Project status: Completed in 2014
Location: Gladesville, NSW

–

Photography: Brett Boardman

Our client required us to design an envelope of rooms to an existing building which at the same time maintained the continuity of commercial marina operations whilst construction was under way.

We built a hard crust of concrete with soft inclusions of timber and brass. Rooms are white and simply-shaped beyond this ‘crust’, with an equally simple expression of a roof-form that enables a caretakers apartment (at the top) to enjoy a rooftop terrace facing the water and the east.

This building must at once appear as a fortress and be something that invites commercial activity. The approach to the commercial marina and its entry sequence is therefore contradictory as per the brief. The building now has an unambiguous presence as a commercial building but where, at the same time, many tenancies exist; each tenancy having its own entry and discrete approach.

The composition creates a sense of ‘weight’ over a base, cantilevering as it does over the public space which is cleaned out to form a new forecourt. This forecourt affords the marina an opportunity to engage in the more public agendas of ‘schools for sailing’ and ‘gatherings of people’; a serendipitous by-product of the project brief.