View DA Approved
View DA Approved!
VIEW was an invited design excellence competition for a mixed use tower within the Rockdale Town Centre. It sought to encapsulate and extend the vibrant character of the existing historic low scale town centre and present in an iconic form the ambitions of its future character to become a catalyst for the redevelopment of Rockdale’s southern industrial edge and an appropriate gateway building into an aspirational town centre.
The project is an 11 storey mixed use development compromising 91 high quality residential apartments with 615sqm of active ground floor retail. Located on the busy Princes Highway at the confluence of multiple land use zones with a prominent position in the Rockdale town centre, the building becomes a bespoke response to a complex framework of statutory, planning and technical considerations. When overlaid with the explicit requirement for design excellence, the outcome is an architecture that exceeds the standards set within market housing in Sydney’s outer ring suburbs, an elegant building in its form, appropriate for its time, purpose and context.
The concept was simple: to deliver maximum yield for our client whilst providing the greatest amenity to future occupants with a building that looks great within its context. VIEW is situated on a compromised site, sandwiched between a busy arterial road, a train line, and directly under a flight path. The technical considerations though complex, were skilfully manipulated to transform inherent constraints into positive design drivers that ultimately helped deliver a practical, confident and beautiful scheme without artistic compromise.
The design started by questioning the idea of “design excellence” and a challenge to implement the ambitions for said excellence as well as the drivers filtered out of the site investigation. These elements were then brought together to ensure the original concept was realised; uncompromised.
The scheme challenged planning controls governing the site that would remove key public domain elements that had helped create the existing vibrant thoroughfare along the Princes Highway. It did this by implementing a continuation of the active retail and unbroken overhead awning to the entire ground plane street frontage. The building was setback as a way of doubling the footpath and prioritised and extended the existing predominate podium height along the highway. It took minimal side setbacks to the secondary boundaries and doubled them to allow for improved amenity and apartment aspect, maximising the number of apartments facing north, away from the busy road and towards the distant city views. An elevated communal courtyard protected from the surroundings was inserted into the setback to act both as a green backdrop and quiet space in which to retreat.
The building form was articulated predominantly through the insertion of the central and open breezeway and its accompanying veil. This created two slender towers sitting on top of the retail podium. The north tower was pulled over the newly created public domain as a sublime cantilever and the ground floor retail at the corner was doubled in height as a befitting gesture to signify the entrance to the emerging Rockdale CBD.
