Location: Melbourne, Australia.

Architect: NH Architecture.

The new Entertainment complex in Docklands’ Village precinct is a multi-cinema and mixed-use structure located on a challenging prawn-shaped site. The project is situated amidst existing vertical infrastructure, elevated walkways, and contiguous structures. The brief required the project to rejuvenate the existing commercial complex and become transformative within its environment. The project achieved this by identifying and exploiting residual areas for new adjunct programs, such as outdoor seating areas, softscape opportunities, sheltered bus stop seating, and an urban circus that used existing programmatic infrastructure to provide new value-added amenity to the project. The site’s spatial and geometric difficulties proved to be beneficial to this conceptual approach. The project attempts to become a highly legible and distinct urban element in a site dominated by the verticality of The Melbourne Star and the horizontality of Costco.

The complex’s immediate context provides a source of reflexivity, certain contextual formal prompts. Using both the color and material schemes of Costco and the wheel, the project seeks to enter chromatic and material dialogue with these two structures, while its volumetric expression describes an independent – yet related – formal syntax. The scheme’s largest cinemas express their function by becoming foyer ceiling, cantilevering over the new elevated walkway and extending into a skylight. Similarly, the northern metal facade recalls Gunnar Birkerts’ 1978 Calvary Baptist Church in its ribbed blindness and muscular scale. Along this elevation and curling into its western facade, a series of custom red 210 x 305mm Zincalume triangular folds are utilised as a kind of pleated house curtain, reiterating the building’s function while reconnecting it to former cinematic experience: an anticipation of the screening and illusion. Clad entirely in metal, the building reflects upon the site’s echo as a shanty town, notably The Dudley Flats, and the bricolage of its Depression Era metal shelters. Intensive customisation and prototyping were tested extensively in the pre-construction phase. Nevertheless, budget and building program were both met. The building is also a minor essay in how large-scale customisation can be efficiently achieved with the collaboration of architect, client, builder and manufacturer.

Photo credit: Nick Hubicki.