 1 Nicholson Street Melbourne Victoria 3000 [) 03 8664 6200 ~ www.batessmart.com

x design team Jeffery Copolov. Grant Filipoff. Adrian Coleiro. Kate Anderson. Jim Milledge. Geoff Cosier. Mariam Oennaoui. Anthony Cox. Rohan Appel. Upendra Ranasinghe. James Christophidis. Pat Aliona. Alex Zudich. Andrew Raftopoulos. Ron Schreiner. Hanna Torii

x design practice SJB 25 Coventry Street South bank Victoria 3006 [I) 03 9699 6688 ~www.sjb.com.au

x design team Charles Justin. Owen Chow. Alan Ball. Anthony Cox. Nick Hughan

x retail and public spaces precinct NHArchitecture

x builder Multiplex

x light ing Stephen Hennessey. NOY Loght. Bates Smart

x furniture Oedece. Anthony Camm

x landscaping Tract Consultants

Bates Smart and SJB's two new towers in the heart of Melbourne's financial quarter- 550 Bourke Street and 181 William Street­reflect an involved dialogue with the city's eclectic architectural history. Varied in scale and texture, the built context is formidable. The intimately scaled bays and frontages of the nearby Supreme Court and the Goldsborough Mort warehouse demand some engagement, while BHP House- that talisman for resurgent high-rise in the Australian imagination - is also close by. The once dense network of alleys in the area has been culled spectacularly, leaving a few bare and empty service lanes between rows of sealed tower backs.

In this setting the Bates Smart and SJB pair have provided three urban forms. Bourke Street has a conventional "sealed" foyer, while William Street is cast as an extension of the streets outside, giving a sense of proceeding inside through streetscape. Internally, the foyers are cast as the central components of two podiums that are visually distinct from the office slabs

CORNER BOUR)(E ANDWllliA.M

abo~e. At William Street the podium relates both to the warehouse opposite and also to the loggia level of Bates Smart's StJames Centre. At Bourke Street, it links more strongly with Charles Debra's delightful red brick building of 1911 twenty-five doors up, and functions at an earlier urban scale.

The dimensions of more recent high-rises have added another realm to the old Federation trio of city, suburb and country. These podiums give the option of working in an older scale and texture, one that allows even the largest building to connect to the first few storeys of its neighbours. The podium levels at Bourke Street are animated, opened and softened by a patterning of colour and texture in the building's windows, which serves to evoke the older buildings nearby while belying the large and imposing foyer within. An element of the playful emerges when you realize that half the apparent volume is the work of a large mirror screen set just behind the second bank of lifts. As at William Street, the counter is a large cantilevered structure, appearing to float in the foyer volume. The ceiling is dominated by Stephen Hennessey's set of zinc light baffles, soft in demeanour and lightly scaled. The lift wells are linked in this feather scale by fans of light played on them at their cornice. A set of tubular sconces, dispersing their light into "flowers," marks the east foyer wall, again in attenuated and delicate scale.

The parallel foyer at 181 William Street's picks up the movement and scale of the street, drawing this inside its columns and plate glass walls. The use of an emphatic cantilevered awning, and a free set of ground floor columns in elevation, enables the building to successfully round its obliquely descending street corner. This was something that BHP House, based on being viewed in a pure and level Miesian plaza. could never happily do. The external expression of William Street's foyer is in two episodes (rather than the five internal bays), comprising a white-finished colonnade supporting the main tower slab and denoting the steady pedestrian movement immediately inside. The street corner mass, clad in a dark basalt colour that picks up on the warehouses and BHP House, is cantilevered over the pavement and while set in line with t he street corner, it works as a distinct cornering element. This engages with another oft-neglected Melbourne problem. Since World

War II, Melbourne's large city buildings have generally been reluctant to tackle the city grid in kinetic terms, preferring to passively fi ll in right-angled corner lines. In contrast, earlier architects had invariably provided a crucial cornering element , both to "round" each corner and to set up an opposing, usually diagonal force line set in tension against the city's regular grid.

Foyers are contrad ictory in nature and this has often created problems in architectural modernism, which so heavily favoured purism in final expression. The architects handle this well here, by exploring an ensemble of two distinct foyer genres: traditional for Bourke Street and streetscape for William Street. The Bourke Street foyer sets up a single beckoning statement along with a physical obstacle - the weather sealant revolving door. And so the foyer makes a statement of grand ent rance whi le ushering you towards the lifts. The entry possesses a quick-slow-quick rhythm of recognition. This foyer is cast as a crucial statement of the build ing and is brief and t ransitory in spatial experience. The foyer of William Street marshals the same kinet ics of entry, followed by a pause in the foyer, then the hurry onto the lifts and up to the higher levels. But it draws in the street by mimesis, generating pedestrian movement on its inside pavement and through the internal bays that flank its west wa lling like a set of building fronts.

In this context the reworked Goldsborough Lane works like a foyer too, taking the street functions of the Wi lliam Street foyer that step fu rther. But the lane treatment reverses the crucial role of commercial foyer as a transitory statement. You are asked to l inger. as in a hotel foyer. In the lane, foyer and street are fused, but in a different way. Above, the anchoring podium of the two foyers to either side is also reversed, dissolving into faceted and skeletal fragments. @

1/ STEPHEN HENNESSEY'S

ZINC LIGHT BAFFLES DOMINATE THE CEILING AT 550 BOURKE STREET.

2/ THE FOYER CAST AS

A CRUCIAL STATEMENT.

3+ 4/ AFTER PASSING

THROUGH THE REVOLVING DOORS THE FOYER USHERS VISITORS TOWARD THE LIFTS.

5 +

6/ THE FOYER OF 181 WILLIAMS STREET FOYER IS AN EXTENSION OF THE STREET.

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