Values

We create enduring architecture

We aim to create architecture that is beautiful, future-proofed, thoughtful, appropriate, and inherently sustainable.

Enduring design is concerned with place, purpose and sustainability. We reveal the songlines and memories of a place through our designs. By sensitively uncovering and adding to the layered and evolving narratives of a place, we embed our designs in our unique history to enrich its social and cultural relevance.

Materials are considered from a number of perspectives, including how they age. We take care with detailing to ensure materials wear evenly, and to minimise the ongoing costs of maintenance.

We work with our clients to generate designs that address immediate needs and ensure future adaptability is maximised. For residential clients, this may be a home that can grow or adapt to the family’s changing needs. For developers, this may involve optimising density where appropriate in urban environments or providing unexpected public amenity for growing communities to meet the commercial objectives of developments.

Our aim is to create architecture that is resilient to our changing climate and architecture that belongs to its place and community. This way, they will continue to be valued, lived in, and loved.

Examples of our aim to achieve enduring architecture include the Point Piper Residence and the Brewery Yard at Central Park, Sydney.

We collaborated with our clients on their Point Piper Residence to design for their existing needs, and also easily adapt over the years as family requirements changed. While making the most of its setting close to the harbour and addressing privacy issues on a constrained site, we have created an extremely comfortable and practical home with many experiential qualities that surprise and delight. Enduring natural and robust materials, including sandstone, copper and timber, were selected to age beautifully in the harbourside salt air.

Photograph of exteriors of the award-wining Irving Street Brewery designed by Tzannes

The Brewery Yard is part of the Central Park master plan that transformed a brownfield land on the edge of Sydney’s CBD into a vibrant mixed-use neighbourhood. This project is an exemplar of successful adaptive reuse, transforming the Carlton and United Brewery landholding into a new precinct of global significance. Central Park involved the recycling of the largest group of retained nineteenth century heritage buildings in Sydney and over 250,000 square metres of new mixed-use development. Part of the brief for the Brewery Yard architecture was the incorporation of a precinct wide tri-generation plant to supply electricity, as well as hot and cold water. Rather than enclosing the plant, an expressive new element was created on top of the historic brick architecture of the Brewery Yard, creating placemaking architecture at the heart of the precinct.

The form of the new element was derived from the integration of the complex profile of the existing roofline, the brick profiles, and the organic form of the plant equipment within. Fittingly, the new plant room hovers over the former boiler house. Original coal hoppers are retained in situ within the new zinc-clad enclosure. The utilitarian and industrial detailing of buildings on the site is continued in the design of new elements, reinforcing the importance of the relationship between new and old fabric. Our goal has been to bring the building back to life in such a way that users and the public can appreciate its history. The careful choice of natural materials that age well in new construction, and the integration of new elements into the historic fabric, demonstrates the social and environmental value of adaptive re-use.

Notes

Image Credits:
John Gollings (Brewery Yard, Point Piper Residence)