Excerpt: Fenwick St designed by Edition Office is a residence divided into three distinct pavilions in order to establish connections with its surroundings. The design aimed to reduce the potential mass of a single huge volume within a place of enormous environmental and cultural importance and instead allow for the production of three separate forms onto the site that individually submit to the domesticate patterns and scale of the current streetscape.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] This project is located in Kew, Australia, on a noteworthy Yarra/Birrarung River bank next to Yarra Bend Park with views of the valley beyond in the north. The site offers unhindered connections to landscapes that are uncommon and thus close to the city, perched on the brink of the escarpment with immediate views along the river as potent as the broad horizon that spreads to the north. The location is also surrounded by a significant number of beautifully restored post-war homes from the 1950s and 1960s that athletically zigzag around the sloping grounds next to the river.
The site demands these connections be drawn deep into the plan and through the site to the street, allowing this link to the distant vista to remain part of the public realm. Balancing density with visual porosity was critical to maintaining this linkage.
Instead of one larger structure, three visually distinct pavilions could provide for a balance of similarly scaled forms with the neighbour residences while linking to the more immediate green spaces nearby. In addition, rather than just seeing past the site’s edges, these pavilions reframe and hold views through it.
The break between pavilions, which is situated at a steep roadway bend, is at the pivot point when one pivots past the location. The pavilions, which are connected by a common basement, protrude back into the hill, bringing their scale closer to that of their residential neighbours on the street and rising as they take in the ground that is eroding towards the cliff.
Living spaces open to the north, the river, and the valley, planned such that circulatory paths link to this space, drawing the distant landscape deep into the plan, with bedrooms and ancillary spaces opening to the green spaces between pavilions, viewed through a copper mesh privacy veil.
The desire for the building to blend into the surroundings has been sparked by the landscape design. The building would appear to be tethered to the land because it had to lower and anchor into the ground to absorb the basement. Each floor plate was softly moved and rotated to feather the mass and scale, giving shear walls motion. The use of copper screening, which would weather and age beautifully, adds a level of delicacy to a pre-cast concrete structure that was otherwise designed to be sturdy and textured.
Living within and being connected to the environment were significant motivators, but interior delight—light-filled private places full of comfort and detail—was also significant. The interiors were designed by Flack Studio with an instinctive response to setting and scenery, expressing warmth and tranquillity with subtle moments of drama. Weathering of the copper screens and slow ripening of the surrounding gardens are registered as material tactility and evolving patina, showing signals and patterns of life. Navigation should be enjoyable, thus junctions, thresholds, and the materiality that interacts with them were carefully designed and put together.
The brief required the creation of nine new dwellings on a site that had previously provided for one. Within a location of immense environmental and cultural value, the design sought to erode the potential mass of a single large volume and instead allow the creation of three distinct forms upon the site that each yield to the domesticate patterns and scale of the existing streetscape.
Working alongside the natural fall of ground across the site, the buildings appear modest in scale in both height and perceived mass. Each pavilion is formed as a wedge, meeting together at their narrowest points in a moment of architectural exuberance that extends away from the densely planted centre, allowing clear visible sight lines between and through to the horizon beyond.
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