GALLERY TOWER FAÇADE - Southbank

This was an architect / artist / developer collaborative involving the use of computer laser cutting, with powdercoat paint technologies to produce a permeable urban façade in Melbourne’s Arts Precinct. As a project, it strikes at the seam between art and architecture by mediating the ‘big-time’ of Southbank with its immediate substrate – the public façade of an apartment tower. Briefed as a means to screen the building’s carparking levels, the scheme observes the traditional effects expected in the making of screens : privacy, exclusion, transparency / opacity, inside-outside luminance, ventilation, mystery, image etc. as a means to generate an art-intervention capable of being read architecturally.

Conceived in collaboration with Melbourne artist - Adrien Allen, the scheme is a graphic ensemble of size-graded openings in response to the ‘flatness’ of the base façade. On paper this produced a gradient effect which offered an illusion of curvature across the building. Development of the graphical idea was achieved by considering each opening as a ‘folded-in’ cavity. These we nick-named ‘foles’ (folded-holes) - the progressive openness of each permitting the façade to engage the on-looker in a veil of views into, and out from the building. The degree of openness of each ‘fole’, varies from 9° (almost shut) to 90° (completely open).

Assembled as a series of painted sheet-metal panels, the project is supported-off the building on a primary frame fabricated from square hollow section steel. The panels themselves are made from 3mm thick bending-grade aluminium plate, the size and joint-detailing of which was developed in liaison with the metal cutters, site-fabricators and powdercoaters. The choice of aluminium plate made handling, paint-finishing, erection and maintenance of the façade economically feasible with respect to machine handling and raw material availability.

The colour scheme - selected from the Dulux powdercoat range, responds to the project’s immediate urban context - the blue night-lighting themes of the Arts Centre Spire and the wash of electric blue neon to the underside of the nearby Flinders Street railway viaduct.

Photography – Artful Noise Production Management