building the unfinished:
BAU003M Victorian Pride Centre, St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia

Competition

Brearley Architects and Urbanists (BAU) and Grant Amon Architects (GAA) have won the design competition for the Victorian Pride Centre in Fitzroy Street St. Kilda, Melbourne. From an initial field of 18 entries, the scheme was included in a shortlist of four for the second stage of the competition. The jury selected the winning design from these second-stage submissions.

The Victorian Pride Centre will bring together Victoria’s LGBTQI community by accommodating a number of resident community organization groups. The building will be a place for work, collaboration and exchange for the LGBTQI specifically, and the Australian community in general. The building houses offices and work spaces for the resident organization groups and will include a communal ground floor of shared workspaces, hot-desking, a theatre, and a library. It will also include a roof top garden function space and an indigenous garden.

BAU and GAA conceived the building as a series of conceptual tubes that create a robust armature – a 3D infrastructure. Extracted from this armature is a series of urban design initiatives and flexible interior planning requirements that generate a surprising and accommodating series of spaces and forms responsive to the various organizations programs. The conceptual tubes fully integrate landscape, urban design, architecture and interior design, into one clear, strong, iconic building.

Introduction

be proud

This is an important project, not only for the LGBTQI community but also for Australian society in general. Given the recent positive outcome from the marriage equality postal vote, this is a building with a calling to become a national landmark. This building signifies important social progress, like the Victorian Trades Hall Council Building, which has been the site for same sex marriage celebrations in Melbourne.

becoming, complexity, and the sublime

We have sought an architecture of inclusion – an architecture of and, and, and. …and meaningful form and space full of potential and order informed from the top down and the bottom up and a robust aesthetic and rationally pragmatic and cost effective and symbolically informed and poetic and rigorously articulated and flexible and surprising and equitable and free and trans-cultural and ….

design response

a good neighbour

The building: accommodate s urban design setbacks and urban character requirements in Fitzroy Street; addresses solar access and perceived scale issues for residences at the rear in Jackson Street; manipulates the development envelope to save the existing trees in the residential area of Jackson Street; and, is shaped to ensure light and outlook from the floors overlooking any future development on the adjacent corner site.

robust armature

A raw, robust armature of conceptual tubes has been created to integrate landscape, urban design, architecture and interior design.

The extraction of urban issues and the extraction or addition of the specifics of the VPC brief generate change, encourage difference, diversity and inclusion – resulting in surprising and emergent outcomes.

connectivity = urbanity

The edges of Fitzroy Street and the commercial part of Jackson Street contain commercial active edges, encouraging pedestrian activity and providing eyes on the street.

The spaces between the programs are considered as important as the programmed spaces of the building. Circulation from the entry to the central VPC ellipsoid atrium is an exhibition-gallery; and the VPC ellipsoid atrium grand stair ensures the atrium is a great place to be, not just a space to pass through.

Consultations with local indigenous representatives has ensured indigenous cultural influences will range from small-scale details cast in concrete elements, to acts of naming; from indigenous garden to the ground floor taking on the significance of country.